Welcome to The DesignWare History Thread.

For the purposes of an interview I’m giving this week, I’m going to write here about the threads of my life “from the vantage point of my company DesignWare from 1980 through 1986.” It’ll be a lot about me. Can’t avoid that, because that’s how humans experience the world. We have our own eyes and ears, and cannot be inside the heads of others. But it’ll also be relational because everything I’ve done was with other people. You could think of this as a segment of an autobiography maybe. So let’s go…

DesignWare was a company formed in 1980 that lasted into at least the 90s. I founded it, recruited a fantastic team, found investors, and nurtured it for almost seven years. For the first three years I was the sales guy, the senior programmer, angel investor, accountant, a word-processor operator, and lots of other things.

The company started in the back bedroom, took over the downstairs flat in my home, moved into a converted funeral parlor, then to South of Market San Francisco’s China Basin Building, where we were the only software company for miles.

DesignWare was active in the big growth days of personal microcomputers. And was focused on what we began calling “edutainment” software — programs for kids that used a degree of entertainment value to promote learning. We also wrote a number of textbook-workbooks for middle school and high school students, with accompanying software.

This thread will chronicle my thoughts about those times. Because a blog reads in “reverse order” it may be hard to follow, so my suggestion would be that you use this index to open each article in chronological order.

Computing comes to the university — 1960s

The computer gets interactive — 1969 to 1975

Computer Based Education, PLATO-IV, PDP/11, computers get smaller 1975-1979

DesignWare’s founding 1980-1982

DesignWare building a team and becoming a corporate author (also 1980-1982)

DesignWare as an integrated developer-publisher 1982-1986

The legacy of DesignWare — seeds of change

The DesignWare photos page at Red7.

Play DesignWare games from the 1980s online at Internet Archive. Hard to believe!

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Chapter 7 of 7 in the DesignWare history thread.

In late 1984, MSA announced it would divest or shut down Peachtree Software, as well as DesignWare, Eduware and Blue Chip Software. The announcement was made 38 days after the acquisition of DesignWare. Our consumer advertising said “One Tough Speller.” Well we were one tough something-or-other to survive all of this.

In that initial acquisition by MSA, our investors came out OK. I think one investor lost a small amount, and most of them did as well in this investment as they would have in the stock market at that time. Pat McGovern, Chairman of IDG Group, had invested in DesignWare early that year in a last round, and several times after all this transpired, he reminded me that we had done a good job preserving not only their investment, but that of the others. I was relieved, more than happy. In those days it was said that maybe 1 in 10 venture investments might come out very well, with the majority of them fading to zero, and the others just kind of piddling along.

Some time around then MSA started pulling in EduWare and Blue Chip under DesignWare management. I felt terrible about all the laid-off people in those companies. Visited their offices and helped pack up ring binders full of development materials to take back for safekeeping. Nobody would ever look at those again. For years we had surplus ring binders everywhere. But the products still ran and with minor upgrades we could keep them on shelves, adding to the revenues of the combined group. But we couldn’t really spend much, pending MSA taking some final action. So we held our collective breath and worked hard to keep it all alive.

Dennis Vohs, Executive VP of MSA (see link to article above), was looking for a deal to sell these small software companies in some advantageous way. Dennis and I talked to a couple of potential buyers, and really only one of them seemed interested in buying the operating companies (i.e. not just the software titles). This seemed entirely noble on his part—wanting to keep the companies operating—and I was impressed and absolutely willing to get actively involved in selling not only my company, but the two others.

We had great new products. Recognized titles. New fantastic concepts. We had a great reputation. Brilliant new packaging. Really good advertising and great distribution. The market sucked. Let me say that again. Well at least it was pretty bad at that time. You had to keep pushing new flashy titles, and you had to grease the skids with money so stores would put your products up front near the check stand. You had to pay the telemarketers to push your product with the dealers. It was a money sink. And a sale to a big chain was often a loss-leader, meaning we paid more to get the product out there than we reclaimed from actual sales. Damaged products came back for full credit. Lost products never came back, but we had to give credit for them. A tough business. Kind of like the toy business or consumer electronics, you might think? Yup. And the same people. Just be aware. Far cry from university computing, isn’t it?

Encyclopaedia Britannica enters the scene

MSA had shopped the deal around. Shown it to a number of potential buyers. The only one with real interest was Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. So we were visited by Patricia Wier and Stanley Frank. Dr. Stanley Frank had been Group President-Publishing at CBS (a group of CBS-owned companies). I hadn’t met him before, but knew the group, as we had done business with a couple of its companies. Initially Britannica said “We’ll pass.” Or that’s what Dennis reported to me. After another round of pushing the pencil, adding the figures, and deciding how to account for the deal, Britannica made a deal, and some weeks we became part of a 400-year old company. He was another of these businessmen that I took a liking to. He was soft spoken, and clearly master of the detail, and well-connected even in our field. Before the completion of this acquisition we had pretty well merged the operations of the three product lines here in San Francisco.

It was still a struggle to find ways to compete in the market and develop new titles. There were a number of good solid companies now in the field. We think the Britannica name was helpful, but distribution was through retail channels, where Britannica had no experience. We coalesced, we continued developing titles, but increasingly were dependent on hit titles. By 1986 I decided to try my computer science expertise in other ways. My personal interest has always been in the building of the company, not in the fine-tuning and “trimming the sail” that has to take place when maneuvering for market share or negotiating manufacturing contracts.

We loved our Britannica image. Our beautiful new ad for EduWare shouted “Expert advice on educational software from the people who give you expert advice on everything else.” — that is, of course, Encyclopedia Britannica — featuring Freud, Einstein, Ben Franklin. Gave us credibility, maybe. Yeah, it probably helped. It also helped that we had resurrected EduWare, which had a good reputation but lacked distribution at retail. (They were big with computer stores and schools.)

DesignWare continued to operate as part of Britannica Software for quite some years. Moving to a favorite little stand-alone building I had my eye on in South of Market San Francisco. Stan was focusing on building the Compton’s Multimedia Encyclopedia on CD. We had discussed this and it sounded like a good project. In 1982 when we moved DesignWare to the China Basin Building we were one of very, very few software companies anywhere in San Francisco proper. Most of them were down the peninsula. Today you’ll find hundreds of them in our old neighborhood.

What DesignWare brought to the party was some fresh creativity. Some ways of making the computer do things that were in the educational vein while still enough fun that kids would play with them. It grew from my desire to have a broad impact in education, and from my base as a computer scientist. The crew was composed of creative individuals who loved what they did, even though the programming was tough. What we did was new. So it didn’t matter if we had no experience with edutainment, we were inventing it as we moved along. We left a legacy of titles, Spellicopter, FaceMaker, Story Machine. We wrote Computer Discovery, and Apple bought 20,000 sets of Computer Discovery, to distribute to schools, in its first year. We wrote best-sellers under our name, and best-sellers under other names.

Some DesignWare games, in their Atari incarnations, can be played online even today. If you try them, realize that their simulated speed today is probably about what it was in the 1980s. Back then you would have played using the keyboard and maybe a joystick, and not likely a mouse. Disk access would have been slow. Displays would have been fuzzy. Try to have fun!

One of the more enjoyable moments in my life came around 2014 when I was in conversation with someone who said “Oh, you developed Spellicopter, didn’t you? I used to fight with my brother over who would play it next.” What a wonderful legacy.

[Back to the title page – DesignWare History Thread]

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By 1983 we were publishing and shipping titles under the DesignWare label. A very different proposition from just working with other publishers. Previously we had to sell the publisher on the idea of a particular title or game. Then the publisher would take on the risk at that point. Now we had to be sure we weren’t deluding ourselves by developing something that might not sell. And we now had to manufacture the floppies, eventually the CDs, on which the software would be shipped.

We added sales and marketing. We formed a relationship with an advertising agency (and PR) Patterson & Glen (and Doug Glen became a friend). A month or so after we signed our contract with Patterson & Glen, they announced they were being bought by D’Arcy, McManus & Masius — becoming the digital agency for a big traditional agency. We were all going through big changes. (Doug later on escaped advertising, playing a pivotal marketing role at LucasArts Entertainment, inviting me to Skywalker Ranch for lunch, and then into newer ventures.) All of these were learning experience for me, though I felt that almost everything I learned made very natural sense.

A 1983 Forbes Magazine article subtitle proclaimed Software to go  “The microcomputer boom has spawned a high-tech cottage industry. The margins can be as incredible as the growth rate.” My company was one of three featured in this article. Cottage industry? Well kinda. We grew this company from a downstairs room at home and $3000 credit on a card. But we were engineering our company about as much as we were engineering our software. It was all conscious, and not the least bit haphazard.

I will mention that at this point our diversity balance was interesting. San Francisco is somewhat diverse, and yes, we were founded by a white male, but half the VPs were female and development was approaching half female, with maybe 1/3 of the programming group being in that classification. And I mean hard-core programmers too. So I’ll claim we were good in those days on gender in software development. I thought this was potentially a turning point for software, at least for software in our field. I was happy to promote this. Jan Davidson had founded one of our big competitors. Ann Piestrup (McCormick) had founded Learning Company. Kathryn Carlston was one of the founders of Brøderbund. Joyce Hakaanson ran the CTW (Sesame Street) edutainment group. One of my heroes, who was an analyst paying some attention to our field, was Esther Dyson. I think it’s worth comparing this with what we see in software today. I won’t make the comparison. You do it.

Hey, look, we struggled with success. The company grew. We were struggling at between $1 and $2 million in gross annual sales. It’s not where we projected we’d be, but by 1984 we were at almost 10x revenues compared to 1980. 10x growth in about five years. And we were constantly growing the company.

But investment and cash got in the way. We were often short on cash, and frequently negotiating payment dates. Retail is murder, with the big chains constantly stretching payment 90 to 180 days. At one point our lawyer went through, with me, and without anyone other than the board knowing, what the process would be if we filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. We had papers ready if they had been needed. We did not file. I’m not sure how we got through that one, but we did.

Bill Goodhew, of MSA, later the CEO of Peachtree Software, came along and was interested in the company. We had approached several people about possibly selling our company, but Bill was really the only one who understood the business. MSA had bought Peachtree Software (desktop accounting software) and wanted to consolidate more software companies under that label. They’d bought EduWare, one of our competitors in a way, though not exactly in edutainment. And EduWare had recently combined with Blue Chip Software. So under Peachtree they would consolidate three brands. Everyone was stretched. Everyone was consolidating. It was a tough time. I won’t go through the detail, but DesignWare ended up being the operational structure under which all this could be combined by MSA. We sold the company. There were lots of shenanigans, and lots of positioning, and lots of bluffing, from shareholders, employees, ex-employees, and nevertheless MSA stood there solidly with a final (somewhat reduced) offer, and eventually we got the deal done. End of the summer, 1984, we became part of Peachtree Software. None of us got rich, but none of us lost our investment.

Shortly thereafter, by my reckoning 38 days after, MSA announced that it would divest Peachtree, and us, and the other companies, either together or in pieces. 38 days of relative stability.

I will move on to the “legacy” of Designware, which follows its acquisition by Encyclopaedia Britannica, in the next article. [Read the end of this story…] [Or return to the start of the story]

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OK, so I had the basic idea of a computer interacting with a human, and discovered that programmed instruction had been tried, and computer-based education was new (PLATO) and decided to build a software language that could transcend proprietary computer hardware through computer-science linguistic tricks. I build LINGO, and MultiTutor, and then the Courseware Design System.

And lo-and-behold microcomputers came into existence. And it was 1980. I started DesignWare on a $3000 limit credit card. In those days this was maybe 2x a public school teacher’s monthly salary. I was a university professor with two kids just going into school, and yes $3000 would last a couple of months. So I didn’t even sink it into the company, I just used it to buy equipment, took no salary, and got those few gifts (remember Steve gave me that Apple II #2515, and so on with Atari and others). I got some small consulting gigs, personally, with Digital Equipment Corporation and Xerox Learning Systems. I did some forward thinking, and I wrote some reports. This I parlayed into an idea I had to write a high school book on computer literacy. I had met computer literacy people already. This included Art Luehrman at Lawrence Hall of Science, and Bob Albrecht, the founder of People’s Computer Company in Menlo Park (who I must have met in 1975), and many others.

So I developed a description and I pitched SRA (Science Research Associates shortened their name to initials, thank goodness) with the idea that their high school division might publish this book. But I wasn’t going to just write it, I wanted them to pay for writing it. And I wanted to include a series of programs that kids could use, in BASIC, on personal computers. There were few computers in schools, so there was really no market for this at the time. But Apple was pushing forward on the vector of becoming an educational computer, so it made sense that if we could write this book, with programs and exercises, and if Apple was successful, we could be a big hit.

I got the contract. It wasn’t huge, but it was the equivalent of at least a couple of years of salary for a developer—I was going to hire others to help me write, and to write the programs. So I first outlined the book and then drafted a lot of material. The core was mine, but I needed collaborators. I rapidly decided that the best way was to hire writers and programmers to get the book done. We would as a group be the “corporate author” of each work.

My boys, Gabriel and Aaron were enrolled at Live Oak School in San Francisco, and the head, Lesley Czechowicz was at that point considering her options. Knowing her as a detail-oriented woman who I thought would be dynamite with writing, editorial and overseeing the programming, I was able to convince Lesley to join and help build the development crew. Over time, Lesley nurtured this crew of fairly diverse types, which included hard-core programmers, others we called “programmer’s assistants” (these days might be a more junior programmer), and others who wrote, edited and built content on the educational side. I was on the road much of the time, visiting Chicago and New York trying to convince educational publishers they should commission DesignWare to get them into educational software. I was quite successful.

By the end of 1981 we probably had a development group of a half dozen. And I think overall we had about 15 employees working, under the corporate author model I described above, by the end of 1982. We have more party photos than office photos, and we continued to hold annual reunions for many years.

Oh, so here’s a couple of office photos just so we can’t be accused of just goofing off entirely all the time. Can you tell they’re staged? How interested, really, is Michael in that side of the Crypto Cube? But look at the vintage Apple II and the really big 19-inch TV. Who even has a CRT (cathode ray tube) any more, except maybe some railroad terminal somewhere? Maybe not even there.

But speaking of goofing off, we actually did make a practice of taking the entire staff out for pizza and video games in the arcades. To gain inspiration for possible new products. It was very edutaining. We all loved that.

Coming off an initial year of $140,000 in sales (on my $3000 cards-worth of credit) I’d say that in calendar 1981 we had around $250,000 in sales, perhaps more because I just don’t have those records, because of books being written, programs being written, and private-label work we were doing for publishers. Among them Harcourt, SRA, Reader’s Digest. Not big projects particularly, but we were actually a big fish in that pond, as there were few other individuals or companies doing this at the time. We got a lot of publishers into software in just a few years.

In or near 1982 three things happened. First, we had a good taste of what it took to write books and programs and we were anxious to do it under our own label, not as author for another publisher. Second, Bill Bowman and David Seuss, of Spinnaker Software, had the idea of building their own independent publisher of edutainment titles, and they came to talk with DesignWare about serving as author of some titles for them. Third, I started investigating venture capital.

It all came together like this. First, Spinnaker signed with us for two titles. Half their initial rollout. I liked these guys and what they were doing, and I really wanted to do it too. Their timing was fortunate as they provided capital, and eventually some reasonable royalties, and we didn’t have to build production capacity right away. Second, we got first-round financing from Vanguard Associates of Palo Alto, with Jack Gill as a member of our board of directors. They also brought Tom Whitney, formerly with Apple, to the board. I believe that because of the Spinnaker deal, I was able to keep more insider control of the ownership and management of the company. This turned out to be pivotal in its survival. I was, and remained for five years, the President, Chairman of the Board and CEO. [Hey, Spinnaker team, we still have a PDF of one of your catalogs. Very creative stuff.]

With the advent of venture capital, we brought some new leadership in. I had just hired Sharmon Hilfinger (she’s now a playwright and non-profit founder) as VP of Marketing, but our investors wanted someone with more experience in the field. Personally, I love starting fresh and bringing in people with just enough experience, but a willingness to play hard and learn a new game. Our investors suggested, and suggested with a little arm-twisting, that we hire Peter Rosenthal from Atari to join the new crew. First of all, I doubted that we could get him. I had met Peter, liked him and what he was doing, and couldn’t imagine he’d leave a company like that, so poised for success, to join a start-up. But he did. This was a great learning experience for me. I learned that experience (in this case, Peter’s experience in marketing) often suggests different tactics than I might think. If we were going to move from corporate author to big-time publisher, and sell our goods through computer stores, and then through Toys-R-Us and other big retailers, it was a different game, and we needed help with that. Great lesson for a computer science guy like me. Peter and I still talk over lunch now, 35 years later, several times a year.

You know, here’s another observation. I’ve got a PhD in Computer Science. Peter has a PhD and worked in biomedical research. How did two guys with PhDs end up in corporations, in education, in software, and not as research scientists? I’ll just say that on occasion the PhD has given just a little edge to me in sales situations. Just once in a while, because it added credibility specifically on the software side of the equation. But it was a great, and a necessary change, for me, to go from academia to business.

Other people I should mention beyond Lesley, and George, Sharmon, and Peter are our incomparable “Mr. Computer” Alan (Al) Macy, who is now a sci-fi author, and I want to call out Sally Bowman Alden (who did the hard work in our marketing group, and who later started Computer Learning Month), Mary Shek (now of D2M) who put together our physical manufacturing, Tom Paderna (who started in manufacturing in our warehouse and moved along into marketing later at Logitech and then T/Maker while I was there, now Adobe). There are lots of other individual success stories in the group. It was wonderful to have every one of them there, and in some cases I know we gave a boost, while in other cases I wish we had been able to do more. But what a group!

By 1983 we had moved into publishing our own titles under our label. [Read the next installment of the story]  [Or return to the start of the story]

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In 1976 I was doing my thing to advance online medical education. Using minicomputers and video terminals at Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. And creating my CDS system which made it possible to run the same courseware on many types of computers using many different computer languages.

A couple of years later when I was leading the very small office of WICAT in San Francisco, I was introduced to the world of personal computers. I don’t know whether it was 1978, or 1979, or even 1980, but I heard about Apple, cold-called them, and they said “You have to talk to Steve.” I didn’t know Apple, and I didn’t know who Steve was. I found out.

We know now the importance of that initial Apple computer.

Apple

Steve Jobs wasn’t even the proverbial guy in the corner office. That was the head of marketing and sales. Steve Jobs was in the next office over to the left, sunny in the morning, cooler in the afternoon. But that’s where the action was. Steve was enthusiastic about education, and learning. And was convinced the Apple II should be in every schoolroom in the country. I agreed, though I thought of the Apple II as more of a terminal. They had not yet brought out Applesoft Basic. Initially I programmed it in Hex machine language from a rinky-dink console application. A month or two later I got one of the first Applesoft Basic cards. And memory was 48k. Not 48mb. Not 48gb. 48k. There was no disk drive.

Steve asked “would you help us evaluate which disk operating system to use?” He gave me contact info for Shepardson Micro and for Microsoft, which were the contenders. I visited Shepardson, which was local. I called Microsoft at 8pm one night, and talked to “Bill” — I recollect that I called him in Arizona at the time. Long-distance was expensive in those days. As you know, Microsoft did not get the gig, and it was not due to anything I did, but it was fun being there at that particular time and place.

One morning I drove Steve over to see a PLATO-IV terminal at Control Data (they were commercializing PLATO-IV at the time). He didn’t have a car. He liked my Volvo and we talked about that. We talked about the potential for computers in education. More than about just the tech, the potential for ubiquity. We saw PLATO. Actually it was conceptually nice, but the Apple II was pretty exciting and way less expensive.

At a very early point, Steve was supportive of my ideas about putting PLATO on an Apple II, but couldn’t give corporate support. (Other folks tried to convince him about PLATO…none succeeded.) So he took me out to the back where Apple II computers were coming off a production line. He picked up a computer and handed it to me as his contribution to the cause. (I heard later that he had been reprimanded and told “This is the last time you’ll do that.” by another executive who I shall not name.) It was serial number 2515, and served as our development platform and later as a testing platform for several years.

Atari

I also knew several people who were working on developing a similar personal computer for Atari. Primarily Joe Schlessinger, Joe DeCuir and Ed DeWath. I showed up on their doorstep and learned of this incredible computer that (patterned on knowledge they had from coin-op gaming) had an independent chip running the display. You could just change certain memory locations and change characteristics of the display, and contents, almost magically. You could reconfigure part of the screen as low-definition and part as high-definition. (On the Apple II you had to select one or the other mode and then bitmapped memory onto the entire screen.) I think you could also set a color palette. There were sprites which were little patterns that could move around the screen without destroying the background images. Wow!

Visiting Atari, I met Peter Rosenthal who was handling marketing at the time.

Other computers

As always, my concern was with writing educational programs that could “run everywhere.” So these early days of 1979 and 1980 were a paradise for me. Apple, Atari, Commodore, Tandy, then IBM all came into the market quickly over the course of about 4 to 5 years (by say 1983). Software was fragmented. They all used BASIC, but it was different on every machine. Displays were all different. Input and output devices were all different.

FORTH saves the day

CDS was a possibility in terms of building programs for DesignWare, but it was too focused on computer-based-instruction types of interaction. Question-answer-question-answer, remember? With personal computers sprouting up all over the place, we needed to program bright colorful cartoonish interactions, with lots of motion. CDS wasn’t going to cut it. So I began figuring out how to write this new type of interaction in BASIC, and early in the game one of our programmers, George Kaplan, came to me and to Lesley Czechowicz with the programming language FORTH. Wonky it was! FORTH was a stack-based language, and you wrote programs in reverse polish notation. It was highly modular. It ran on every microcomputer. Let me repeat, it ran on every microcomputer. You just needed a small interpreter kernel that was native for each computer, and then any FORTH program could run. There were graphics libraries. There were input and output. You could control the floppy disk and the tape. It was cool. It was super-geeky. The Wikipedia article on FORTH is the best in terms of explaining what it was like at that time.

George knew of FORTH because he was an astronomer. Though when we hired him, he was working as a parachute packer in the East Bay. Astronomers, as I understand it, were using FORTH to control telescopes. George was an astronomer. We were giddy with the discovery of this universal tool. Um, the language I mean, not the telescope.

So after some consternation, and especially worrying about the reverse polish issue and the difficulty it can bring to coding, we began writing every product using FORTH.

In the next article I’ll introduce the team and tell you how DesignWare evolved. You’ll see why all of my background culminating in CDS, and then George’s introduction of the FORTH platform, which provided write-once-run-everywhere capabilities for our software, was so important. [Press onward through the years…] [Or return to the start of the story]

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So as I developed my LINGO language (not the Macromind one, which came later) I was focused on how to “represent” an interaction between human and computer. That is, I wanted to be able to write, using a software language, a script that could be followed by the computer in teaching a subject, or in some fairly constrained type of interaction with a human.

Programmed Instruction was a logical place to begin, and I read up and built and tested a lot of PI materials during my few years of developing LINGO. In the process I created a canonical language in which I felt I could write these interactions. And I tested different ways that the computer could try to determine whether the human was giving a correct answer (or even making a request the computer could understand) to a question it had posed. This is similar to what interactive voice response [IVR] telephone systems do today with voice inputs.

By 1969 the PLATO-IV system had become a stellar example of a computer system with remote terminals supporting computer-based education. It had a whole ecosystem, which is well-documented elsewhere and I won’t belabor, that was truly mind-expanding. It had teaching. It had messaging. It had interactive groups and its Notes system that was essentially email in real time. Email on its own didn’t yet exist. It was close to having computer conferencing.

I want to call out many kudos and much credit to Don Bitzer and Paul Tenczar and Bruce Sherwood and other heroes of PLATO-IV who I knew personally in those days. Many thanks for the pioneering work they did!

My LINGO interest turned into a new system MULTITUTOR, which accepted the TUTOR-IV language of the PLATO system, yet ran on our local CDC 6400 computer. PLATO-IV required a dedicated computer and was wicked fast. MultiTutor ran on a multi-purpose system, was slower, but had the necessary capabilities. And it worked with many types of computer terminals, whereas PLATO-IV was designed for its own specific computer terminal. (My idea was to broaden the appeal of these systems, though sometimes I know it was seen as competitive. Ultimately we had somewhere between 15 and 25 institutions using MultiTutor – sorry I don’t remember the exact number.)

My interest was in universality. I did not want these systems, which I felt had the potential to revolutionize communication (and learning) to be limited to large university or commercial systems. I wanted them democratized. I wanted to see them everywhere. I wrote about neighborhood centers. I predicted people would live at home, then go over to the center to co-work, leaving the kids there at on-premisis daycare, and socialize over lunch as well as work at terminals. There would be supercomputers, but the users would be everywhere. By 1972 or 1973 this had become a central theme of my writing and development. How did I know this would happen? I had a teletype-like portable terminal in my home, of course down in the basement in a room specially allocated, with a second phone line (unheard of in homes in those days) just for the terminal to call the supercomputer.

And then I noticed that computers were getting even smaller. The KIM-1 became the first home computer kit (that I know of). By 1976 it was on the market, with minuscule memory, and a terrible programming interface, but it was tiny and shone a light on what might be possible. In 1976 I moved my base of operations from Northwestern to University of the Pacific in San Francisco, where a PDP/11-47 computer was installed for the project where I was to build an online course structure for a program in respiratory therapy. (Long sentence there.) My LINGO language had evolved into MultiTutor. MultiTutor had spawned a complete rewrite as the Courseware Design System [CDS]. CDS was a hierarchical system in which the canonical language of interactions could be turned into executing computer code for dozens of target time-sharing system with thousands of terminals. With support from the National Library of Medicine, we made CDS available to all. It ran on system supporting the BASIC language, Fortran, PILOT and probably some others. It had real-time translation capabilities so it could export its own programs in any of these programming languages. And I had begun to go graphic, so programs could be expressed as flowcharts. This visual kind of language was a key concept in the AuthorWare language and system of Michael Allen — I don’t know which of us thought of it first, and maybe we weren’t even first. (The article says Authorware was begun in 1989, but my time in trying to go visual was from 1975. I think Michael was into this long before 1989.)

So here we are in 1975 to 1979 and computers are getting smaller and smaller. Curiouser and curiouser. What will be next? [Read on in time…] [Or return to the start of the story]

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My responsibilities while a graduate student at Northwestern University included a half-time position at the computing center where I was responsible for maintenance of the software side of online access to the supercomputer. And as long as I kept the system running and expanding, I was allowed to do my own investigations into computer-human interaction. A half-time job rapidly became full-time research.

Initially the purpose of the job was to support remote entry of batches of computer-card decks containing programs and data. And remote printing. But it was pretty obvious that another little device that was pretty ubiquitous elsewhere in the world, could be handy in that you could use the “teletype” to connect, via phone, to the same ports on the computer and have a more-or-less two-way interaction with the computer. There were a few universities doing this (for example Dartmouth University) using custom time-sharing software on a central computer. And we wanted to go that way without giving up the research aspects of our supercomputer.

So I developed a way to sandwich in the execution of a program that could interact with a teletype. To make the program small and fast. And then to make a more general purpose language of my own, which I named LINGO, in which I could program these interactions. Question-answer-evaluate-question-answer-etc. So there was presentation logic, and answer evaluation logic, and branching. In the 1950s others had begun working with programmed instruction on computers. I was easily able to implement that on our computer and go well beyond.

Other researchers began using graphic displays. And remote terminals began sporting CRT screens. And becoming easier to put on a desk in a workroom well away from the noise of the computer center. They relaxed and became something you could envision using in your quiet office, or even at home. This shift took place in the early 1970s.

By 1971 I was on the faculty at Northwestern (after getting a Masters Degree), while still a PhD student, and that’s a fun ‘nother story for some day. I had met Bob Johansen, who was a fellow grad student and liked future studies. We worked together to teach a Seminar in College Teaching with the sponsorship of Dean Claude Mathis. In the seminar we explored with students some possible futures of education, both tech-enabled and not. During that time Bob and I conducted one of the first, if not the first online computer conference outside of government, and what a stellar group of participants we had. This further motivated me in terms of understanding the unrealized potential that computers and terminals had for improving communication among researchers, workers, and probably most other folk.

In the next article, I’ll introduce more about how computer-based education laid the groundwork for what I wanted to do. [Continue forward in time…] [Or return to the start of the story]

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In thinking back about how I came to the decision to form DesignWare, I have to acknowledge some important roots. When I’m coaching people these days, I always ask them to describe for me their core capabilities — those capabilities or interests that keep coming back into their lives.

My own core is a curiosity about how things work, and a desire to build things of my own. There’s a secondary interest I have in understanding how people communicate and in facilitating communication, and it’s important, but definitely secondary. My early life was in the 1950s, when the pervasive feeling in the United States was one of optimism and growth. I lived in a small town of 1,100 residents. I realized yesterday that large aircraft today routinely carry (each) almost half the population of that town across huge intercontinental distances. My class of 100 fellow high school graduates would just make a dent in the back of the plane.

So my core of curiosity led me to a National High School Institute summer program for high school students, in the summer of 1963, at Northwestern University [NU]. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, we had some weeks of time on campus in introductory courses, getting interested in science and engineering. One fundamental course was in computing—in which we got access to the card punch machines and instruction on how to write small iterative programs in Fortran. Many years later, my neighbor here in San Francisco was John Backus “inventor of Fortran” — but I knew him more as the father of Backus Normal Form or Backus-Nauer Form which was even more important in my education. The university computer was an IBM 709 — a tube-computer — at our beck and call that whole time. At that time the university didn’t have computers of any size in administration — they were only for research. I learned basic programming, and invented algorithms to do things like shuffle a deck of cards efficiently, and figured out a lot about how probability worked. And programming. I became intrigued by how computer languages worked and what the different languages were good for.

I had maybe been destined to become a concert pianist. (A struggling one, at that.) But only until this time when I was sucked into computing. Why computing? It fit my core definition of being something fascinating to understand, and also to be “infinitely tractable” as Alan Kay would later say. A medium in which practically anything you could envision could be simulated, calculated, analyzed, constructed, dissected. Or even better, you could work out alternative formulations of a problem and solutions, both as simulated possibilities and as virtual logical systems making their own decisions.

By the time I was in grad school, the university had grown through a CDC 3400 computer to a big CDC 6400. When the 6400 came on the scene, I became part of a varied crew of students who were permitted by the computing center director, Ben Mittman, to use the computer after the midnight shift completed. In those days, programmers punched cards and submitted hundreds or thousands of cards in “decks” to a clerk who then ran them into the computer. Each job would run until completion or abnormal termination, and batches of jobs would run until the shift was completed. On some nights, there might be very few jobs, and even those might terminate abnormally, or just finish early. And we then had the run of the computer until 6am when maintenance work began each morning. In some sense you could consider this “my own little supercomputer” that I had the privilege of using on an unpredictable basis at truly weird hours. I got used to having a personal computer quite early in my career. A number of important, and some famous, projects were started in this way. Larry Atkin and Keith Gorlen wrote the CHESS 1.0 program in this environment while I was doing my own work in 3D graphics. David Slate joined the team early in that process. I remember vividly more than one time when my work failed, taking down the computer and consequently abruptly ending a session in which CHESS had been playing against itself to learn the game better.

To get ahead of my story, my responsibilities in 1969 were to maintain and expand the online capabilities of our computer. This included the systems that allowed CHESS 1.0 to play games through remote terminals, thus freeing the team from having to sit in the computer room to type in or be told the computer’s moves. Development of CHESS continued beyond my own time at Northwestern.

[Read what comes next…] [Or return to the start of the story]

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