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It Takes a Great Deal of History
to Produce a Little Literature *
Review by Ray Duncan
Copyright (C) Dr. Dobb's Journal, March, 1992
The history of computing in general, and of personal computing in particular,
is one of my little hobbies, and I'm fairly compulsive about buying books
on this topic whenever they appear. The trade literature is surprisingly
sparse in this area, and the scholarly literature not much better--not too
surprising, I guess, because the intact, working relics of the pioneering
era are even less common. It's pathetic how many of the artifacts of early
digital computing have already been consigned to the junkpiles and paper
shredders, in spite of people such as Gwen Bell at the Boston Computer Museum
who have been making an earnest effort in recent years to recover and safeguard
some of the most precious machines, program listings, and documentation.
I'm as guilty of this heedless destruction of our heritage as anyone. When
I owned my first Imsai 8080 computer, I had a copy of the source code for
Gates and Allen's original 4K ROM Basic, and I threw it away when I sold
the Imsai because I couldn't imagine ever needing it!
The two trade books of choice, if you are interested in this subject at
all, are Steven Levy's Hackers and Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine's
Fire in the Valley. Both are vivid, fluently written, predominantly
accurate accounts, but have a somewhat different emphasis: Hackers
begins with MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club, the artificial research research
lab of John McCarthy, SpaceWar and semilegendary, compulsive, social-misfit
programmers such as Bill Gosper and Richard Greenblatt. About halfway through
the book, Hackers arrives at the Silicon Valley Homebrew Computer
Club and personalities such as Lee Felsenstein, Jim Warren, Bob Albrecht,
Dennis Allison, Ted Nelson, Bill Gates, Stephen Wozniak, and Steven Jobs
-- which is pretty much where Fire in the Valley picks up the story.
Fire in the Valley is a relatively practical book with detailed coverage
of early microcomputing retailing (such as it was), business relationships,
operating systems, and "productivity software." Hackers
spends much more time talking about the Apple and Atari game empires of
companies such as Sierra On-line, and hearkens back fondly to a golden age
of "The Hacker Ethic" which, I suspect, existed mainly in a few
idealistic people's imaginations--much like the Camelot of John F. Kennedy.
The sheer talent of some of the characters in Hackers and Fire
in the Valley can strike awe into your heart, and the sheer melodrama
of Hackers may bring a smile to your lips, but both books are rather
sad as well. So few of the original programmers, engineers, and entrepreneurs
portrayed by Levy, Freiberger, and Swaine have been sufficiently well-rounded,
broadly educated, and financially savvy to maintain control over their own
inventions, their own companies, or even their personal destinies. The fate
of Richard Stallman, one of McCarthy's hacker proteges, is a depressing
example. Stallman, widely admired as a virtuoso coder for his EMACS editor,
is apparently content to remain an angry iconoclast and spend the rest of
his life tilting at windmills. At present, he is furiously rewriting a 20-year-old
operating system so that he can give it away to spite AT&T -- while
the rest of the world moves on to new operating system architectures, new
programming paradigms, and new user interfaces.
More Details
Robert Slater's Portraits in Silicon contains 31 thumbnail sketches
of computer hardware and software pioneers. The book is heavily weighted
toward engineers, mathematicians, and physicists, beginning with Charles
Babbage, but it does include a healthy cross-section of latter-day microcomputer
programmers as well. Portraits in Silicon is worth its purchase price
for the chapter on Konrad Zuse alone. Zuse is a brilliant German engineer
who evidently deserves the title of inventor of the general-purpose, programmable
digital computer at least as much as Atanasoff, Mauchly, or Eckert. Zuse
built his first working machine in 1936-1938, and his fourth machine--constructed
in Berlin on a shoestring budget during 1943-1945--eventually found a home
in the Technical Hochschule in Zurich, Switzerland and remained in use well
into the 1950s. Unfortunately for Zuse, but fortunately for the Allies,
the German government was oblivious to the importance of Zuse's work, and
residuals of his designs do not survive in any of the mainstream computer
architectures of today.
Slater's book, while valuable, must be read with caution for several reasons.
First, Slater, who is a Time magazine correspondent, seems to have virtually
no understanding of the technical implications of his material. Most of
the time, due to the excellence of his technical reviewers, he gets away
with it, but occasional paragraphs on hardware specifics are conspicuously
confused. Second, when the stories provided by his interviewees are in obvious
conflict, Slater doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings or step on anyone's
toes, so the reader ends up with no clear idea of where the truth actually
lies. Third, the historical accuracy of the entire book is thrown into question
by blatant deficiencies in the microcomputer-related chapters. For example,
in the biography of Bill Gates, Slater writes:
IBM asked Gates to design the operating system for the new machine
-- what would become the incredibly popular PC... Gates went to work on
what would become MS-DOS -- Microsoft Disk Operating System. He filed his
report personally in Boca Raton in September, and in November he got the
contract... Gates chose a small room in the middle of Microsoft's offices
in the old National Bank building in Bellevue, and got to work.
Incredibly, Slater fails to describe the role of Tim Paterson, Seattle Computer
Products, or 86-DOS in the genesis of MS-DOS 1.0 -- even though this role
is common knowledge throughout the industry. For that matter, he doesn't
even mention any of the Microsoft employees that were involved with the
first few releases of MS-DOS: Bob O'Rear, Chris Peters, Chris Larson, Aaron
Reynolds, and Mark Zbikowski, among others.
Susan Lammers's book, Programmers at Work, must surely be one of
the most readable, sympathetic books about software developers ever published.
Lammers was not interested in muckraking or confrontation, but rather made
it her goal to explore the personalities, attitudes, and work habits behind
some of the great personal computing products of the mid-eighties. There
is no pretense at objectivity or fact-finding in this book--the interviewees
were basically allowed to take the discussions in any direction they wished
and edit the transcripts to present themselves in the most favorable light--but
the book is quite revealing nonetheless. Several of the chapters literally
reek of hubris (I'll let you discover these for yourself), while others
-- such as the interviews with Gates, Carr, and Hertzfeld -- are unexpectedly
disarming.
One of the more intriguing features of Lammers's book is the inclusion of
design jottings or source code by the various programmers she talked to.
We see pages from the manuscript from the original Visicalc user manual
by Dan Bricklin, notes to himself by Robert Carr on the data structures
underlying Framework, excerpts from the source code for 8080 Basic and a
couple of amateurish articles from the MITS user newsletter by Bill Gates,
a full-fledged animation demonstration program for the Macintosh by Andy
Hertzfeld, an elegant page concerning character grey-scaling from one of
John Warnock's notebooks, and a PDP-10 assembly-language program for compiling
wirelists by Charles Simonyi--using Hungarian notation, of course! A lot
of water has passed over the dam since Susan Lammers put this book together
in 1986, but it's still a good investment of your time and money.
Accidental Empires, by Robert X. Cringely, is the very antithesis
of Programmers at Work. Accidental Empires is classic yellow
journalism--unsubstantiated anecdotes, mangled facts, inflammatory speculation,
and half-baked freshman psychology all masquerading as history. This book
could just as well have been named Fear and Loathing in Cupertino!
The chief targets of Cringely's vitriol are Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, although
a good many other industry luminaries, ranging from Donald Knuth to John
Warnock, receive glancing swipes of the claws as well. This is not to say
that the book isn't entertaining -- entertainment and making money are,
after all, the primary goals of yellow journalism -- or even that it doesn't
contain some valuable insights. But Accidental Empires is ultimately
doomed to irrelevance because its author, or authors, didn't have the integrity
to offer their interpretations of our industry under their true names. A
pity.
* Henry James, "Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne"
Five Views of the Same Event
From Fire in the Valley
Then the Popular Electronics article came out. Gates' friend Paul Allen
ran through Harvard Square with the article to wave it in front of Gates'
face and say, "Look, it's going to happen! I told you this was going
to happen! And we're going to miss it!" Gates had to admit that his
friend was right; it sure looked as though the "something" they
had been looking for had found them. He immediately phoned MITS, claiming
that he and his partner had a BASIC language usable on the Altair. When
Ed Roberts, who had heard a lot of such promises, asked Gates when he could
come to Albuquerque to demonstrate it, Gates looked at his childhood friend,
took a deep breath, and said, "Oh, in two or three weeks." Gates
put down the receiver, turned to Allen and said: "I guess we should
go buy a manual." They went straight to an electronics shop and purchased
Adam Osborne's manual on the 8080.
From Hackers
Not long before MITS began shipping Altairs to computer-starved Popular
Electronics readers, Ed Roberts had gotten a phone call from two college
students named Paul Allen and Bill Gates. The two teenagers hailed from
Seattle. Since high school the two of them had been hacking computers...
The Altair article, while not impressing them technically, was exciting
to them: it was clear microcomputers were the next big thing, and they could
get involved in all the action by writing BASIC for this thing. They had
a manual explaining the instruction set for the 8080 chip, and they had
the Popular Electronics article with the Altair schematics, so they got
to work writing something that would fit in 4K of memory. Actually, they
had to write the interpreter in less than that amount of code, since the
memory would not only be holding their program to interpret BASIC into machine
language, but would need space for that program that the user would be writing.
It was not easy, but Gates in particular was a master at bumming code, and
with a lot of squeezing and some innovative use of the 8080 instruction
set, they thought they'd done it. When they called Roberts, they did not
mention they were placing the call from Bill Gates' college dorm room. Roberts
was cordial, but warned them that others were thinking of an Altair BASIC;
they were welcome to try, though. "We'll buy from the first guy who
shows up with one," Roberts told them.
From Accidental Empires
Like the Buddha, Gates' enlightenment came in a flash. Walking across Harvard
Yard while Paul Allen waved in his face the January 1975 issue of Popular
Electronics announcing the Altair 8800 microcomputer from MITS, they both
saw instantly that there would really be a personal computer industry and
that the industry would need programming languages. Although there were
no microcomputer software companies yet, 19-year-old Bill's first concern
was that they were already too late. "We realized that the revolution
might happen without us," Gates said. "After we saw that article,
there was no question of where our life would focus."
"Our life?" What the heck does Gates mean here -- that he and
Paul Allen were joined at the frontal lobe, sharing a single life, a single
set of experiences? In those days, the answer was "yes." Drawn
together by the idea of starting a pioneering software company and each
convinced that he couldn't succeed alone, they committed to sharing a single
life -- a life unlike that of most other PC pioneers because it was devoted
as much to doing business as to doing technology. Gates was a businessman
from the start; otherwise, why would he have been worried about being passed
by? There was plenty of room for high-level computer languages to be developed
for the fledgling platforms, but there was only room for one first high-level
language. Anyone could participate in a movement, but only those with the
right timing could control it.
From Portraits in Silicon
After Gates entered Harvard in the fall of 1973, Allen challenged him to
developed a BASIC interpreter for the Intel 8008, but Gates soon decided
that the 8080 instruction set was not powerful enough for BASIC. Allen next
urged that they start a microcomputer firm. The two had already spent $360
to purchase one of the very first microcomputer chips. The turning point
in their young careers came when they read the January 1975 issue of Popular
Electronics. The Altair microcomputer, based on the 8080 chip, made by an
Albuquerque, New Mexico firm called MITS, and selling for $350, appeared
on the cover. Allen was the first to see the article. He noticed a copy
of the magazine at the newsstand and hastily tracked down Gates. Here was
the first truly cheap computer! Allen ran through Harvard Square waving
the article in front of Gates, issuing a friendly warning that the train
was leaving, and if the two of them didn't get to work, they would not be
aboard. Gates' problem was whether to stick to his present studies in pursuit
of the legal career his parents wished for him, or give full attention to
computers. The latter won out; the two young men wanted to make sure they
wouldn't miss what was happening. "We realized," Gates recalls,
"that the revolution might happen without us. After we saw that article,
there was no question of where our life would focus." Allen proposed
to Gates that the two try to write a BASIC -- the simple, high-level computer
programming language -- for the Altair. At least one minicomputer firm had
insisted that it was impossible to write a high-level language that would
run on a personal computer. But the two young men wanted to give it a try.
They informed MITS of their plan.
From Programmers at Work
(Bill Gates speaking to Susan Lammers)
The really great programs I've written have all been ones that I have thought
about for a huge amount of time before I ever wrote them. I wrote a BASIC
interpreter for a minicomputer in high school. I made massive mistakes in
that program, and then I got to look at some other BASIC interpreters. So
by the time I sat down to do Microsoft BASIC in 1975, it wasn't a question
of whether I could write the program, but rather a question of whether I
could squeeze it into 4K and make it super fast... Paul Allen had brought
me the magazine with the Altair, and we thought, "Geez, we'd better
get going, because we know these machines are going to be popular."
And that's when I stopped going to classes and we just worked around the
clock. The initial program was written in about three and a half weeks.
We ended up spending about eight weeks before I had it fully polished the
way that I really liked it. And then I later went back and rewrote it. No
great programmer is sitting there saying, "I'm going to make a bunch
of money," or "I'm going to sell a hundred thousand copies."
Because that kind of thought gives you no guidance about the problems. A
great programmer is thinking, Should I rewrite this whole subroutine so
that four people, instead of three, could call it? Should I make this program
ten percent faster? Should I really think through what the common case in
here is so I know how to order this check?
Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer
Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine
Berkeley, California: Osborne-McGraw Hill, 1984
288 pages, $11.95
ISBN 0-88134-121-5
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Steven Levy
New York, NY: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing, 1984
448 pages, $5.99
ISBN 0-440-13405-6
Portraits in Silicon
Robert Slater
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987
374 pages, $10.95
ISBN 0-262-69131-0
Programmers at Work
Susan Lammers
Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Press, 1986
383 pages, $9.95
ISBN 1-55615-211-6
Accidental Empires
Robert X. Cringely
Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1992
336 pages, $19.95
ISBN 0-201-57032-7
Electronic Review of Computer Books
Created 5/1/96 / Last modified 6/15/96 / webmaster@ercb.com