Remembering the Future: Interviews from Personal Computer World

Remembering the Future Interviews from Personal Computer World

Springer London Berlin Heidelberg New York Barcelona Budapest Hong Kong Milan Paris Santa Clara Singapore Tokyo

Wendy M. Grossman (Ed.)

Remembering the Future Interviews from Personal Computer World

Springer

Wendy M. Grossman [email protected]

Individual interviews by Wendy M. Grossman, John Diamond, Nick Beard. Benjamin Woolley, Sara Gordon, GeofWheelwright, Ian Burley and George Cole e the interviewers; other interviews C Personal Computer World

Photographs e the photographers Text e Springer-Verlag London Limited 1997

Reprint of the original edition 1997

ISBN- 13: 978-3-540-76095-5 DOl: 10.1007/ 978-1-4471-0945-7

e-JSBN-13: 978-1-447 1-0945-7

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Remembering the future; interviews from Personal Computer World

I. Computer industry - History 2. Electronic data processing per$Onnel -Interviews

I. Grossman, Wendy 338.4"'004 ISBN.I3:978-3-540-16095-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or crit icism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and P atents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent 10 Ihe publishers.

The use of registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, thaI such names are exempt from the relevant laws and regulations and therefore free fo r general use.

Product liability: The publisher can give no guarantee for information about drug dosage and application thereof contained in this book. In every individual case the respective user must check its accuracy by consulting other pharmaceutical literature.

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28/3830-543210 Printed on acid-free paper

Foreword

Prepare yourself for a book which is the result of selfindulgence: my self-indulgence. While the other boys in 5K at my school might have wanted to meet Kevin Keegan when he played for Liverpool or Adam Ant when he played the Forum, I wanted to meet Sir Clive Sinclair and Chuck Peddle. I was a pretty sad kid. But I knew what I wanted.

PCW is the best place in the world to work if you like computer hardware. You get the latest, most exotic equipment to play with, often months before it hits the shops, and the manufacturers even pretend not to mind if you break it.

Sometimes, to break the monotony of playing with yet another fastest-ever PC or high-resolution colour printer, the computer companies will buy you lunch in the kinds of restaurants where you are disappointed if at least one of the other diners hasn't won an Oscar. Eventually you get blase and start turning down boat trips on a fjord and odd days on the West Coast (Monterey not Morecambe).

But these are all things you can have with enough money. Getting to meet the major personalities in the computer industry is harder. And I've done it. I've met many impressive people and always enjoyed interviewing them.

It wasn't long after I joined PCWin 1990 that I met Sir Clive Sinclair, my first interview. What the interview here doesn't record is that he showed me a prototype PC, something very similar to a Hewlett-Packard Omnibook, a PC successor to the Z88. Unfortunately he became too interested in electric bicycles for the computer to appear.

My second hero was bagged a lot later. Chuck Peddle was the inventor of the 6502, the Commodore PET and the Sirius 1. He was in London to promote his new company, but I was more interested in the past and the distant future. He promised a machine, codenamed "The Chunk", which could reconfigure itself to emulate a number of different platforms. Both this computer and Sinclair's prototype are futures which never

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happened. Mostly, though, these interviews are about the past: how the greats of the computer industry have earned their success, power and influence.

We've always been hard-nosed about PCWinterviews. We've never submitted questions in advance or allowed anyone outside the PCWoffice to "check the facts" by reading the copy before it goes to press (and we have refused interviews where this was a prerequisite). The first people outside the PCWoffice to see an interview are usually PCW subscribers.

Unfortunately, I wasn't very good at interviewing people. I enjoyed meeting them and asking interesting questions, but when it came to turning their thoughts into the high-quality prose that is the stock in trade of PCW I failed to measure up. You won't have noticed this because anything which wasn't up to scratch has been rewritten and turned into sparkling copy by Lauraine Lee and her wordsmiths on the PCW production desk. Lauraine has been with PCW since the days when 16K RAM packs wobbled and a monitor was something you used for entering hexadecimal.

The pictures have also helped to make the PCW interviews special. Most of them have been shot by Jon Millar, a man who isn't scared of getting some of the richest men in the world to sit on the carpet or hang in unusual positions from staircases. His banter has livened up the interviewing almost as much as his shots have livened the pages.

The greatest influence on the interviews, though, is Wendy Grossman who, being much better than I was at interviewing, writing up the interviews and getting them in on time, has been responsible for most of the interviews in this book, and it is Wendy who has compiled and edited the interviews you see here. She has been incredibly patient waiting by her letterbox for the book contract long after I'd given up hope and the result is a good overview of the people who made the UK microcomputer industry over the last decade, with some pointers to the future.

We've not yet interviewed everyone I want; I'd still like to meet Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and as close to the inventor of the video game as we are ever likely to get. And I've always wanted a PCWinterview with Alan Sugar ... but I suspect he'd rather meet Kevin Keegan.

November, 1995 Simon Rockman

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Introduction

Computers do not change the most fundamental parts of life: humans are born, they live, and they die. But in the years since World War II, computers have come to mediate almost every part of that process, from the processors embedded in medical equipment to the computerisation of even traditional crafts like sail-making.

It was when I was listening to Dennis Hayes (the man who gave the standard set of modem commands his name) talk about the three hours it used to take to configure a modem the size of a shoebox by moving tiny, little jumpers that it occurred to me that in these interviews we were recording history that would otherwise be lost. The computer industry moves so fast that almost no one has time to write anything down - just about the only things that get published are instructions for using products, promotional material, or, in the case of egregious successes (Microsoft) or outstanding failures (IBM), business analyses. Simon Rockman, who commissioned most of these interviews, had the same reaction when he read the Hayes piece, and that's how the notion of a book was conceived. It was Nick Beard (robots), though, who interested Springer-Verlag London Limited in the idea.

Rereading these interviews has been intriguing. It's surprising to see that only five years ago even top people (Michael Dell) were uncertain about the eventual success of Microsoft Windows, and to rediscover the world before computing standards that led British manufacturers such as Apricot (Peter Horne) and Acorn (Hermann Hauser) to grossly underestimate the importance of the standard-setting IBM Pc. The ebb and flow of this volatile and unevenly maturing industry bears a lesson for every arrogant company which thinks success today means success tomorrow. And for every country - charted in these pieces is the early lead Britain had and lost in computing, which survives only in a few pockets here and there. History does not have to be only written by the winners.

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As this book goes to press, yet another shift in the face of the computer industry is taking place: early in 1996, the Canadian company Corel suddently vaulted itself into the number two spot behind Microsoft in applications software by buying WordPerfect.

As always, the change comes as another major computer company struggles to hold on to yesterday's market share. In this case it's Novell. The Utah-based networking leader swallowed WordPerfect (a DOS winner but Windows loser) at a gulp in 1994, and also acquired a spreadsheet (Quattro Pro) and database (Paradox) from Borland, itself falling from black balance sheets at the time. Less than a year and a half later, with Microsoft claiming 90 per cent of the office suites market, Novell put those applications up for sale to concentrate on retaining its dominance in networking, where it's facing ever-increasing competition. Meanwhile, a host of companies, new and old, are panning for gold on the Internet, where the next wave of boom or bust is starting with new companies like Netscape and Yahoo!, turning Microsoft into the old, slow company that must race to catch up.

The personal fortunes of the interviewees have fluctuated, too: the personality it takes to start up a company and take it through its season of fastest growth is not always the same personality it takes to manage a large company. Some have managed the transition: Michael Dell, Mark Eppley, Gordon Eubanks. Others have moved on, amicably: Mike Markkula, Philippe Kahn. A few have faced dismissal: Jack Schoof. But they'll all be back. If there's one truism about the computer industry it's that people don't leave; they just move on to other jobs.

PCW has been around as long as microcomputers; it is the oldest and best-established computer title in Britain. Founded in 1978, before there were PCs or to day's glut of computer magazines, it runs neck and neck with Computer Shopper for the top-selling spot. But what's special about it is not that it has more editorial pages than any other British magazine (a dubious distinction) but that in this ocean of product reviews and jargon it tries to cover the underlying technology in a broader sense. The series of interviews from which these have been selected is part of that. Originally conceived by Guy Swarbrick and Simon Rockman, the series has gone from one industry name to another since John Diamond's opening tea party with Emma Nicholson, MP.

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pew was one of the first publications that ever paid me to write anything, and it's been a mainstay ever since; thanks to its staff for that, and for commissioning these interviews and assisting with providing the raw materials for the book. The magazine would, however, never have heard of me if it hadn't been for Nick Beard (again), who in the summer of 1990 planted my name on several editors' desks at VNU, or for Carol Hemsley, who made sure they remembered it afterwards. Thanks are also owed to my friends Mike Cogan and Maren Cooke, who provided the chauffeuring and accommodation that made several of these interviews possible, and to my agent, Robert Kirby, for extreme patience. To the various unnamable folks I claim as family for their encouragement and support: you know who you are.

London, November, 1995 wg

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Contents

Contributors xiii

THE EARLY DAYS 1

Hermann Hauser: Missing the Big Time 3 David Potter: State of Independence 9 Clive Sinclair: Clive on His Bike 15 Chuck Peddle: Walking Tall 21 Andy Grove: Hello, Mr Chips 27 Bill Gates: Perfect Vision 31 Chuck Geschke: An Industry Type 37 Al Shugart: Moving with the Times 43

THE PC GENERATION 49

Dennis Hayes: Modem Man 51 Philippe Kahn: Back on Course 57 Jack Schoof II: Jumping Jack Flash 63 Mark Eppley: Travel Writer 67 Gordon Eubanks: Bankable Asset 71 Peter Horne: For Pete's Sake 75 Volker Dolch: Dolch Vita 81 A. C. Mike Markkula: Neurons from Outer Space 87 Michael Dell: The American Dream 95

MEN IN SUITS 99

Mike Newton: Voyage of Discovery 101

Howard Ford: Howard's Way 107

Rikke Helms: At the Helms 113 David Svendson: Playing to Win 117 Dieter Giesbrecht: Looking After Number One 123 Robert McConnell: Chipping Away 129 Carol Bartz: Success Story 133 June Rokoff: The New Lotus Position 139

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COPS AND ROBBERS 145

J. J. Buck BloomBecker: Crime ofthe Century 147 John Austen: Hacked off 153 Bob Hay: Policing the System 159 Emma Nicholson, MP: The Perils of Emma 165 Inside the Mind of Dark Avenger 171

RESEARCH AND THE FUTURE 179

John Connolly: Man in a Million 181 David Cutler: Rock Steady 187 James McGroddy: Out ofthe Big Blue 191 Andy Hopper: Olivetti Reveals Pandora's Box 197 The Cambridge Connection 203

JPL: Pics in Space 209

Steve Williams: Taking Effect 215 The Robots are Coming - Very Slowly 221

EPILOGUE 227

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Contributors

Nick Beard is a physician with an MSc in software engineering; he has worked in Big Six consulting firms and was responsible for installing an advanced hospital information system at HeI in Scotland. He has been a PCW columnist since 1990.

David Brake joined PCWin 1991 as a staff writer, and served first as news editor and finally as editor of the net-oriented Cutting Edge section; he left in 1995 to become Net Editor at New Scientist.

Ian Burley has been a freelance technology writer for 11 years, specialising in computing and communications topics.

George Cole is a freelance technology writer and a regular contributor to the Times and the Financial Times.

John Diamond is a freelance writer; he is a columnist for the Times and presenter of Radio 5's Stop Press.

Sara Gordon is a security analyst whose work in anti-virus research has been profiled in publications including the New York Times and the WaJJ Street Journal Europe.

Wendy M. Grossman is a freelance writer specialising in science and technology, and a recovering folksinger.

Lauraine Lee is Production Editor of PCW; the headlines (now chapter titles) and original editing are largely her work.

Simon Rockman was first Features Editor and then Deputy Editor at PCWfrom 1990 to 1995; he is also Publisher of What Mobile?, which he founded in 1993.

Guy Swarbrick was Editor of PCWfrom 1990 to 1992, when he moved on to Dell UK where he was Business Development Manager for mobile computing. He moved to Microsoft in 1996.

Ben Tisdall is Editor of PCW and former editor of Personal Computer Magazine and What Micro?

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GeofWheelwright is a freelance writer and author based in Vancouver. He is a regular contributor to the Sunday Times and the Financial Times, and served briefly as editor of pew in 1990.

Benjamin Woolley is author of Virtual Worlds and presenter of The Net, BBC Television's series on computing and the digital age.

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((

The Early Days

It's easy to forget that in the early 1980s Britain led the world in the number of personal computers per capita. Companies like Sinclair, Commodore, Acorn, Psion, Sirius, ACT and Apricot gave Britain that early lead. Hermann Hauser, David Potter, Clive Sinclair and Chuck Peddle all made vital contributions to Britain's computer industry. Slowly and inexorably, however, the lead moved to the US and into the hands of standards-setters like Bill Gates and Andy Grove, as well as Al Shugart and Chuck Geschke, whose hard drives and printing technology were both essential to ensure the widespread acceptance of computers. Britain's leading companies discovered then what took IBM another decade to learn: that past dominance is no guarantee of future success.

"

Hermann Hauser

Photograph by John Millar

Missing the Big Time

Interviewer: Wendy M. Grossman

Appeared: May, 1993

Hermann Hauser may be the most prolific company founder in the UK. The list includes Acorn, A TM, EO (formerly Active Book), IXI and ARM; he also set up Olivetti's research division. Acorn was the maker of one of the first really successful British computers, the BBC Micro.

Hauser was born in Vienna and grew up in the Tyrol. He did his first degree at Vienna University, and has a PhD from Cambridge. In 1995,

Hauser, as Chairman, oversaw the launch of UK Online, a subsidiary of Olivetti Telemedia. Acorn continues to make and design its own hardware and operating system. EO's pen-based Personal Communicator, discussed here, didn't make it. ATM networking, however, is gaining some of the ground Hauser predicted for it.

Hermann Hauser really believes that if he had had just a little more foresight the world now would talk about Acorn-compatible computers rather than IBM-compatible computers.

"Looking back," he says, "we were so far ahead of anybody else in the industry, including Apple and IBM." What they missed, he says, was understanding the importance of strategic alliances and standards. That's why when Hauser started his current project, EO's Personal Communicator, he went to every major company he could think of until a deal was struck with AT&T.

Hauser is probably best-known for the company he founded with Chris Curry in 1978: Acorn, which started life as a microcomputer consultancy.

3 W. M. Grossman (ed.), Remembering the Future© Springer-Verlag London Limited 1997

The company's first product, a computer kit, was launched, fortuitously, in 1979. "It was the same time as Apple in the US, and the market was ripe for an Apple-type computer," he says.

The kit had two selling points that Hauser says he's tried to keep consistent throughout his career: it was technically ahead of the competition, and it was easy to use. "Easy to use" is relative: you programmed the computer in hexadecimal code with its hex keyboard.

Hauser attributes some of the kit's success to Roger Wilson, then an undergraduate student at Cambridge. Wilson showed up one day and said he thought he could build a computer kit that was a lot better than the kits on the market.

"So we said, 'Sure, let's do one. Produce a prototype, and if it's good we'll sell it.' And he says, OK, and goes away. A week later he comes back with a prototype that he had hand-wired, and he says, 'I've also written some systems software for it, but now it needs to be blown into this PROM [programmable read-only memory],."

Blowing meant programming binary systems software by selectively applying high voltage to blow the connections between specific wires on a chip full of transistors.

"I said, 'But how are you going to debug it?' Because it was very difficult to debug things, and we didn't have a debugger because we were poor in those days. And he said, 'Oh, it doesn't need debugging. I've already written it to be correct'." Impossible. But they blew the PROM.

"There were two minor flaws that were then corrected, but the system worked well enough that you could use the system itself to find them. I think there was one seven-segment display that was wrong or something, and five minutes later we blew the second version, and that was the version we shipped to customers."

So, Hauser says, "This guy turned out to be a genius. Together with Steve Ferber, he is one of the guys who invented the Acorn RISC Machine." Wilson joined Acorn when he finished his degree.

Acorn's next product, the Atom, was given two more unusual things. One was a video interface that let you hook it up to a TV set. The other was a case, an idea of Curry's.

"We put this ad in Practical Electronics, a full-page ad," he says. "We put that ad out, and we just couldn't shovel the cheques to the bank."

That set the pace for the next few years. "From then onward until we went public in 1984, there was just one problem with Acorn, and that was to produce enough. We just cranked up production at phenomenal rates. I remember, one year we grew from £8 million to £40 million. That was a factor of five in one year. In Silicon Valley, this was not unusual, but in Britain there was no experience [of it]." In fact, the entire company was started with £200 and a £5000 overdraft from the local bank.

4

Getting the BBC contract is one of Hauser's best stories, although some of his colleagues suggest it may be slightly embellished for effect.

The BBC had decided two years earlier to educate the nation by doing a series of 10 programmes on computers. The producers wanted to broadcast hands-on demonstrations with an actual computer that people could buy, and they drew up a specification. But in two years the BBC had failed to get a working prototype from the company it had hoped would build the machine, and it had now opened up the bidding. A condition was that the chosen company be able to produce the 12000 computers the BBC estimated the show would sell.

"They came to see us on a Monday," says Hauser, "and they told us the specification of this computer, and it was just typical BBC: it was way over the top in every way, the amount of processing power, the integrated graphics, the connectivity it had to have for the rest of the world, the printers ... because they wanted to make, basically, a programme about the computer industry, so this thing had to do everything that you'd ever thought of."

Bya stroke ofluck, "We had a design in our drawer that was just a little bit better than what they'd asked for, but we thought it couldn't be built, that it was just over the top. So on that Monday I got on the phone and I said to Steve Ferber, 'What's the chance of building a prototype by Friday?' And he said, 'Completely out of the question. There's simply no way this can be done.' So I rang Roger Wilson, and I said, 'Roger, I've just had a word with Stephen, and he thinks it's really hard, but if we really tried hard we could have a prototype by Friday.' And Roger said, 'Absolutely no way, but if Stephen says it, I'm in'."

To help them, Acorn hired Ramesh Bannerji from the Computer Lab, whom Hauser describes as "the fastest gun in the west." Bannerji's skill is in wire wrapping as fast as people can call out the connections to be made without mistakes.

"So this guy just went completely bananas for a whole day." The hard part, as always, was the debugging, which they worked on for

three days and nights, during which Hauser says his major contribution was to make lots of cups of tea to keep everyone going.

"Friday morning, they were going to be there at 10 a.m., and we'd worked all through the night, and it was 8 a.m., and this thing didn't work. I thought it was time for me to change my role now, show them what a hotshot designer I really am underneath this tea lady fa~ade. There was this development system on the prototype that we had, and we had linked this with a clock wire, and I said, this clock wire introduces a skew on the clock here, and you just cut this umbilical cord, it will make this thing work all on its own. And they've never forgiven me for that, because that was actually it, and this thing worked well enough to be

5

demonstrated to the BBC." Acorn got the contract "despite the ranting and raving of Clive Sinclair."

Over its lifetime, the Acorn BBC Micro sold one and a half million. And people noticed.

"Bill Gates tried to talk me into adopting his MS-DOS operating system." Hauser didn't go for either DOS or Gates's BASIC interpreter. He thought they were inferior because Acorn's operating system let you control all the parts of the system, including speakers or screen layout -and networking was built in, even in 1981.

The networking emphasis came from Cambridge's computer lab, where Andy Hopper, later a technical director at Acorn and currently Director of Cambridge's Olivetti Research Lab, had invented the Cambridge Ring, long before Ethernet became a standard.

Most of the findings from the Cambridge Ring, Hauser says, have been adopted by what's now known as ATM (for asynchronous transfer mode). "I actually believe that A TM will become the LAN [local area network] standard, because it's the only standard I can see that will elegantly unify all the media you need to transmit with in the home, office, wide area, or across the nation or across the globe - by different media, of course, I mean telephony, TV, cable and computer data." AT&T has recently announced it is to standardise its high-end network on ATM.

So: another missed opportunity. "I think we could have easily standardised had we realised that standards were becoming important. Then in 1984 it was basically copied by Apple, and it's now called Appletalk."

1984 was Acorn's watershed. The company had gone public with £200 million - and then the home computer market collapsed. "It was the year when Atari was sold, Commodore was sold, Apple nearly went bust - and we solved the one problem that Acorn had throughout its history, which was to produce enough." Acorn had commitments to ship some 250000 unwanted computers.

"I think there was a backlash," Hauser says, "because nobody understood in the first place why people bought these computers by the handful. IBM at that same time had brought out the self-correcting ribbon, and you could not explain to people that the computer would do anything else that would be helpful. I think we've got the same problem with personal communicators at the moment - people do not understand that the diary can be such a vital part of your life because you can hang all kinds of connections off that diary entry that are useful."

Olivetti rescued Acorn, Hauser says, specifically for its technology, which by this time (1986) included the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM). Hauser himself became Olivetti's vice-president in charge of research.

The ARM chip was part of an Acorn policy decision that a computer

6

should be designed on silicon rather than cobbled together out of thirdparty components. This focus, says Hauser, makes Acorn one of a very small, select group of genuine computer companies - Apple being the most obvious - that own their own technology from the ground up.

"All the big companies - IBM, Olivetti, Bull - gave up their birthright. They're not producing computers any more, they're just assembling standard chips, and that's the reason behind the profit margin squeeze that they have at the moment," he says, comparing this way of working to building pre-fab houses. "If you actually look at the Intel processor architectures before the P5 [now Pentium] - the 286s, 386s, 486s - they're some of the worst processor architectures that have ever been around in the history of the industry. If you ask any academic or anybody who understands anything about microprocessors, they just happen to be incredibly successful because IBM made it a standard."

Hauser believes the Acorn development team had a couple of advantages that none of the chip manufacturers - Intel, AMD or Motorola - had.

"They had no money, and they had no people." That first ARM chip, Hauser says, had 30000 transistors, the same number as a Z80 or the 6502 Acorn used in its BBC Micros, but it was 20 times faster. It was also the world's first RISC processor.

"Now again, we never thought of selling this processor to anybody else," says Hauser. Until recently: "We were very successful with Apple, which has adopted the ARM for its Newton product range, and also 3DO, which is now using it as part of a new video standard."

The Active Book Company also intended to use the ARM for its personal communicators. Active Book was set up in 1988 to exploit penbased interfaces, which Hauser felt could really make a difference because they're so much easier to use.

But that's another story.

7

David Potter


State of Independence

Interviewer: Benjamin Woolley

Appeared: September, 1991

Psion is one of the few British computer companies (since Apricot was bought by Mitsubishi, Acorn sold a stake to Olivetti, and ICL went to Fujitsu) that remains independent even though it went through the kind of mid-1980s crisis that forced those other companies into sale. David Potter is its Managing Director and founder.

But where Hauser thinks Acorn would have dominated the PC world by embracing standards and allies, Potter's idea was to tackle a completely new niche market he thought had potential. Psion is now the leading supplier of hand-held electronic Organisers, currently the Series 3a, which have competed successfully against products like Sharp's IQ series.

That's not how Psion started, however. In the early days, Psion was the company that supplied software for the popular British computers, including some of the early Acorn machines.

"I guess I'm not a monkish figure," says David Potter. He had certainly not taken a vow of silence. He needed no prompting to unleash an almost unstoppable stream of thoughts, speculations, stories and anecdotes about his life and business. It was a flow that questions merely served to interrupt, rarely to divert. But who's complaining?

Potter, founder and head of Psion, is in a unique position: he's an intellectual who abandoned his monastic university cell to set up a company in that most volatile and exciting of markets, the British


microcomputer industry. At nearly every stage of its early, ecstatic, agonising development, he was there. And unlike nearly everyone else involved, he has survived to tell the tale.

Psion is chiefly known for its hand-held Organiser, launched in its first form in 1985. Since then, Psion claims to have sold up to half a million units, many into companies like Marks & Spencer, which uses them to enter stock and pricing information on the shop floor.

Potter came to Britain from his native South Africa at 19 to read theoretical physics at City College in Cambridge. His boyhood had been somewhat unusual. «I was born and brought up in Cape Town, and my father died when I was young. I was really brought up by my grandmother, who acted like a mother, and my mother went out to work to earn some money. She remarried when I was nine or ten, and my stepfather was Rhodesian, so I was dragged up kicking to what is now Zimbabwe."

He ultimately benefited from the move. It was Rhodesia's education that provided him with the opportunity of a place at what was then the British university for science. Once there, he began an academic career of some distinction, which included research at Imperial College, a doctorate, and a brief period as assistant professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

Potter's academic career was more the result of accident than design. «If you'd asked me as a 15-year-old or 16-year-old, I would have said I would have been building things or doing things rather than an academic." As his reputation developed, he wrote papers and books including his most successful title, Computational Physics. The choice of subject was an early sign of Potter's uncanny ability to spot where the action is - or rather, where it will be. «Computational physics" was the rather prosaic term then given to a field that has since attracted immense popular interest under the more poetic name of «chaos."

Potter did not, however, just want to write books about computers. «I came back from California in 1975 intrigued about what was beginning to happen there with microchips. I was impressed by an extraordinary computer built by a couple of academics to study a particular problem in 1974 to 1975 in Santa Barbara. It was a specialist machine, a kind of array processor capable of doing Fourier transforms and things like that, on an extraordinary scale. It was amazing that people could build such a thing without the resources ofIBM."

As quickly as he was gaining interest in the opportunities offered by microchips, he was losing interest in theoretical physics. In a conventional business story, this would be the point when our bored but brilliant hero would put his house in hock and attempt to translate his academic expertise into a commercial product.

10

However, Potter had noticed that the 1974 stock market crash had left a lot of companies with undervalued shares, and decided to seize the moment: "I started investing by studying just smaller companies in great depth, picking out a few after a lot of research. I was successful at this and made quite a bit of money." Fifty thousand pounds, he claims. It was this money, plus a little extra raised from a second mortgage on his house, that he used to set up Psion (the name, incidentally is an abbreviation of Potter's Scientific Investments, with "on" added, "to make it unique, as in Exxon").

In true opportunistic fashion, he founded the company with no definite sense of what it would actually do.

"Microcomputers were just starting off, and at that stage it was a kind of cottage industry." Apple, Commodore (whose PET was then bigger than Apple), CP/M-80 machines, AIM microprocessor kits - all were on the market and selling to data processing workers who played with them at home. "I studied the marketplace for pieces of software that I thought could be packaged and sold more generally."

As before, Potter's timing was perfect. It was 1980, a technological springtime. High-tech firms were popping up everywhere, all of them with development plans and dreams of becoming the IBM of the future. Apple and Microsoft were still nothing more than start-ups. There was everything to play for, and Potter was prepared to play hard. Within a year, on his own, he had generated a turnover of £120 000 and a profit of about £15 000.

His first package was a set of utilities for the Acorn Atom, a machine for which he has little respect: "God, it was ropey." Potter claims it used an American-standard 60 Hz video controller, relying on the fact that 60 per cent of British 50 Hz television sets would lock onto it anyway. "But it was a tough cookie for the other 30 or 40 per cent who couldn't. Hah! I mean, that was classic Hermann Hauser."

Then he saw the Sinclair ZX80. "I thought it would create a serious impact. So I began to focus particularly on that." This was a turning point. The ZX80 opened up a new market, and Psion prospered on the back of it. As subsequent Sinclair machines were launched, Psion became established as the official software supplier, developing packages for sale under the Sinclair brand name.

At the end of 1982 Sinclair was at his height, spearheading an industry saturated with innovative, incompatible hardware: the Dragon 32, the Oric, the BBC Micro, the Commodore 64, the Atari 400, the Video Genie I, the Jupiter Ace.

Potter took a good, hard look. "We came to the conclusion that these products were of tremendous educational value, a lot of fun, but there was no real, long-term utility and the market would not be long-term

11

because of that. So we decided to diversify and put a lot of our development resources into two very new areas for us. One was applications software. The second area was a quite new, radical concept of a handheld computer. That was dreamt up by Charles Davies [a former student of Potter's at Imperial College, hired as Psion's Software Director] and myself in a little Greek restaurant over lunch."

Soon after, news of another development reached the Psion office, one that ultimately marked the downfall of the British home computer industry.

"In the spring of 1983, Sinclair approached us and said they'd heard that we were developing certain applications software and that they had a machine which they had called the ZX83 ... which was going to be a kind of people's computer designed for real applications like word processing and so on. Would we be able to produce the software for it? It had an amazing spec: [Motorola] 68000 [processor chip], colour, all wonderful things.

"What we were working on was an integrated word processor, database, spreadsheet and graphics program. We said that this machine is not really powerful enough to deal with the integration as a whole, but we could split it up and reduce it somewhat and be able to run each application separately." Psion ended up with a deal not only with Sinclair but also with ICL; at the time these were the dominant companies in British computing. "So for little Psion to get these huge contracts in which the software would be exclusively on every single unit was a huge potential to us. So that was exciting." It was also dangerous. The ZX83 was to become the QL, and the ICL machine the equally ill-fated OPD, or "One Per Desk."

"We had a tremendous team of people, very capable, and we were liaising with Sinclair because we didn't have a machine. But we'd been rather creative. We'd invested in a huge development system using a V AX, a minicomputer on which we would run simulators for different microprocessors, and in this way we could develop things without having any hardware. That was all going along very well. Eventually, round about October/November we began to get bits of hardware and bits of the operating system through to use and we were able then to port down our applications software and test it.

"Then I went away on holiday in December, 1984, and while I was away I got a telephone call from Charles [Davies] saying, 'They're absolutely mad, they say they're going to launch the ZX83 in January and they want all our software up and running.' I said they're daft, but I got on an airplane and came back because that's what they'd decided to do and it wasn't for us to stop them."

An impressive launch, however, was followed by a distinct lack of

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shipping hardware; when the machines did dribble out, they didn't work properly.

"This went on through March, April and May, and then they began to ship some quantity around about May."

Too late. Sinclair's reputation as a computer company was in tatters. "The concept was right, as Amstrad later showed with the word processor. It was the execution that was wrong. Sinclair himself was interested in markets. He's got this boffin image and he husbands that himself, but the key to it is that he's got a great marketing nose. He knows a lot technically behind the thing, but he's no engineer. He's a marketing boffin and an engineering buffoon.

"Even the Sinclair Spectrum, which was a hugely successful product, the production yields on that were always dreadful." Further, "The product never stood up in the field anyway. It's not just true of the Spectrum. It was true of the ZX81, it was true of the Black Watch, it was true of the calculators - you know, there were all these stories of these calculators blowing up in ambassadors' pockets. I think this was a great weakness."

This overexcited, undisciplined dash for new markets was, in Potter's view, responsible for the downfall of nearly all the companies of that era. There are, indeed, few survivors. The Sinclair trading name was sold to Amstrad. Acorn was bought up by Olivetti. Dragon and Oric simply disappeared. Research Machines is one of very few British companies from that era to survive in something like its original form. And Psion.

Potter could easily have been sucked under. What kept him afloat was not the integrated applications suite developed for pes - any aspirations of becoming another Lotus or Microsoft were soon dashed. His salvation was the hand-held computer concept first launched (or lunched) in that Greek restaurant.

At one level, the decision to devote research money to developing a new type of product based on still unproven technology was reckless. But for a young company, new markets "might be higher risk, but they're easier."

The Organiser I was launched in 1985. It was a robust mix of technological conservatism and innovation, with a standard Intel microprocessor, a surface-mounted circuit board (developed with the help of the electronics defence contractor Radamec) and EPROM "Datapacs" for mass storage. Though it wasn't a huge success, large companies were ready and waiting for the following year's better-specified Organiser II.

By 1988, the Organiser II had become something of a consumer icon. The company's turnover grew fast, peaking at well over £31 million in 1989. Then Psion's luck seemed to run out. Buoyed by the success of the Organiser, it decided to have a go at the notebook market. The result was

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the MC range, launched in 1989. On this occasion, the timing was terrible. It coincided with the first generation of PC notebooks, whose main advantage was the ability to run the same software as a desktop system.

The MCs could not. Though they were light, beautifully engineered and unequalled in battery life, two of the models did not even use DOS, and none had disk drives or backlit displays, features regarded as essential.

After a year of depressed sales and profits, Psion has turned its attention to the HC, its new top-end hand-held unit, aimed at the corporate market. It is also developing a retail version of the HC, to be launched late this autumn. This will use the same basic technology -solid-state mass storage, operating software, expansion potential - but probably packaged into a palmtop unit with the keyboard set to one side, rather than beneath the screen.

It would be sad if Psion faltered now. Potter admits he cannot compete with the likes of Toshiba, and is likely to spend the next few years defensively developing niche markets rather than attacking more general ones. Nevertheless, his company has unique experience of the portable market, which everyone agrees will over the next few years be one of the strongest in the computing industry. An opportunist like Potter cannot afford to miss that.

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Clive Sinclair


Clive on His Bike

Interviewer: Simon Rockman

Appeared: October, 1990

David Potter blamed a failed liaison with Sinclair for nearly bringing down Psion in its early days. But signing that deal was logical.

At the time, Sir Clive Sinclair was the biggest name in British computing. Born in 1940 and knighted in the Queen's Birthday honours list in 1981, Sinclair pioneered all sorts of technology products from miniature radio kits and pocket calculators to the Z88 portable computer and digital watches. Sinclair Research, which sold all the rights to its computer products to Amstrad in 1986, was also involved in developing the Sky satellite receiver. Here, Sinclair talks primarily about two new projects: a lightweight DOS-compatible portable computer and a folding bicycle. He had others: an electric car, and a superfast processor chip that would run any type of software. The chip and the portable computer never appeared, but Sinclair Research sells a lightweight bicycle and an electric bicycle motor. Work continues on the electric car.

The computer industry has felt the loss of the archetypal boffin. Sir Clive Sinclair and his products used to fill the pages of this magazine every month. Since the late 1980s Sinclair has dropped out of the headlines but the impact of his products is still being felt.

A generation of youngsters grew up at the keyboards of Spectrums, ZX80s, ZX81s and QLs. Many have gone on to become programmers; many of the best selling games in Japan and America are written by


British software houses which started out writing games for Sinclair mICros.

Today's Sinclair Research offices aren't as plush of those of the mid-1980s: the company has exchanged expensive furnishings and valuable antiques for a new horne in an anonymous office block with smart pine furniture and floors. Clean but untidy cabinets are filled with past Sinclair products, and the walls are filled with bookcases containing references to all forms of science, although materials science seems to dominate. It is an office for work rather than show: Sir Clive is preparing to hit the headlines again. The ZX computers were the right product at the right time. Is there any room left for innovation?

"The ZX80 and ZX81 were special because they were a revolution. What happened after that was really evolution. On the ZX81 everything was done on four chips - the entire machine. Very exciting. The Z88 was very nice, too. I'm pleased with that. It's not a huge seller, but technically quite pleasing. The QL was quite fun, we sold a lot of machines but the age of the non-PC machine had passed. It's a shame it was not continued [by Amstrad] but I don't sit about thinking about that - much."

Still, he says, "I don't regret selling to Alan Sugar. It had become a games thing - he didn't make it that - and from my point of view that's tiresome."

Rather than garnes, "What I'm interested in the long term is when we can reach the point when we can have machines that can help in the horne, in being advisors if you like - perhaps doctors, lawyers, teachers. My interest is in artificial intelligence, not necessarily expert systems, and has been for a long time."

This interest has led him into wafer scale integration. "I realised in order to achieve artificial intelligence you'd need massively parallel systems and possibly many thousands of processors. If you think of the early 1980s and if you looked at what was going to happen, if you started to try to do that where we were then, you could have run up against some very nasty interconnection problems.

"I thought that wafer scale integration was the only answer to that and we started in Sinclair Research a research programme to try to solve the problem. Of course, it had been attempted by a number of people, and as you know, we did indeed solve this and Anamartic was created to exploit this, and that's now delivering product."

Perhaps it is appropriate that Sinclair ducked out of the computer market just as the IBM PC and its culture created a period of stagnation in hardware development. Now that things are beginning to change again and people are beginning to launch new innovative hardware products, is the time ripe for are-emergence?

"I entirely agree that the IBM PC has frozen development. Obviously

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there are good sides and bad sides to that. It gives software houses a clear pattern, but it is limited."

Sinclair has an answer: "We have been developing a chip here which we hope will help on that; we have a very high performance chip - the PGC-l. It will be so fast that even in emulation mode it will still have good performance so that you will be able to use it as a decent Pc. In native mode it will be blindingly fast. UNIX would be the most normal, most probable choice for the native mode. It will emulate any PC processor, including a 386 with co-processor. Whatever emulation you create for it."

But that's just a start. "Sinclair Research is still working on wafer scale integration to realise longer term aims. There are various patterns. Most of our shareholders see Anamartic as an end in itself. To us it's a means to an end, something we want to use potentially for large scale computers.

"It is fairly easy to see the sort of hardware we are likely to need. That is arrays where each block contains a processor and a block of memory. It is clear that's what we need. Arrays of perhaps a thousand of such processors. What is very, very far from clear is what sort of software and architecture organisation is going to be best. There is a lot to be learned. But I'm quite confident that if the hardware is made available the software will follow."

Sinclair couldn't say too much more about the PGC-l, except that it will be simple, the way RISC chips are supposed to be simple, and sold both as a processor and in complete machines.

Meanwhile, "Anamartic" - the spin-off wafer integration specialist -"is very much in business and shipping product. It's certainly going to change the world."

Meanwhile, Sinclair Research is moving into the next generation of laptop computers. "I'll show you in confidence - not in confidence, but without the photographer - what we're doing, just to give you a preview if you like." The camera stopped.

Sinclair produced an A4-sized slate-grey box around an inch thick. A lid halfway along the top edge hinged back to form a clamshell top with a screen, uncovering the rubberised Z88 style keyboard. All the edges were bevelled, so it looked like a cross between the Psion MC400 and the Z88. While it looked good it was not a working model.

"This is what we are about to show to retailers. It has no floppy, but has an optional separate floppy."

It is a PC compatible with the name "Sterling" to the right of the screen. "It's just a name. We may use it, but it's not certain. It's a PC compatible machine that is even slimmer than the Z88 and a bit lighter. Things are still changing, the screen (80 x 25 - Z88 size) is going to be

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bigger and won't need to be backlit. It's a supertwist with very good high contrast.

"At the moment I think it's an 8086. But that again is why we want to bounce it off the retail world." The plan is for software in ROM.

"It has a lot of hardware innovation - I mean a lot of features the Z88 pioneered. You can switch it off and come back and it's got everything still alive there. It's got very low power consumption. It can go into sleep mode without losing its data. The weight of that model is correct: a bit less than two pounds, a bit lighter than the Z88.

"One of the things we are looking at is a hard disk, but I think what it will have is probably a silicon hard disk. Something moving towards wafer scale, not to start with but perhaps sometime in its life. It will probably have a parallel port, but again, it's not decided until we've shown it around. The thing about this is it is totally compatible, it will run any software, there is no hedging or fudging.

"It has a megabyte of RAM. We might do a half-megabyte version for people that want to go cheap, people that have some limited use. Say they just wanted to use it for word processing, which is a very big part of the market. If the word-processing program is in ROM then the half megabyte is sufficient. RAM uses the same technology as the Z88, which is actively maintained. We have patents on that technology. If we go ahead it certainly won't be out until next year."

Also still to be decided is the colour. "They always seem to end up black. We design them in another colour then someone says 'let's see how it looks in black' and then it looks smart in black so ends up black. I think probably not black. What do you think? I am certainly so ready to change." He'll guess at the price - £495 to £595 - but even there, "What do you think it needs to be?" He intends to be "very competitive."

Sinclair Research's work with Cambridge Computer and Anamartic is fairly well known, but what about the other companies connected to Sinclair Research? What happened to the portable phone and the satellite dish?

"I'm on the board of Shaye [Communications]. CT2 is the way forward to personal communications. The network isn't installed yet. They are putting in a very big network and they won't push it until the network is there. I see the telephone and computer technologies merging."

The reason Sir Clive widened his interests was the development of an ultra-portable bicycle. Is it still a major project?

"Yes, very much so. The thinking behind it is that bicycles are very useful for getting around town until you arrive and have got to secure them some way and lock them up. It's a nuisance, and also not satisfactory because people can still steal them."

Sinclair's answer: a lightweight bicycle you could fold instantly and

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take with you, even upstairs on a bus. "It would transform the way in which you could use one, so that's what we've been working on for a while. It's a very exciting project."

Weight, Sinclair says, is a bigger problem than size. "The lightest bikes have weighed twenty pounds for 100 years. The reason for that is that they are fundamentally metal." Hence his interest in materials science: there must be an alternative. "The target I've set out to meet is a dramatic reduction in weight." In addition, he wants, "one that folds instantly rather than a series of moves."

It's not easy. "Going into composite materials is a very difficult thing to do because all bicycle experience has been an evolution and has been fundamentally with metals, so although you may have plastic in the superficial parts the load-bearing, the strong bits if you like, are metal. Nothing wrong with metal of course except for the weight." If the project is environmentally sound - green - so much the better.

Working in the UK is a benefit: "The early work has been extensively done here. The advanced composite materials we need have been pioneered here more than anywhere. So we are better placed in England than anywhere else in the world. And lei in particular is perhaps the most important company because of its foresight, as far as we're concerned, in having pioneered materials for us to use."

Sinclair hopes the bicycle will appear in the second half of next year. He explains why so long: first there will be - "shortly" - prototypes made out of conventional materials "because it's a very radical form of bicycle. Then we've got to design it in radical materials and then we've got to tool it which is a very large and expensive job. It's rather a long process." The company will be independent, with Sinclair Research as a shareholder.

"The bicycle is the main focus, and other vehicles beyond that." Times have changed, and Sinclair is moving into new areas, areas

where he can again be a leading influence. The bicycle is designed to ease the problems of city commuting, while the intelligent wafer is aimed at offering computing power two orders of magnitude greater than we are used to today. Success in either of these projects will restore the great knight to his position of strength. Sir Clive Sinclair will ride again.

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Chuck Peddle


Walking Tall


Appeared: July, 1992

If Clive Sinclair was one of the dominant figures in the early days of British computing, Chuck Peddle was the other. He was inventor of some of the earliest British computers. Co-inventor of the 6502 microprocessor which fuelled many machines of the time, the father of the early PET computer, founder of Sirius (later sold to ACT, which became Apricot), and founder and former head of Tandon's computer division, in 1992 Peddle had recently launched a new company, THStyme. The company didn't make it, and The Chunk was never released. The long-lived 6502

chip, however, is still used in some Nintendo games machines.

"Who's Chuck Peddle?" It's a question lots of people asked me when I told them how excited I was at having been to see him.

They all met with the same reply, spat with contempt for their ignorance: "Chuck Peddle is the co-inventor of the 6502, the father of the PET and founder of Sirius. He headed Tandon and made millions."

He is one of my heroes. He dominated the pages of PCW when I read it on the bus on the way to school back in the days when the word "Gates" was more often prefixed by the word "logic" than by "Bill". If one of Peddle's machines hadn't turned up in the school stationery room I might not now be writing about computers.

Meeting a hero can be a disappointing experience, particularly when he's severely jet-lagged and more interested in talking about the future than the past. And Peddle doesn't look much like a hero. Thin and grey,


elegant but a little hawkish, he has piercing eyes and a considered manner. I met him at The Polish Club - an elegant building and supposedly a clue to what he is up to with a new, still secret project. Being photographed on the balcony unsettled him: not the reaction you expect from a man who has shaped your past.

Peddle's own past is more substantial than most. He graduated from university in Maine in 1959 and went to work for General Electric designing intelligent data terminals. Then, as the pocket calculator boom started, Peddle moved to Mos Technologies in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where he designed the 6502 processor chip in 1974. There he crossed paths with Jack Tramiel, then head of Commodore and looking for an edge in his battle to lead the calculator industry.

Tramiel especially wanted a lead over the Japanese in LCD and CMOS technology. With this in mind he bought Mos Technologies. As a footnote to save later confusion, Mos Technologies is different from Texas-based Mostek, the company which later manufactured the 6502.

Peddle doesn't have good things to say about Tramiel, who founded Commodore: their eventual split was clearly acrimonious. "Commodore was never straight. Germany was OK for a while but even they went queer."

Mos Technologies was just one in a line of acquisitions. Tramiel's move into calculators was a reflection of business acumen rather than technological interest - he started out repairing typewriters. Other diversions included the manufacture of gas barbecues in the same Canadian factory which made the cases for Commodore disk drives.

The 6502 was not obviously marked out for success. "When I did the 6502 it was a microprocessor. There were calculator

chips which did more for running calculators," Peddle explains. Spotting the 6502 at a time when the world was going crazy about calculators and no one really understood why they would want a computer at home was perhaps luck on Tramiel's part, and genius on Peddle's. But it was a building block.

Three of the first five applications for the 6502 came from Peddle; the other two came from Apple and Atari. One of Peddle's was a pinball game and another was the PET. It is interesting to compare how successful those branches of early development became.

The Apple II went from strength to strength, forming the greatest Stateside competition to the PET.

Nonetheless, Peddle is no Apple fan: "You couldn't get a good idea in to Apple with a hammer - and never could." Even so, he says, "Markkula did a great job with Apple. I think Sculley did a pretty good job for the Mac, but they haven't done anything interesting for a long time."

The Atari 800 also met with some success, more in the US than the UK,

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where it was overpriced. It evolved into a number of similar machines, some of which even made it to market. The same designer went on to work on the Amiga before it became a Commodore computer. In turn, other people on the Amiga project moved to Epyx to design the 6502-based Lynx machine, which then became an Atari games machine. The 6502 is now strongest in the design of games machines, selling in tens of millions for Nintendo consoles and various hand-held machines. Naturally, the games include Pinball.

But it was Peddle's PET which shaped the future. A 4K machine with a built-in monitor and 300-baud cassette deck, its keyboard owed more to Commodore's calculator roots than to a Remington. The name was chosen to sound friendly - a home machine - and the acronym was stretched to fit (I'm not sure anyone would actually think of it as a Personal Electronic Transactor).

The PET went on to sire a whole range of machines. As the price of memory chips came down, PETs grew - first to 8K, then 16K and 32K. Commodore adopted some nasty practices, such as drilling holes in the area of the motherboard where RAM expansions went so dealers couldn't buy cheaper machines and upgrade them by soldering in additional chips.

The machine evolved considerably during its lifetime. The cassette deck became an (expensive) external unit, and the keyboard was upgraded to give a proper typewriter pitch and feel. The read-only memory, which made no distinction between the operating system and a Microsoft-sourced BASIC, was upgraded to include limited support for disk drives. The drives themselves also used Peddle's 6502 chip and were intelligent. They could handle operations like disk formatting and some random file access without holding up the main processor. It was clever, but the interface was a bit slow and the software of the day failed to take advantage of these features.

Next came a major change in direction for Commodore: the move to produce a small home computer - the VIC 20.

"Tramiel didn't like computer dealers and wanted to get into the consumer market," Peddle claims, and the way Commodore treated dealers at the time certainly reflects this.

The 3.5K VIC, which Peddle worked on with Shiraz Sivji and Tramiel's son Leonard, was one of the first colour machines. It was, like most Commodore products, developed in a rush, with an early monochrome machine - called the VIC 1001 -launched in Japan.

At its heart was the custom VIC chip which, due to limitations in speed, could only produce a display 176 pixels wide. Commodore went on to develop the VIC chip to become the VIC 2 and the Commodore 64, but by then Peddle had moved on to found Sirius.

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He clearly has much happier memories of being his own man there, where he designed his next machine, the Sirius 1.

Reviewed in pew in February, 1982, this machine was famous for its ability to record voice on floppy disks, along with drives which spun faster when the inner tracks were being accessed. The Sirius was the first MS-DOS-compatible machine in the UK. Like the early IBM PC, it offered the option of running CP/M 86. The system was a great success for the Birmingham firm ACT. The company built up a roster of 600 dealers, and the machine became the top-selling 16-bit microcomputer for two years before the IBM PC took over.

But Sirius ran into trouble. It was bought by Victor (part of the Kidder group), which filed for Chapter 11 US bankruptcy protection in 1983. Companies do survive Chapter II, but ACT, with 90 per cent of its business based on Sirius computers, looked for an alternative. This was what led to the Apricot, ACT's British-built machine and the first to use a 3.5 in disk drive.

Peddle's next move, to Tandon, had a tougher commercial edge. The company was well known as a manufacturer of hard disk drives. Peddle saw scope for vertical expansion into computer manufacture, even if this meant going into competition with existing customers. He set Tandon up as a computer manufacturer at a time when distribution was a good deal simpler than today and there appeared to be no room in the market for another clone company. Peddle assembled a team which excelled in its purpose and established Tandon as a leading brand.

N ow Peddle has a new company, THStyme, a computer distributor. Peddle talks boldly about a four-stage plan. With each stage he becomes more vague about specific details and with each stage the company sounds more interesting.

Initially, THStyme will be a hardware distribution company, selling a range of products. The company will be particularly aggressive on memory and backup device prices. He claims this is possible because, "Weare buying memory at a better price." His goal is to establish a loyal dealer chain.

Second stage: software. A dealer should be able to order stock from THStyme and get delivery the following day. The company will specialise in low-cost software and in getting dealers to be better at handling networks.

The first really interesting thing will happen in the autumn. It will be "A new way of selling PC clones," Peddle claims. How it differs from existing clones and why it will take six months to appear is not something he is willing to divulge; he calls it an exercise in packaging, but then, he says, "The Commodore 64 was an exercise in packaging." The machine is still a means to an end: a new computer, a new platform, and a "whole

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new way of selling to a new class of user." To Peddle, establishing a dealer network is essential to the new

machine's success. He wants THStyme to make a lot of money for dealers so that they will be willing to stock his new, mystery machine - about which he will say very little. Rumours vary: it's a portable, it's a universal machine which will run several operating systems, a chameleon. The rumoured codename is "The Chunk," but here Peddle is a little more forthcoming. "The Chunk is the technology; it has nothing to do with the product."

A confidant of Peddle's who claims to know what the machine is but will not divulge any details believes Peddle is being overambitious. Certainly, if it were anyone else being so coy about a new machine, claiming future market domination and possibly a new operating system, they would be laughed out of court. But there are two reasons why Peddle gets away with it.

First, he has a string of successes behind him. Second, he isn't claiming he's going to beat IBM or Microsoft at their own game. He is playing a new game. "It's like asking someone in the scientific calculator business [back in the 1970s 1 what is going to happen because the personal computer has come along. This is as dramatically different from existing machines as the PC was from calculators."

The enthusiasm shows through: "The new product has the same kind of excitement we had in the early 1980s. We had to show them a reason to own a computer. Weare going to have to get back to that."

One thing is clear - the new machine will not be pen-based. Peddle is dismissive of Momenta, the pen-based specialist where a lot of former Tandon colleagues now work.

There were supposed to be some clues to what the new machine will be like hidden in the dealer price list - and there are a lot of IBM products listed. The venue mayor may not have been a red herring: some rumours have it that the new machine will be made in Russia, but Peddle claims manufacture will be in the US and the Far East, with nothing in Europe.

He offers a wry no-comment about involvement with IBM. Either way it is likely to have a lot of IBM components. "They have the world's best disk drives [he highlights a small 1.2 Gb unit], they have state-of-the-art semiconductor technology and they have the ability to produce all of Intel's chipset." He goes on unequivocally, "They are world-class products, better than the Japanese, better than Seagate or Conner."

IBM may well offer Peddle the clout he needs to succeed, but it is a shame if such a move is necessary. His machines in the past have been wonderfully successful - all except the Tandon Data Pac - and if a track record is a measure then Peddle walks tall.

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Andy Grove


Hello, Mr Chips

Interviewer: Geof Wheelwright

Appeared: February, 1992

Hauser, Sinclair and Peddle all saw their greatest success in the days before the now-ubiquitous IBM PC, which came on the market in 1982 and set the standard for personal computers. Two of the most sigificant components of IBM's design, however, were not made by IBM but by Intel and Microsoft.

The two most important elements that make a computer an IBM-compatible PC are the microprocessor chip inside and the operating system that controls how the computer actually works. Andy Grove is the CEO of Intel Corporation, the leading manufacturer of the processor chips that power PCs.

In 1990 and 1991 Intel was facing new competition from companies like AMD, which makes compatible chips at lower prices, MIPS (now owned by Silicon Graphics), and Motorola, which makes the chips used in the Apple Macs. In addition, a technique called "Reduced Instruction Set Computing" (RISC) is being used to produce faster and more powerful chips on the high end, by both Intel and its competitors. The "PS" discussed here was released in 1993 as the Pentium.

Andrew Grove is a co-founder of Intel, the largest and most successful microprocessor company in the world, and has led the personal computer industry by the nose for most of its IS-year life - but you wouldn't know it to talk to him.

He greets you with a winning smile, a twinkle in his eye, and a manner that suggests that being President of Intel is just what he does for a living,


and that he really can't wait to get home, slip off his shoes, and relax. Unlike most CEOs of large US computer companies, Grove does not appear to be a zealot for PC technology - nor even for Intel itself.

But behind the easy manner and laid-back style is a self-made man in the best traditions of American business. Grove was born in 1936 in Budapest, Hungary, and, after making his way to the US, graduated from City College of New York in 1960 with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering. He finished his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley, and landed his first job at Fairchild Semiconductor. There he stayed until he was invited to help found Intel with Robert M. Noyce and Gordon E. Moore in 1968, with the goal of developing a process to allow several thousand transistors to be integrated on a single silicon chip with relatively high production yields. Shortly afterwards, the first Intel microprocessor was born.

Intel has since come to dominate the microprocessor industry, with PCs from every major manufacturer (except Apple) basing their systems around Intel-architecture chips. Over the past two years, however, Intel's position has been challenged. MIPS wants to steal the high-end PC business from Intel's 80486 and (when it comes) 80586 processors. Motorola is attempting to woo IBM away from Intel by supplying the RISC chips for the new joint Apple/IBM PC products expected in 1993. And long-time rival AMD has won the right through the courts to make processors compatible with the 80386 and 80486.

Grove claims not to be worried by these threats. In fact, Intel is currently implementing its most aggressive manufacturing expansion programme yet, with the development of a new facility in Ireland. Grove says that the site will include a wafer-scale fabrication plant and an OEM (original equipment manufacturing) PC manufacturing facility, as well as service, repair and support facilities. Probably the most surprising to Intel watchers is the OEM plant - Intel is not well known for building and selling ready-built personal computers.

Yet tens of thousands of systems will roll out of the Irish factory this year. It's a strange business. The reason for the high sales levels has little to do with the machines' appeal to dealers, or even to corporate computer customers. Intel PCs are only sold through value-added resellers, value-added distributors and OEMs. The last of these is probably the largest element, with systems going to the likes of AT&T, Unisys and Siemens. In most cases, customers are high-end computer manufacturers who need to have PCs to complement their existing ranges of mini and mainframe systems, yet don't want to bother designing an IBM-compatible system from scratch.

Intel is even happy to sell to manufacturers who want to test new machines to fill holes in their PC range. Siemens, for example, bought in

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Intel PCs until it found that it was selling enough to make a Siemensbuilt model viable. Grove admits that OEM work is never likely to be a major part of Intel's operations, and that whatever success it does have requires flexibility from Intel. AT&T signed with Intel (after years of buying its systems from Olivetti, which it part-owned) only after Intel turned over its PC product development to AT&T for 18 months, and then built its new systems to AT&T specifications.

Intel will not launch its own brand, however: as the sole supplier of processors to the likes of IBM, Compaq and Olivetti, and any other manufacturer of high-end PCs you care to name, it cannot afford to upset its customers by being seen to compete directly with them.

Intel does claim that establishing a manufacturing facility in Ireland has been some help in building its European business - a more ambitious operation than anything the company has in the us. The 170-acre site will eventually hire some 2600 employees. One reason for the operation's scale is the persuasive nature of the Irish Development Agency, which offers grants for capital expenditure, 10 per cent flat corporate tax rate and assistance in payment for the training of staff.

The site at Leixlip will not just be a manufacturing operation for Europe, Grove said. "It will be supplying our global requirement."

Development was quick: a greenfield site in January, 1990, just one year later was producing some 250 circuit boards (including motherboards to be used in OEM PCs) and 200 complete personal computers everyday.

To most users, however, Intel's manufacturing investments and OEM PC business are sideshows. The main event lies in its research and development efforts, particularly the 80586, codenamed "P5" at Intel.

Grove says his R&D team has given him strict orders not to talk about the product until it begins shipping next summer, but the company has already given a number of detailed press briefings on the subject. According to European Vice-President Steve Poole, the P5 designers were able to work from the ground up developing a processor that would break all land-speed records. "The design focus for the 486 was that it still had to integrate everything onto a chip - cache, clock, co-processor, etcetera," Poole says. "The 486 falls down in that its floating point performance isn't as good as it could be and its ability to process numbers doesn't offer any significant advantage [over the 386 with a co-processor]."

Poole reveals that the P5 is a much more complex product than the 486. The 486 packs 1.2 million transistors; the P5 has a "budget" of 4 to 4.5 million. "We just have to put a 4486 core on it and then we can just add to it what we want - and we want performance. We want something which will scream." He adds, "It will offer a performance level which stands toe to toe with anything the RISC companies can produce. The

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emulations we have done so far suggest that it will be eight to nine times that of the 486.

"We believe that the P5 will re-establish the x86 architecture as a performance architecture, and with it we will offer a future development story that will show a path forward. From a performance point of view, this business of having to choose RISC will go away. It will be killed. The future of microprocessors will then be dictated by our ability to make process improvements that allow operating speeds to go higher and higher and to continue to design ever larger and larger chips."

Grove is not quite as forthcoming and claims to be "not the world's greatest expert on the P5." But he is quite talkative about how the chip will help Intel knock all the other microprocessor companies into a cocked hat.

"It will be a high-performance processor using a variety of architectural techniques. Its performance headroom is going to be bigger, so it is not going to be a matter of just cracking up the frequency [from, for example, the current ceiling of 50 mHz on the 80486DX]. We have also been aided in data integration by advances in silicon technology -advances that have to do with integration, security and other issues that will provide a better-equipped platform for enterprise-wide and networking applications.

"This is particularly important in our view because of our contention that the decade of the 1990s will see the industry go toward the development of group and enterprise-wide applications. The phrase 'computersupported collaboration' seems to cover what we are talking about. It will require strong security features and enhanced stability."

The P5 aside, Grove is keen to promote Intel's other processors. "We have probably had more experience learning the virtues and drawbacks of compatibility than anyone else. If a machine can be made compatible and reach approximately the same performance levels, there is no contest. But the invisible costs of switching a reprogrammable architecture are huge, and they are not invisible to the supplier.

"We have seen what you might call the rest of the iceberg. As we have learned the reliabilities of these systems, we have adapted our architectures to platforms where we can put these things to use. The Intel i960 RISC processor, for example, became an I/O processor and has been used a great deal for laser printers. We have now shipped more than 250000 units - making it the most successful RISC processor. Meanwhile, the i860 is becoming a graphics accelerator and is being used for CAD work."

It is hard to believe that Grove is the head of a company which so many people in the computer industry charge (off the record) with being exploitive. Some of the answers to my questions show that Grove, while not happy to see the influx of rivals gearing up for the battle to dominate the second PC decade, is more than ready for it.

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Bill Gates

Photograph courtesy of Microsoft

Perfect Vision


Appeared: May, 1991

If Intel makes the brains of a PC, Microsoft is the company that writes the software that tells those brains how to understand instructions from the outside world. Andy Grove and Bill Gates, therefore, are arguably the two most powerful men in guiding the future development of the most popular personal computers.

Over the last decade, Microsoft has become the dominant force in PC software, leading the operating systems market (by a landslide) and holding 90 per cent of the office suites market. The company got its big break in 1981 when IBM signed it up to supply the PC's operating system, which Microsoft based on QDOS, bought for the purpose. Legend has it that IBM first approached Gary Kildall, inventor of CP/M, first, but he missed the appointment.

In early 1991 Windows 3 had been out for less than a year and was a runaway success. Microsoft also had 60 per cent of the Apple software market and a stake in the UNIX company Santa Cruz Operation. Microsoft was also pushing OS/2 (here called Presentation Manager or PM), which it had developed jointly with IBM. This partnership came apart in 1990, and OS/2 is now wholly an IBM product. By late 1995 and the Royal wedding-sized launch of Windows 95, Windows was running on 60 million computers worldwide. In 1995 the US magazine Forbes named Gates, 39, as the richest man in the country with a personal fortune of nearly $15 billion. Microsoft's revenues for fiscal 1994 were $4.65 billion.


What do you ask the man who has everything? At only 3S, William (Bill) H. Gates III is America's youngest self-made billionaire and co-founder of Microsoft, the most successful software company in the world. He is also its chairman, chief executive and visionary leader, as he has been throughout the company's IS-year history. Gates also has a great deal of power: when he talks, everybody listens.

Gates's latest buzz phrase is "information at your fingertips," the concept behind the keynote address Gates gave at the Comdex computer industry show in Las Vegas in November, 1990.

"Information at your fingertips exemplifies the concept of making computers more personal, making them indispensable, making them something you reach for naturally when you need information," he says. "It encompasses what Microsoft has done in the past and what we want to do in the future. In the early 1980s we wanted to establish a computer standard that would lead to low-cost, high-volume computers and software so that everyone could have a computer at their fingertips and become more productive. The results - DOS and the PC standard - have allowed for incredible growth and innovation.

"In the mid-1980s, we began evangel ising Microsoft Windows and the graphical user interface to make software easier to use and more appealing. In the late 1980s, OS/2 systems introduced client/server computing to the mainstream PC world, bringing powerful workgroup applications to the average user and making data available corporate-wide. As we walk into the 1990s, we are poised to bring all these pieces together and expand on them to create a powerful computing environment."

Of course, it wasn't always this way. Twenty years ago, Gates and his Seattle school friend Paul Allen were just bright, local kids who made a little pocket money as programmers during their high school years. Not every high school kid gets taken on as a freelance consultant in the mini and mainframe programming sector, though.

In 1974, when Gates was an undergraduate at Harvard, he and Allen developed a version of BASIC for the first commercially available microcomputer, the MITS Altair. Spurred on by the success of this project, the pair then founded Microsoft. Over the next six years, Microsoft sold many versions of BASIC, along with a few applications, including Microsoft Olympics for the Apple II. The real Microsoft success story, however, began in 1981, when IBM decided to take MS-DOS as the operating system for the IBM Pc.

The rest, as they say, is history. Microsoft has gone on to set standards for the software industry in languages, operating systems and applications software. Gates now plays the role of company and industry visionary for new products and technology. He is still, of course, actively involved in significant operating and strategic decisions and plays a key

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role in the technical department and management of Microsoft. When I interviewed Gates, he had a good many reasons to be happy.

He was flying off that afternoon to attend a US press conference where he was to unveil Microsoft Excel for Windows 3 and had just seen the publication of the company's annual report, which showed revenues of some $1.18 billion for the fiscal year 1990, up some 47 per cent over 1989 revenues of $803.5 million.

He has also presided over the recent success of Microsoft Windows. Although Windows has been around in various forms since 1983, the release of Windows 3 in May, 1990, finally gave Microsoft the breakthrough it had been looking for. Windows 3 has since become the fastest selling software product in PC history.

All this has made Gates even more of an industry guru, and this is why so much attention was paid to the speech he gave at Comdex last year.

"Microsoft's role is to move the current generation of PC software users - which is approaching 60 million - to an exciting new era of improved desktop applications and truly portable PCs in a way that keeps users' current applications and their huge investment in them intact," he said then. "Our goal is to evolve the existing PC system standards to include new capabilities such as compound documents, object-oriented file systems, distributed file systems, handwriting recognition and multimedia. A non-standard implementation might offer a short-term advantage for a particular feature, but a better solution would be to incorporate new technologies directly into the PC architecture or system software. If the goal is to unify all the information in our lives, then we must bring the standard along carefully so that all users come along."

The intriguing thing about Gates is that he has so many complex and intricate ideas about what can and should happen in the computer industry, yet at the same time, he exhibits a boyish enthusiasm for his work. You might also gather from his comments that he really enjoys the cut and thrust of competition. A smile crept across his face when I asked him about Jim Manzi's controversial decision two years ago to give up on Lotus's commitment to produce a Windows version of the OS/2 based 1-2-3/G spreadsheet. The number of systems which use OS/2 has been so small that Lotus has now had to reverse its decision.

Despite all this, Gates remains approachable and open to new ideas. He doesn't suffer fools gladly, though - these transcripts don't show his response of "That's a stupid question" to one of our queries.

You might say Gates is big on what US President George Bush likes to call "the vision thing." Here are the visions he offered when we spoke in early January.

On moving applications from DOS to Windows 3 to OS/2 Presentation Manager: "There are three tiers to this: DOS, Windows and OS/2. Until

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recently, everybody saw their opportunities [for selling software] at the lowest level of these tiers. But we have now seen a real shift in attention from DOS to Windows."

What Gates says to those companies which have found there is a great deal of extra work in moving from earlier versions of Windows to OS/2 Presentation Manager, and where he sees the future of OS/2: "Until we had the Windows libraries, you could spend a lot of time having to change graphics calls and other design details. Now all of that is handled for you, as long as you make sure you're not doing things outside the Windows design specification. Adding things such as long filenames and threads is now pretty straightforward. Some people will write OS/2 Presentation Manager applications and not bother to test them with the Windows library, but this is all business, and it's up to them [third-party software houses ]."

"Their decisions will be based on what demand they see for more powerful systems. It [OS/2] will have a huge impact on the software industry. We have tried to set an example - we have shipped more OS/2 software than anyone, with Communications Manager, LAN Manager, Microsoft Word for Presentation Manager, Excel for Presentation Manager, and I think that is helpful. Some people will also be interested in developing mission-critical applications [under OS/2] at the high end. Another market worth mentioning is the server sector, where the extra features of OS/2 are absolutely critical."

On the question of open systems: "There's nothing more open than the PC market. OS/2 and DOS users can choose the latest and greatest software. The PC market is the most open market in the world, far more open than a market where there is no standard keyboard, interface, or code."

On what has kept Microsoft relatively untroubled in one of the world's most turbulent markets and how it has managed the problems of dramatic growth: "There is a chain of things which lead to these results: taking a long-term view, having good vision, hiring good people and getting them to develop great products. Weare growing when the market is not, and growing as our products build market share. Our commitment to the graphical user interface is also now paying off. We have taken a long-term approach to graphical interfaces, handwriting, advanced networking, development of Macintosh applications, and other areas. We have been able to develop products in such a way that the new facilities in Excel version 3, for example, will be brought to Presentation Manager and the Macintosh within 90 days.

"In terms of managing growth, the problems most [software] companies run into is not necessarily that they grow too fast, but that they don't create great products. We hire smart developers right out of college."

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On the future of DOS and text-based applications: "I think DOS will continue to work. Software has a long life. But people should move over to the graphical interface and I have no doubt that this is where the majority of software development will be in the near future. DOS does have an installed base of 60 million users. It has been widely discussed that we have a newer version of DOS in beta test. Weare excited about that, and I think we can do more there [in further developing DOS] but we see our future in the graphical environments."

On the question of using small or large teams in the development of new applications and operating systems: "Small teams are always the best - we use small teams. You get more done and it's clearer who does the good work. It's more fun and it costs less. The team for the development of Excel version 3 for Mac, Windows and PM was made up of as many as 25 developers, and all these products were shipped within 90 days of each other. We have competitors who don't use small teams, but most of our projects have a lO-person development team. Microsoft Word for Windows got up to 15. Even our operating system projects are broken down into small teams, and in total there are only about 50 who write code and manage the writing of the code."

On developing software in-house versus acquisition: "For us, acquisition rarely makes sense. We like to have our source code structured in a certain way. If we buy some code (or a company which has produced it) we have to rewrite it to our standards. There are a few cases where we have acquired products. For example, Flight Simulator is done outside, the long-term development on the Macintosh version of Microsoft Works was done on the outside, so was the Microsoft Windows Project. [The company which produced] PowerPoint is the only real example of us acquiring another company. We did it because we felt we should get into this [business presentations 1 market early. With Windows taking off, we now have PowerPoint under Windows 3 well before the competition has anything there."

On how Microsoft deals with being number two in the networking market: "Our high-end networking product came out after Novell had entered the market in a very strong way. It's hard to gain market share from them, but we are doing very well. Weare certainly a credible number two in that business and dominate in the cases where people are looking for high-end network solutions. Competing with Novell in the network market is no different from competing with Lotus on spreadsheets."

On the evolution of Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet: "Excel on the Mac has become the dominant spreadsheet in that market with a 90 per cent share. But on the PC we were held back by the limitations of Windows version 2 - although Excel often motivated people to buy Windows. In

35

fact, [the limitations of] Windows held back Excel until May, 1990. Now we are seeing two incredible changes in the market with the success of Windows 3 and the release of Excel version 3. We see a move from a respectable market share to what we hope will be a much larger market share.

"I also find that software companies who are used to having a high market share [such as Lotus] can throwaway their profitability by cutting prices. This is quite an interesting competitive battle. Lotus will now give away Ami Professional [the Windows-compatible word processor that Lotus inherited when it took over Samna] if you buy Lotus 3.l. It just shows how much fun this stuff can be.

" ... Lotus 1-2-3/G would really be a terrible Windows product because it's so big. In fact, we had a signed contract with Lotus which stated that they would produce a Windows product, but when [Lotus founder] Mitch Kapor left, [current Lotus boss] Jim Manzi just didn't want to go along with it." An I-told-you-so look crossed his face.

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Chuck Geschke

Photograph courtesy of Adobe

An Industry Type


Appeared: June, 1992

Throughout the history of the PC there have been areas that Bill Gates and his company have overlooked until someone else has developed a successful product. One of the key such areas is graphics and fancy fonts. One reason why computers (mostly) eventually killed off typewriters is the elegance of their printed output. Adobe is the reason: the company that invented PostScript, it brought professional-quality typesetting and graphics onto every desktop.

Based in Mountain View, California, the company was founded in 1982 by Chuck Geschke and colleague John Warnock, Adobe's CEO. They met during their time at Xerox PARC, the research lab famous for inventing the graphical user interface ("Star") that Apple copied for the Mac and that persists in the Windows-based Pc. In 1994, Adobe merged with desktop publishing leader Aldus; joined, the companies had 1994 revenues of $598 million. The product here called "Carousel" was released as Acrobat; it is a system for distributing documents electronically across different types of computers in a common format - a potentially vital bit of technology in today's networked world.

Only the cream of the computer industry was chosen to work at Xerox PARe, the lab that was set up to ensure the company's future in the paperless office. In the early 1970s Charles (Chuck) Geschke was one such: he obtained his first degree and doctorate in computer science from


Carnegie Mellon University. Once at P ARC, he had a chance to start up a new laboratory to work on graphics and electronic printing.

One of his first tasks was to find a head researcher. He says, "I had known John [Warnock] by reputation for a number of

years. He had been working at Evans and Sullivan Corporation after getting his degree in Utah. He joined me at Xerox and we started a group called the Imaging Sciences Laboratory." The lab focused on building what today is called Display PostScript (then called Cedar Graphics), the interactive graphics system for driving the computing environment.

One of the product groups at Xerox was about to bring out the Star workstation. Geschke's advice was sought.

"About six to nine months from introduction they recognised that they didn't have a very good printing strategy. They came back to the research labs and said 'help'," Geschke recalls. "What we did is take the basic ideas behind this interactive graphics system for driving displays and refocused it on the job of providing a device-independent way of representing the printed page." Known as Interpress, that was so successful that Xerox as a corporation decided to standardise on it.

"Since that was the first major project in our research group, we felt really good about that fact." Until, that is, Xerox decided not to propagate it externally. "We said, well, that doesn't make a lot of sense. You can't get people to adhere to and begin to adopt a standard unless you tell them what it is and that it exists." Geschke and Warnock went round in circles on that point until frustration set in. They believed in Interpress and considered it a viable financial proposition. If they couldn't get Xerox to market it, they would raise venture capital and take their idea away. At the end of 1982, they left Xerox to start Adobe.

"We started the company with seed money," says Geschke. The venture capital was raised to run an entirely different business, a complete turnkey publishing system that would include a workstation, software and electronic laser printers. "We had even started development of our own proprietary typesetting equipment," says Geschke, as though he is a little sorry that they didn't see it through.

The turnaround in strategy came when Gordon Bell, head of R&D at DEC, and Steve Jobs visited Adobe. They could see that licensing the software technology would solve some major problems.

"DEC had half a dozen different teams of people trying to develop a laser printer strategy and none of them was being very successful," Geschke says.

Apple was about a year away from launching the Macintosh. "From the very beginning, Steve recognised that if Apple was going to be successful with that product it had to be successful in the office, where dot matrix print quality wouldn't be acceptable in the long term. He

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was having difficulty getting the software for laser printers," Geschke recalls.

Both Jobs and Bell said that they would be interested in forming a business relationship, and after buying some turnkey publishing systems from Adobe, licensed the technology for driving laser printers. For Geschke and Warnock, the change was abrupt.

"We threw out our business plan and refocused our development activities. We turned from an end-user, turnkey-product kind of company into an intellectual property organisation licensing technology to third party OEMs."

The Macintosh was introduced in January, 1984, followed by the LaserWriter and AppleTalk in January, 1985. While the LaserWriter received critical acclaim it was not a commercial success.

"During that first summer after the introduction the volumes of units being shipped dropped dramatically, mostly because people didn't understand the significance of what the technology could do," is Geschke's opinion.

At that point Apple, Adobe and Aldus got together in earnest and devised a marketing campaign with Apple CEO John Sculley, the man who coined the term "desktop publishing." They relaunched the LaserWriter with a vigorous, US-wide, city-to-city marketing campaign and Adobe's sales, as well as those of the Macintosh, took off.

"It was critical," says Geschke, "to get not just technology - I mean this is a standard story in the computing business - but also to get a solid marketing program behind it."

Once Apple accepted PostScript, the second major technology event was the introduction of the first PostScript typesetter. About a year later IBM announced a relationship with Adobe and gave it the industrial stamp of approval. All the leading computer, printing and typesetter manufacturers began scrambling to get PostScript products onto the market.

Originally Adobe had no plans to get into shrink-wrapped software. "We discussed quite actively with Apple the possibility that Apple would take the after-market typefaces, and put them out under its own label," says Geschke. "Since Apple already had a retail channel we felt that this was perhaps the most cost-effective way to get the products out and we knew that for PostScript to be successful people would eventually want to buy more typefaces."

Apple eventually decided it was better to go to third parties for software than to promote its own development. It turned Adobe down. Geschke had his work cut out in setting up a retail distribution channel: "Once you start that process you begin to recognise that in order for the economics of retail software distribution to work you have to continually feed it new products."

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In the meantime, PostScript had caught on, but end-users were having trouble recognising its capabilities. There was now a compelling reason to try to design a program that would highlight its graphics specialties, so Illustrator was born. It was introduced in January 1987. "It was really a first-of-breed kind of product. Up until then, interactive graphics products were pretty unsophisticated."

Initially Illustrator was only available for the Macintosh although there was an attempt to bring out Illustrator on the Pc. "I think we chose the wrong approach," says Geschke. "We looked at the PC, and at the capability of the early versions of Windows, and decided that we would restrict Illustrator in its features." The result was as disappointing as the sales.

Geschke has learned his lesson. "Illustrator for Windows has the opposite philosophy. It has more features and is a better product than the one that's currently shipping on the Mac.

"In future we will target products on the Windows platform at the same position as our Mac products. We're also going to promote an internal competition to see that each platform always has the best possible product on it. So, with the next version of Illustrator on the Mac, our goal would be to make it a better product than the Windows one that will be shipping soon."

This strategy of making development teams compete does not extend to separating the systems and applications divisions. "We never intended that one division should grow faster than another. Rather, it's a case of which distribution channel has the products that have brought in the most revenue. What we've seen over the last couple of years is that applications has been growing at a faster rate than PostScript."

The least public side of Adobe is the hardware division, in particular its font-rendering hardware project; several companies have products under development incorporating it. The main interest will probably come from two areas: the Japanese market, where you actually can get higher performance; and in network printing, where speed is a major issue. Geschke anticipates the product will ship by the middle of this year.

Many of the features of the new version of Windows 3.1 offer solutions to problems addressed by Adobe products. Among these is True Type, although the capabilities are limited.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been talking about embedded fonts, but Geschke can't figure out what kind of problem it's trying to solve, especially since he's heard it discussed in response to how documents should be transmitted.

"When we talk about communicating a document we talk not only about text but also colour and graphics and photographic images. Embedding fonts doesn't deal with those other issues. All the embedded

40

fonts do is let me make sure that you receive the same font that I used when I wrote the document."

Adobe's solution to this is the multiple-master substitution capability. A publisher who wants to publish on CD is very likely to want to embed all the fonts so you get exactly the look and feel of the original document. "But," says Geschke, "if I'm sending you an interoffice memo in which you're principally interested in the content it doesn't make a lot of sense to send you a 5000 byte memo and add a half a megabyte of fonts with that. None of this solves anything. It's an attempt to respond but it's so far off the mark at what it means to actually communicate."

Now that it's firmly established as the standards-setter for getting text onto paper, Adobe wants to cut down on paper use.

"A large percentage of documents are being produced electronically. It's sort of frustrating to realise that the computer that sits on my desktop that allows me to author those documents really doesn't help much in terms of allowing me to sift through all the information that appears on my desk," says Geschke. "People use all this technology to author information they've put on paper, they mail the paper, they make faxes, but in general they just put a whole bunch of stuff into the post and send it off and when I receive it, all the advantages of the fact that it had been in electronic form are now lost."

The idea behind Adobe's product Carousel is to go beyond composing the information to use the electronic medium to communicate. Communication has always forced us to go to the least common denominator: ASCII text. The alternative is to send very high resolution bitmaps and then sample them down to the resolution of the receiving end's imaging device. This is economically unattractive - you're going to send a large amount of data, and along the way you'll throwaway most of the ability to deal with it electronically.

"With Carousel," says Geschke, "what we've attempted to do is leverage the fact that the dominant authoring technology is all compatible with PostScript today. You take a document produced with whatever application you want and whatever operating system and as long as that application can produce PostScript we'll have technology to transform that into the Carousel format. We'll also have viewing technology - that is, technology that allows you to receive that information and look at it on Macintosh, Windows, UNIX, DOS workstations and print it on those workstations as well. Even though you as the recipient don't have the same operating system, you don't have the applications, you don't have the fonts, you don't have any of the environment that people author, you have the Carousel viewing technology on your platform."

Adobe's relationship with Microsoft has always been a little strange. Microsoft is the only major company that doesn't seem to have embraced

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PostScript. Geschke would like to see Carousel faring a bit better, but recognises that there is a difference in approach.

"What I see going on with Microsoft is the presumption that everyone in the world will adopt the same operating system and it'll be Windows. Our position as a company is always to offer technology that is multiplatform, resolution and device independent, and multi-vendor, because we believe that typically the marketplace prefers that kind of thing whether or not a captive of a single vendor."

There are not very many people who can claim to have substantially altered the face of computing, but Geschke is one of them. Adobe is the acknowledged leader in providing the hardware, software and know-how to improve the printed word. How successful Carousel will be in improving the communicated word is yet to be seen. New standards are always hard to establish, but in his quiet, clear way Geschke comes over as a man with the wisdom, power and influence to do so.

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"

The PC Generation

A generation of small, apparently niche companies rode the computing wave to success on the back of the standardisation of PCs. Almost everyone in this section started their careers in the days when the earliest microprocessors were finding their way onto the market, but built their companies in the PC era using the infrastructure that standardisation fostered. Mike Markkula is only apparently an exception: one of the founders of Apple, his interview focuses on his next company, Echelon, whose products were made possible by advances in networking and other technologies developed later.

"

Al Shugart

Photograph courtesy of Seagate

Moving with the Times

Interviewer: Guy Swarbrick

Appeared: January 1991

Chips and software by themselves aren't enough, especially as you start adding features to the software - all those fancy graphics take up lots of memory. One of the key components that makes a computer useful is a hard disk, which allows it to store programs and data for future recall and use.

Al Shugart, founder and CEO of Seagate, was one of the pioneers of hard disk drives, for a long time known as either "Shugarts" or "Winchesters" (after the place where they were invented). The company has had shaky moments since 1991, but in October, 1995, it was still on top, announcing plans to acquire Conner, one of its competitors, to give it an overall share of a third of the market. Shugart was more in charge than ever, having taken over operational responsibilities when his co-founder, Tom Mitchell, was removed by the board in late 1991.

The $100 for 100 Mb price point was hit in 1993; in 1995, $200 would buy you 500Mb.

Despite the fact that many of us wish, half seriously, that we could go back to the early days of the industry, to Woz and Jobs, Clive Sinclair and the Jupiter Ace, Alan Shugart has moved on. He enjoyed that era, and now he is enjoying this one: he doesn't have much time for nostalgia.


Shugart is not as well known now as he was ten years ago. Then, when 1 was coming into contact with microcomputers for the first time, his name was everywhere. When 1 recently had the chance to meet him, 1 discovered that the pioneering spirit which typified the early days of the industry has been replaced with a more realistic attitude to business.

Since Seagate started the market's obviously changed beyond recognition. What does he think have been the most important changes in that time?

"Since 1979? I haven't seen any big changes. I think there's been an evolution in technology ... I guess IBM's introduction of the PC and PCDOS. Those were the significant things."

It was a different era in 1979, in the sense that the microcomputer industry was run by a bunch of fat, bearded hippies, as opposed to the businessmen that make the decisions today. Was the industry more fun in the early days?

Shugart laughs. "I think it was more fun in 1979 than it is now, but 1 think it's probably more fun in smaller environments than it is in big environments anyhow. There was a lot more innovation when there were no standards. People could do a lot of things. You don't have the George Morrows any more, who do crazy things, who prompt people to do other good things."

Does he think it's a bad thing that we've lost that? "I don't know if it's bad or not. It's different. It's progress. Progress is

bad, 1 guess - if you don't want progress." You get the impression that Shugart would enjoy himself just as much if he started the company today.

You've grown from a company that manufactured 1300 units in the first year to one that manufactured 573 million in the last quarter. That must have caused some major problems?

"It sure has. It's a different world. Like I say, we're still having fun, but it's a different kind of fun. Fortunately, the company's still run by two of the founders, so we still remember when we didn't have much money. It's also difficult for us to gauge and compare spending $100 million or $200 million. However, it's a different kind of thing for us. It's tough to face up to those big numbers when you've come up from such a small company."

Presumably of that growth quite a lot was early on and the curve's flattening out a little?

"No. Of course, last year we almost doubled - there was the acquisition of Imprimis. But including the nine months of Imprimis our revenues, our turnover, almost doubled."

Does that sort of rapid growth cause problems? "It wasn't because of the rapid growth, it was because of the acquisi

tion. Acquisitions are always a problem."

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Again, looking back to when Seagate was started, disk drives were packing, what, about 30 million bits per square inch?

"Is that what they were?" Shugart looks genuinely surprised. I assure him that the figures are taken from Seagate's 1989 annual report. "Then it must be right." He smiles again, then breaks into a chuckle.

Now it's about 300, I suggest. "I think what's being delivered now, I think it's about 100." It says 300 in this Seagate brochure here .... "Not being delivered today." Can that growth continue? "I see no stopping of the curve we've got right now. It's pretty linear.

Over a long [time] scale you can draw a straight line - pretty much - and I see no stopping it."

So, ten years into the next century, we should be getting three billion bits per square inch?

"Well, the research scientists that we sponsor in universities are projecting a trillion bits per square inch."

By the early part of the next century? He smiles that smile again. "I don't like to ... Like all research scientists,

I don't think they have a schedule. But it's been doubling about every 28 months."

A lot of the increase, as I understand it, came from thin film technology.

"There's other ways of getting the increases in recording densities we get with thin film heads today. But densities in the future - that's with medallin gap heads and that sort of thing - in the future you're going to have to have thin film heads to get the future densities. So we're very fortunate."

And that's a fairly long term technology, or is there something around the corner which will come in when thin film reaches its limits?

"Well, thin film is just a method of manufacturing, a method of fabricating heads, so ... There's a type of head that we've spent a lot of time on - magneto resistive heads - which are still fabricated with thin film technology and that will be a breakthrough, I believe.

"They give higher recording densities with slower rotation speed because a magneto resistive head reads the actual flux charge as opposed to the change in flux, so it's good for very small disks. But that'll be thin film." Shugart seems far more comfortable discussing the technical issues than the business details. He is more excited, more animated.

The access times for hard disks have come down as well, but they don't seem to have come down as far as capacities have gone up. They have come down quite quickly to around 15, 12, 10 ms, but seem to have levelled out there.

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"Sure. F = rna, you know? There's nothing you can do about that." Is 10 ms going to be the practical limit, then? "Yeah. You're going to find some a little faster, but I don't think it's

going to be significant. There's a certain amount of time to start and a certain amount of time to stop, even if you don't have any distance to travel. I don't think you're going to see significant improvements in access times."

At the moment, it's unclear whether multimedia is hype or whether, as an application at least, it's pure hype ...

"I think it's hype. I think everything's hype that I don't see how I'm going to use."

If it isn't, people are going to need vast amounts of hard disk storage very quickly. Are they going to be disappointed?

"No. It can happen. With technology growing the way it is, there'll be enough memory for everybody. That's not my concern ... "

Will it be fast enough? Shugart didn't have to think about the capacity problem, but he thinks about the speed for a while. "Yeah. At some point in time. Not right now. Five years ... "

Seagate has publicly shunned optical media ... "Shunned? What a horrible word!" I say he said that they're an ancillary product for publishing, as

opposed to a mainstream data storage technology ... "Publishing and hierarchical storage." He certainly isn't averse to

interrupting, but he's far from being intimidating. Do you think that's also true of rewritable optical disks? "Yes. I don't see optical technology resulting in a product that would

be competitive with magnetic recording for data, computer data. It wouldn't be competitive on price or speed."

A lot of Seagate's growth seems to have stemmed from acquisitions. When you wanted chip manufacturing facilities, you went out and bought them.

"Yeah. That was a matter of needs." Is it company philosophy that if you want something you find some

body else who does it and buy them, or is that just coincidence? "N o. We've done three acquisitions ... four acquisitions, in our history.

We acquired a thin film disk company that we helped start." Next, "We bought a substrate company which made aluminum substrates and supplied them to the thin film disk company because we wanted to control that process.

"We bought the semiconductor company in Scotland because we'd done a dumb thing and hadn't completed the second sourcing of a product that this semiconductor company was the single source for. They were in bankruptcy, so we had to buy them in order that we could

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continue to get the parts. That was the need. "The last acquisition was Imprimis, which we did in order to broaden

our customer base." Are there other companies in existence that you seeded, that you

helped start? "We did help a test equipment company in our early days called

Applied Circuit Technology. We knew we were going to need lots of very sophisticated test equipment, and we helped this company go from a three-man company to a multi-hundred person company in order that they would be able to build lots of test equipment. We helped them do that and owned the stock and sold it."

More and more corp orates are starting to use networks: big networks. As the mainframe becomes a big, sophisticated PC fileserver, will Seagate's business change to reflect that? Will the company become more of a mainframe disk supplier?

"I don't believe so. I think that all the networks I see, at Seagate anyway, which have the big fileservers and database, all the PCs have big disk drives in them anyway. In fact, I've got one on my desk and I've run out of storage."

How does he see the industry changing over the next 10 years? "If I had any idea, I could sure make a lot of money. I don't see any big

changes. Just more evolution of the same things. Nothing has happened in the ten years we've been in the business.

"Fileservers are the way of the future. They're not going to obviate -it's going to extend - the need for big, individual hard disks, because it'll mean more applications for small computers, in my judgement. And the more applications there are for small computers, the better it is for us."

Does he think 100 Mb for $100, a figure he was once quoted on, is a realistic proposition?

"Absolutely." In the near future? "In my lifetime ... Now you're going to ask me hold old I am, right?" That smile again.

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Dennis Hayes


Modem Man


Appeared: December, 1992

Dennis Hayes, founder and CEO of Hayes Computer Products, was one of the first people to foresee a mass market for modems, the gadgets that give individual users access to online services and networks like the Internet. His company was the one that defined the standards, so that modems are "Hayes-compatible," and use the "Hayes command set."

Since this interview, Hayes has had a difficult time: even though the modem market has exploded, competition from cut-price rivals and production problems forced the company into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on November 15, 1994. In November, 1995, a reorganisation plan was announced which would give Northern Telecom and ACMA Ltd a 49 per cent stake in the company, with Hayes continuing as chairman and CEO. LANstep, Hayes's foray into networking, was quietly withdrawn.

It's hard not to hold Dennis Hayes personally responsible for the on-line world: CIX addicts, CompuServe bills, computer crime and the Internet's production of 40 Mb of data each and every day. Would any of this have been possible without mass-produced modems? Hayes was not the first, but his name is linked to some of the most influential developments in communications.

Hayes Microcomputer Products started up in 1977 as a partnership between Dennis Hayes and Dell Heatherington with working capital of $5000. They called the new company DC Hayes Associates because

5] W. M. Grossman (ed.), Remembering the Future© Springer-Verlag London Limited 1997

Heatherington thought putting Hayes' own name on it would make people take it more seriously than giving it a technical name.

The story really starts, however, at Atlanta-based Georgia Tech, where Hayes, who is originally from Spartanburg, South Carolina, was on a work-study programme that had him going to classes two quarters a year and working the other two quarters. It was the jobs that Hayes had during those years, 1967 to 1972, that laid the groundwork for his company's development.

The first was with AT&T Longlines, where Hayes says he first realised the limitations of the electrical engineering degree he was planning to finish. Seeing how much of what his fellow engineers had learned was no longer applicable, he changed his major to physics so that he "could get into a more basic understanding of how things work so it would last longer."

During this period, Hayes also worked for Orlando-based Financial Data Sciences designing electronic terminals to automate teller stations at the Savings and Loan banks. Hayes was part of a project that changed the way terminals were designed, making it possibly for the relatively small company to compete with IBM, NCR and Burroughs, now part ofUnisys.

"We had a keyboard laid out to implement the transaction, so that you could step across it - it was ergonomically designed."

The terminals' design, when Hayes arrived, called for a huge circuit board with 125 parts, most of them small- and medium-scale integrated circuits. In the next generation of that equipment, which Hayes was involved in designing, all those random logic circuits were replaced with a microprocessor, the Intel 4004, which had been designed as a calculator chip. The final design had just 27 parts, and the circuit board was a quarter the size of the original one.

"We reduced the cost and improved the reliability. We made it run 50 per cent faster on the printer mechanism, and made it run very much quieter." These printers stamped customers' passbooks with the balance and transaction details, and created a backup record. Designing the stepper motors for those printers, Hayes says, was one of the few times he used his physics background: they timed the pulses to the motors to minimise the vibration.

The design was a ground-breaker for other reasons. "We proved that microprocessors could be used for terminal control, at a time when nobody was really even proposing that - this was before even Intel was saying that."

Hayes says the product was successful, and Financial Data Services grew to the point where it was bought by the credit-reporting giant TRW. The sale of his stock gave Hayes enough money (about $500) to buy a Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator.

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The job that got him into communications, however, was managing a telecommunications service for electric membership co-operatives for National Data Corporation. These membership co-operatives are fairly common in rural parts of the south, where they were formed as a means of raising the capital to get electricity out to the farms and small towns.

"What we were doing," Hayes explains, "was automating their billing system. We ran a computer system in Atlanta, and we were putting terminals in these membership co-ops." There was a complication: even in the days of Ma Bell's greatest strength, the telephone service in many small towns was provided by a small, independent company which tended not to be, as Hayes delicately puts it, "technically sophisticated." And these were the days when if you needed a modem - the way the terminals were going to communicate with National Data in Atlanta - the telephone company had to install it for you.

Hayes quickly developed a routine for handling this situation. The local installer would arrive with the shoebox-sized modem, and would ring the toll test board in Atlanta - it was Atlanta Bell that provided the long distance services and that was responsible for ordering the job. In turn, the operators at Atlanta would call Hayes, so he could walk the local serviceman through the installation.

"The way it would start is, I'd say, OK, I know you don't want to be there all day, and I know you don't want to make three or four trips back to get this thing working, so if you'll work with me step by step I'll get you home quicker."

These were dumb modems. The procedure involved first unpacking the modem, checking which of the three or four available models it was so Hayes could be sure he was looking at the right manual, and then taking it apart and laying out the circuit boards. Then came setting the 25 or so jumpers on the board - everything had to be done in hardware. Then the serviceman would reassemble the modem and plug it in, the computer operator on Hayes's floor would fire up the system, and Hayes would check whether the system was up and running on the terminal in his office. If it wasn't - an hour and half or so after the serviceman's arrival on-site - they would start over.

"It was a lot," says Hayes, "like putting in a LAN board today." Hayes remembered these experiences when he and Heatherington were

designing their new company's first products. "We said, we can't do it like that. We'll be spending all our time getting people running." From the very beginning, "the idea was to develop modems in such a way that they would tightly couple with the microcomputers."

Like Hayes, Heatherington worked at National Data, where the two of them built special interface hardware to interconnect different types of computer systems. They were both interested in microprocessors and

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wanted to start their own business making something to go with them -everyone they knew in those days wanted to buy a computer kit.

His experience in Florida gave him confidence: "I'd seen the company in Florida double in size the year I was there, and so I knew it was possible to compete with the big companies if you understand what you're doing and if you move faster than they do, and that seemed fairly reasonable. "

Hayes and Heatherington started by asking themselves what people would want once they had their computer kits built and running. On the list were printers, disk drives - and modems. Both printers and disk drives were such obvious needs that they figured the big computer companies would tackle them fairly quickly; also those items required a lot of capital investment in manufacturing.

"And we didn't have any money," he says. "Basically, we decided that communications would be a good area to work in because the computer companies would never think of that until long after they'd been selling computers, because ... they just never did."

They started by making a modem to plug into the S100 bus used in the Altair and the Imsai kits, intending to go on from there to design other products.

"We worked nights and weekends and designed a modem," says Hayes. "We originally sold it as a circuit board with instructions, or you could get a circuit board and all the parts and build it yourself. That didn't last very long, because it was just at the time when the market for S100 computers was shifting from kits to assembled products."

By the time they were ready to think about a second product - a modem for the Apple II - the computer clubs were starting up, and computers were beginning to take off with machines like Radio Shack's TRS-80 and the Commodore PET.

"People with all kinds of things would call us and say, have you got a modem for this?" says Hayes. "There were a lot of people coming into the market at that time. They didn't know we'd just started the company. We were advertising in the magazines; they'd just call us and say, have you got this? No, all we've got is these two products, but we'd talk to them and find out what they were looking for.

"This led us to say, how can we solve this problem for all these people at the same time? If our next product is really clever, then we'll figure out how to have a modem for all these other people so we can sell it to them, and then we might be able to afford a new oscilloscope, or something that would help us grow the business."

The next product was the Smartmodem with the standard RS-232 serial interface.

"On those early products which plugged into the computer bus, the

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software had complete control of the modem, so the trick was how to take that complete control of the modem and extend it from the computer bus out through the serial port." That was where the AT command set came m.

"We had to change from setting bits on a bus to sending characters through a serial interface, so we put a microprocessor in the modem. That made it possible for the software in the computer to completely control the functions of the modem. It ended the problem with the earlier modems, where you had to open it up and change all those settings, because it could be done by software." Because of space limitations, a few settings still had to be done by hand, but that was all.

Even those so-called standard interfaces weren't all that standard, however. "Different computers implemented different parts of the RS-232 interface, and you could never tell whether all the signals were going to be there or not. But the thing you could count on was they always have transmit data, receive data and a signal ground. So what we thought about was three-wire minimum connection."

This led to a problem that has recently revived in the US: when the transmission is finished, you have to be able to regain control of the modem to tell it to hang up the phone or change settings. The way you do this is to send the modem an escape sequence.

The typical answer for the time - the Smartmodem was neither the first nor the only intelligent modem - was a sequence of characters thought unlikely to appear in data files.

"The problem we saw with that approach was that you could have a situation where sooner or later the data you were trying to send would have that character sequence in it, and it would cause an escape." What this would mean, essentially, is that the modem would cease transmitting. Most people thought of choosing a longer character string for the escape sequence. But not Heatherington.

"Dell was really bothered by that," says Hayes, "because you could have a situation where the modem's not broken, the software's not broken, the computer's not broken, but there's a file you can't transmit."

Heatherington eventually came up with the idea of adding guard times at the beginning and end of the sequence so there could be no mistakes. This escape sequence with guard times was later granted a patent, and Hayes licenses the technology to other modem manufacturers.

But this is all the past. What, one might reasonably ask Hayes, has he and his company done for technology lately?

"We continue to innovate," he says, citing work the company has done in inventing special PC boards for high-speed communications, defining standards, developing ISDN and connecting to mainframes. Unlike most people, Hayes can get passionate about which standard eventually gets

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adopted: his wife, Mina, who is Director of Corporate Planning for the company and whom he met at an ISDN conference, describes him as "such a stubborn man."

To Hayes, moving into networking - the company recently bought the LAN step networking operating system from the Canadian company Waterloo Microsystems - is a logical extension of what the company already does. "We don't define ourselves as a modem company. Our first products were modems, so a lot of people saw us that way, but the reason the modems work the way they do is because we saw it as a computer communications approach. So being a computer communications company says that we work on comms applications, we work on LAN capabilities and we work on transmission - modems are part of that, and ISDN's part of that."

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Philippe Kahn

Photograph courtesy of Borland

Back on Course



If Dennis Hayes got into modems because he wanted to stay in one placeAtlanta - Philippe Kahn emigrated to California from his native France in order to work in the software business. Kahn is founder and former CEO of Borland International. The company started back in the CP/M era, competing with Microsoft in areas like programming languages. Through 1992 it was one of the top three software companies.

In 1991, however, the company made what even Kahn now says was a mistake: it merged with database specialist Ashton-Tate. Besides that, in partnership with WordPerfect, it entered the battle over office suites with a hybrid suite that linked WordPerfect with Borland's Quattro Pro spreadsheet and Paradox database. By 1993, Borland was in the red. When Kahn was speaking here, the company had decided to go back to concentrating on the areas in which it had its earliest successes: languages and database tools.

Kahn survived these changes for only 18 months: in early 1995, he left Borland to start up a new company, Starfish, whose first products are the consumer-oriented Sidekick and Dashboard, which he bought from Borland shortly after departing. As Kahn predicted, though, Borland won its legal battle with Lotus on appeal.

These are interesting times for Philippe Kahn, founder and CEO of Borland. This time last year, we were talking about the Big Three software


companies: Lotus, Microsoft and Borland. These days we're still talking about the Big Three software companies, but all of a sudden they're Lotus, Microsoft ... and Novell. The landscape changed suddenly at the beginning of 1994, when Novell acquired, at a gulp, all of WordPerfect and Borland's Quattro Pro spreadsheet program and turned itself into a supplier of applications software as well as operating systems. Borland's Paradox for Windows, however, continues in Borland's ownership, and will continue to be part of the office suite (formerly Borland Office) that Novell will now develop and market.

"We want to be a smaller, faster, leaner software company focused on delivering quality and service to customers in areas where we're both technical and market leaders," says Kahn of the "radically different landscape" in the software business. Other changes include the hiring of a chief operations officer, Keith Maib.

"It's important to focus on the fact that without Quattro Pro and suites," Kahn wrote in a memo on the changes within Borland for distribution both inside and outside the company, "last year Borland's revenues were about $290 million, which represents an average of $70 million a quarter. On that basis, most people expect Borland to resume growth and profitability in the next 12 months." Selling Quattro Pro, he went on to say, had as much to do with market leadership as with picking up a cash bundle: "We plan to compete only in businesses where we have an opportunity to be number one or number two. Quattro Pro is the best-ofbreed spreadsheet, but it remained number three."

Kahn is not your typical CEO: leisure interests include jazz piano (he'll tryout any piano he happens to walk past) and flying stunt planes. Running a company wasn't what he set out to do: he was born and raised in Paris, and was educated in various places around Europe, winding up studying math in Zurich. As he tells it, even his involvement with computers was more or less an accident.

"I happened to find myself in Zurich in 1971, when the first Pascal compiler was designed," Kahn says. "I was a student of Niklaus Wirth, the father of modern computer science." He was teaching math in Grenoble and working on his dissertation when, again fortuitously, he happened to be in the right place at the right time to come into contact with the Micral.

"It was the first non-kit personal computer ever, before the Altair. It was based on an Intel 4004 chip, and it was the first complete machine. It preceded US models by nine months." Boston's Computer Museum, he says, now recognises it as first.

"What happened was that I knew a little bit about software, and these guys were doing mainly hardware, and I ended up tweaking the machine and getting stuff to work with it." Very quickly, he says, he realised that

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the future in personal computing lay in Silicon Valley. "So I went there to look for a job as a programmer at Apple, someplace like that, because those were my heroes. I wanted to work in stuff that would make a difference, with technical guys."

So there was Kahn, somewhere around 1982, looking for work in Silicon Valley and doing the odd bit of consulting. He started a small company called Market in Time, which helped other companies with software problems so they could get their hardware to market on schedule.

"One of my customers was a Korean company making multi-user CP/M machines, called OSM, and they had a Danish distributor who was distributing their machines there. So that's how, indirectly, I met Anders Heilsburg, who essentially wrote the heart of Turbo Pascal, the compiler. And Anders had built the compiler, and through a bunch of colleagues of his we built a better user interface to this compiler and invented basically the first interactive development tool, which ended up being Turbo Pascal." The product went on the market in November 1983.

"We never thought about building a company," Kahn says. Instead, they went out and showed the product to several companies including Microsoft, which by then was already large because of MS-DOS. "We tried to license them the product, because my goal was just to make a living as a software engineer over there." In the end, "It turned out that nobody really wanted to do anything with it, and so we decided to place a mail order ad."

Kahn goes on, "The product took off and the company became instantly profitable by accident, because nobody wanted to market the thing." Once they had a company, though, the problem changed very quickly: "The issue was to guide this company through what was going to be an interesting life in the software industry." Borland's second product was Turbo Pascal Toolbox, which was popular but not nearly as famous as Borland's third product: Sidekick.

"The idea of Sidekick was to build an instant productivity tool. The vision was that people were buying $3000 computers and they still had notebooks, calculators, calendars and all this stuff - they still can't do the job that these other devices do." The company's new release of Sidekick for Windows is still based on that same idea.

Overall, Kahn says, "I think we did a good job of innovating, coming up with new ideas, acquiring technology and bringing in people from the outside to add to the gene pool in the company. That's really very important - they become stale."

Time passed. "We grew the company and did a bunch of things, always specialising in tools, databases, and so on. I think a turning point was that we came out with Paradox, the first relational system under DOS, then later under Windows, and we acquired Ashton-Tate." This was in

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1991, and, a lot of outsiders seem to think, is where Borland's troubles started. If you listen to Kahn tell the story, however, it sounds like a logical decision.

"The reason was the fact that we wanted to be in a category where we could actually have a long-term market leader presence. We were a market leader in tools, but we wanted to be a market leader in databases. I think it will translate that way three to four months from now."

In the meantime, though, Kahn looks back on 1993-1994 as a tough period for the company, listing two major troubles: the year's delay in the release of dBase for Windows and the ongoing Lotus suit.

To take the Lotus suit first, this is a long-running argument over the macro interpreter in Quattro Pro - Lotus claims its intellectual property rights have been infringed. So far, the judgements have gone against Borland. Kahn sees Borland's stand as a matter of principle.

"Borland has taken the clear approach to say that for the user community and for the development community innovation was key, and in software innovation is driven fundamentally by compatibility and interoperability."

To understand Kahn's position, you have to understand that the process of de constructing a product, drawing up a functional specification and then turning it over to someone "untainted" by the original product - the so-called "clean-room" approach - is how a whole class of products gets built, from Compaq clones to AMD chips. A second important point is the difference between expression and functionality. Expression is the actual code, and it is protected by copyright; functionality is what the program does, and in other industries this might be protected by patents.

"Fundamentally," Kahn explains, "Lotus is arguing, which is an incredibly amazing argument, that programming languages and their macro language is copyrightable, and that any functional product that has no expression in it that is able to interpret those macros infringes their copyright. They found a judge in Boston who bought their argument. It's a complex argument. He said, you copied, and we said, that's right, we copied. And why did you copy? Well, we looked at their menu structure and we believed it's a system. We don't believe that anyone ever organised menus because they were expressive, or because they looked good, but that Print is next to Load because of functional reasons, not because of aesthetic reasons. If Lotus wants to protect a system using a patent, that's fine, we will license their patent, but we don't believe you can copyright a menu hierarchy."

The case has gone to appeal. "We will prevail, we believe, in appeals." It's the first time in the four years since the original ruling, he says, that a new judge is getting a fresh look.

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Meanwhile, the case has cost tens of millions of dollars in legal fees, and, Kahn believes, a lot of money in lost sales as well - much of which he thinks probably went to Lotus.

The second major problem, the delay in shipping dBase for Windows, is one that should be over soon.

"The last year has been very painful, because we set very high goals for us to design dBase for Windows, and it took much more time than we anticipated. It's like a car that's only firing on two out of four cylinders, something like that."

But both of those "challenges" as Kahn calls them, are long-running sagas. The decision to move out of office suites was an apparently sudden switch in direction. Kahn attributes the decision to the industry price wars.

"It's going to be very difficult for anyone to make money," he says, quoting Microsoft's new, low pricing strategy. "That is going to be a bloody war. And so you have the way in which we believe the software industry is structuring itself now, which is two giant companies -Microsoft and Novell - with operating systems slugging it out for positions one and two. It's very difficult for people to make money as number three. Lotus is going to be number three: they have some challenges. We decided to refocus our company to be in the second tier of software companies. Just like Adobe is focused on graphics, we're focused on upsizing, databases, languages and tools, plus our two start-ups."

The start-ups in question are Borland Simplify and Borland Interactive. Borland Simplify is the division that's produced Sidekick for Windows, and the "Simplify" refers to Kahn's conviction that the world needs "slimware" to counteract the massive, feature-laden, hard-diskgobbling programs that are so common nowadays.

"The idea of Borland Simplify is to actually build software that's been designed to be single-disk - very simple software that everybody can use." The division is expected to release about two products a year.

Borland Interactive is aimed at the information superhighway: "The idea of Borland Interactive is to create a business opportunity through partnerships with different providers of either content or infrastructure, such as cable or telecommunications companies - partnerships that will help us leverage the technology that we build." He adds, "We've invested about $10 million in each one. We expect Borland Simplify, with Sidekick, should now be profitable within 90 days; we expect Borland Interactive to be profitable within the next year."

Those two start-ups are bets: investments in what the company hopes will be high-growth areas. But Borland is also betting the company's core business on a strategy Kahn calls "upsizing."

"The idea of upsizing," Kahn says, "is to leverage the infrastructure

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you've built in eXlstmg knowledge, eXlstmg applications, trammg, or existing hardware." One key element is constructing systems with enough flexibility in the underlying architecture in the first place, so that systems can be up sized, rather than replaced.

"That's where products like dBase for Windows and other new products that we're building come in, because they've been designed for upsizing purposes, with an open architecture that allows people to upsize. It's really the next wave, we think, in PC computing, which ultimately leads to unplugging the last mainframe." He adds, "It's a pretty broad vision, but we believe it's the next wave, the next opportunity and that's what we're betting on. We think that's going to fuel growth in the next ten years and change social structures, corporate structures - the way companies run, the way a lot of people think about information systems."

It's a big gamble. "The whole restructuring of Borland is a massive bet on the fact that up sizing is the future."

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Jack Schoof II

Photograph courtesy of NetMedia

Jumping Jack Flash

Interviewer: Ben Tisdall

Appeared: August, 1993

Kahn's departure from Borland, 18 months later, was sudden but apparently amicable. Jack Schoof wasn't so lucky: only weeks after this interview, Schoof was "terminated" by the Artisoft board and replaced as CEO by Will Keiper. After a brief period of acrimony, the company bought out his shares, and he resigned all his remaining interest in the company he had founded. Schoof was quiet for a while, and then he resurfaced in Tucson, Arizona, where he has a new company called NetMedia, which sells a PC-controlled home and office automation system called TABS. Artisoft has faced fierce competition since 1993, as both Novell and Microsoft have moved into the peer-to-peer networking market.

You may not have heard of Artisoft. It's just another US start-up that's nudging towards $100 million a year turnover. And John (Jack) Schoof II, the founder, chairman and chief executive officer, is just another astoundingly youthful computer entrepreneur.

Schoof, now 34, is a much more relaxed character than, say, Bill Gates. He doesn't rock agitatedly backwards and forwards in his chair and he doesn't seem intent on technical jousting to find out how much the interviewer knows about his products - in Schoofs case the peer-to-peer networking software LANtastic.

Schoofs life is a fairly conventional computer whizzkid-turned-


entrepreneur success story, if there is such a thing. By the age of 14 he was working as a professional programmer. At 17 he started his own computer consultancy.

Most of his early work was helping out small firms in a small town in Arizona. One of his first clients was a bunch of cattle breeders who were trying to work out a systematic way of breeding the best beef, tracking which animals produced better calves and so on - a kind of mixture of a database and artificial intelligence. This, says Schoof, taught him that "High technology means nothing unless you can convey it to the people you're working with."

By the time Schoof reached the University of Arizona to study Electrical Engineering he thought he knew everything about software. He was already marked out as a "special kid." The University immediately gave him an office and put him in a special department for solving the university's computer problems - the other people in the group were postgraduate students or full-time staff. Schoof worked around 40 hours a week and managed to fit in a full-time education.

He started getting interested in microcomputers in the CP/M days with the first SlOO machines and bought his first computer around 1980. Right from the start, Schoof spotted the advantages of micros over the timesharing systems he was used to, and had, or so he claims, the entrepreneur's instinct. Inspired by his experience with the cattle breeders and others who couldn't care less about computers but just had problems to solve, he figured microcomputers would be a big success if they became easier to use. He describes the first product he created as a product rather like Norton Commander, the DOS file manager. At the time this product category was unheard of.

Schoof believed in the idea enough to junk his humdrum day job designing hybrid integrated circuits for Phoenix and Maverick missiles at the Hughes aircraft corporation, and start his own company.

Of course the rags to riches thing is a bit of a myth. Like Bill Gates, Schoof came from a comfortable middle-class background. His father just happened to be in the stock market analysis business and spoke to a few of his friends, raising $40000 in no time, no mean sum in 1980. To Schoof $40000 seemed like a fortune and he reckoned it was "all he'd ever need."

The first major thing he did with the money was to take out a few full page ads in Byte magazine. His utility was a $49 product and apparently got a lot of press coverage, but the market still wasn't very big and it only sold around 1200 copies. Schoofs next product, which came out in 1983, was one of the world's first printer sharing units. He spent a lot of money trying to get the concept across with little success. Down to $1800, Schoof spent the last of the money on some of the clone components that, in 1984, were starting to appear.

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Schoof characterises "being able to change what you're doing even if it isn't your first love to get to the final goal" as one of the essential qualities for an entrepreneur. That's what he did by starting to build clones: Schoof stumbled into a million-dollar-a-year business. He showed his machine to a friend and he wanted one, who showed it to a friend who also wanted one, and so on. But at this stage Artisoft was a tiny operation - just Schoof and two part-timers answering phones, screwing screws, fixing problems - and turning over what was a lot of money in 1984.

There was only one outlet and each PC was built to order. "I got to the point where I was doing over $2000000 a year just supplying the local clone market," he says. But the quality of components he was getting from Taiwan was getting worse. Most of all, he hated the retail business: "I had customers complaining that the side of their computers were scuffed, yuck, it was terrible."

He ploughed the cash from his clone business into hiring one of his best friends from college to start work on creating LANtastic. It was also to solve a practical problem - "We were a growing company and we needed a network." With his friend Alex, Schoof put LANtastic together in less than a year. "We went to his house and burrowed away for seven months to create all the hardware and software for LANtastic. We used a good old Z80 to build our first two megabit board. It was plentiful and cheap because nobody was using it for computers anymore."

Schoof acknowledges that today he "could be Michael Dell," since Artisoft's involvement in the clone business predates Dell's. But the clone business wasn't his first love, and when he began making as much money out of LANtastic as the clone business he killed the clone business.

By the time LANtastic was demonstrated at Comdex in the autumn of 1987, Artisoft employed 15-20 people, most of them on the clone side. LANtastic finally shipped in early 1988 and took off straight away, helped by a recommendation in one of the influential US PC magazines. The first year Artisoft did $2 million, which more than tripled the next year to $6.6 million. From there it has progressed in sizeable jumps: $21 million, $42 million and now $73 million.

It wasn't until 1991 that LANtastic began serious distribution in Europe. Schoof explains, "We had hardly enough time to catch our breath in the States."

Schoof believes LANtastic has still barely scratched the surface of its target market. And, perhaps surprisingly, he welcomes the fact that Novell and Microsoft have both waded into the peer-to-peer network market with, respectively, Netware Lite and Windows for Workgroups. "Our business grew 80 per cent when Novell introduced N etware Lite; when Windows for Workgroups came out our sales tripled. They gave legitimacy to our product approach."

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Measured by installed nodes and nodes shipped per month, Artisoft is now the second largest networking company in the world with over 50000 resellers worldwide, so then: where does Artisoft go from here?

Unlike Microsoft and Novell, Artisoft sells Ethernet boards; it has slowly moved away from the proprietary boards it originally supplied. Earlier this year it launched a family of 10 Mb/s Ethernet boards using its own Alice controller, an Ethernet integrated circuit which is apparently the only network-ready IC to support ISA and MCA bus architectures. In the future, Artisoft intends to sell the chip into motherboards, and the company is thinking about selling cards separately because it could compete on price and performance with 3Com despite all the hype about 3Com's parallel tasking technology. But as Schoof puts it, "In our hearts we want to sell LANtastic."

Schoof and his European Managing Director Robert "Mac" McKinley are optimistic about the future. "It appears our competitors - Microsoft and Novell- are getting too big. It's tough for those companies. Novell's already in the high-end, Microsoft's in the high-end. Novell and Microsoft are going to try and kill each other over the next few years."

Schoof knows about the scenario where "the entrepreneur flames out," where the entrepreneur is good at managing a company in its rapid growth phase and then either the company goes bust or the entrepreneur gets kicked out, as happened with Steve Jobs at Apple and others at many other 1980s start-ups. But Schoof is philosophical about it. He realises he's not good at managing everything and, crucially, doesn't care that he's not.

Artisoft has made a few key appointments to keep it on track. "We've hired the chief architect and the head of software development for Novell, says Schoof smugly. "The fellow who built Netware 4.0 now works for us as VP of engineering. He sent me his resume. I got it in the mail and I thought, is this for real? Is this a joke? Is this the real guy? but he wanted to come and work for us. Microsoft offered him a job as well and we're actually paying him less than Microsoft offered. Nobody wants to work for Microsoft." Schoof has also hired a new president from MicroAge, one of the big retail operations in the US. All this has freed up a lot of extra time for him.

"I'm back in the vision business now," he says.

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Mark Eppley


Travel Writer



Networking is fine, but it presumes that you and your computer are fixed in one location where your machine can be connected. The increasing popularity of laptops in the early 1990S led to a different problem: how to move files around when the only movable medium, the floppy disk, could hold only 1.4 Mb, maximum.

Anyone who has to use more than one computer appreciates Mark Eppley's contribution to the computing world: he invented the first program to let you hook two machines together and transfer a mass of files in bulk. The first version was invented in the early 1980s to run on the first popular portable, the Tandy Mode/wo. The DOS version, released in 1986 and known as LapLink, has received the ultimate honour of verb status, as in, "I'll LapLink it across."

Traveling Software, the company Eppley founded in 1982 to sell his product, was slow to release a Windows version; LapLink for Windows didn't arrive until late 1994. LapLink's speed and remote control facilities have kept it a market leader. Eppley continues as CEO.

Some programs are workaday tools. LapLink helps divorce data from hardware. In the pew office we often chop and change from machine to machine, and in doing so we need to keep running the same software and, more importantly, data. It is the independence this gives users which


makes Lap Link special, and it is a philosophy which Traveling Software, the publisher of Lap Link has taken as a creed.

Mark Eppley, the larger than life founder and president of the company, still finds time for a little programming on the side.

"Do you think these computers are just a fad?" asks Eppley by way of introduction. He is not the California hippie I'd expected: he is smart and relaxed in the poshest of London hotels. "It's been going on for more than ten years now and we've got graphics, the 486." But he isn't really trying to predict the end of computing, and so after a brief chat about how everyone would really rather have a NeXT we move on.

Eppley is more interested in the future than the past; the present is just a stepping stone to more exciting things. "Let's just talk about some of the underlying code that we've written. Where we see the industry going. What part in that Win Connect products will play. I'll talk about the extended office." Eppley is in evangelism mode, he wants others to appreciate how exciting computing can be.

"Quite a good analogy about what can happen in the [computer] industry is the VCR at the moment. Quite a few people have VCRs that do this time-switching when they're recording something that's on when you want to go out. And now the growth in the computer market is in the notebooks." He extends the analogy: "Notebooks are now allowing the commuter to timeshift in a computer environment as well. With your notebook computer you can be working anywhere at any point in time. Some research that we've seen says that on average the average person only spends 40 per cent of their work time at their desk. If they use any computer on their desk, obviously while they're away they're less efficient unless they're using a notebook computer. There's scope to optimise their own efficiency and this is what we call the extended office. When Xerox first launched home-working in the early 80's, they were then able to work at home a certain number of days of the week and send the work in that they were doing."

I contend that this need not be a thing of the future and that I often work at home and mail articles to the office. "OK, but how do you upload it?" asks Eppley. "You have to go into BIX or CIX [online services]," he observes correctly, "but you can't load it directly. Wouldn't it be nicer to do that directly?"

He talks of "expanding the spectrum" of communication. "Right now cabling is the problem. We're all communicating but we can only do so directly via a cable, or some form of cable. So we're limited." He goes on, "We want to think beyond the realms today of just the cable, and then start looking at some other medium in order to allow that extended office in any environment. It's fine when you're in a hotel room or something but if you happen to be in your car, how do you communicate?"

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Eppley pulls out what looks like a thin A4 leather wallet, with a paper screen showing a set of icons. It's a mock-up of the envisaged machine for which his company is developing software: a portable, pen-based model with built-in wireless communication. He talks excitedly of being able to contact a remote wireless network from anywhere in the world.

The portable transmitter will sense when it is out of range of the FM network, and will periodically try to regain contact; in the meantime the computer will simply queue any outgoing messages, and the network will have incoming ones stacked up, ready for reconnection. To users it will seem almost as if they are never out of contact. The machines would be mobile workstations.

"Just like remote email. That's really what we've invested the last two years in engineering. Blackbird is the code name for the communications engine." It is, he says, named after the Lockheed SR71: "Despite being retired it's still the fastest plane ever built. But our Blackbird is more than fast. We need the software robust enough to be able to connect and disconnect. It's going out in two products now."

I ask if there will be a Lap Link for Windows. "If we do a LapLink for Windows it has to be more than just Lap Link. You have to have a compelling benefit for your customer to upgrade." He proposes a future of wireless, diskless notebooks using Traveling Software's WinConnect technology and a central server for all file storage.

I comment that the reason I want a wireless network is that I'm too lazy to plug a machine into a network. I'd rather arrive and be hooked in. Eppley agrees. "Yeah, it just recognises that it's connected. With the wireless we're not quite there. We've made tremendous advances over the last two years. In 12 to 24 months it will be viable to have a commercial product that's high enough in performance and low enough in cost to be compelling. Why bother transferring from the server's floppy to hard disk then start moving that copy around when you can keep that copy on the machine? Then when you go home at night you don't have to worry about sitting there running Lap Link: it's updated. I keep it plugged in next to my desk, it's there all day. I keep organised because all the directories and information that I want when I'm travelling are just permanently living there. I back it up from volume on my hard disk, but day-to-day work, if the information is being changed it's right there."

Eppley picks up one of a number of calculator-sized computers from the table, a Sharp IQ. "This is probably the closest machine to what we've been talking about because its got no hard disk, and it's got long battery life. All it needs is the wireless network."

I ask how he sees the limited radio spectrum coping with everyone's wanting to fill it with computer data. "The analogy I like to use is the oil industry" says Eppley. "At the turn of the century we were just taking the

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best oil we can find that was easiest to refine. Now we're getting heavier crude we're going to get different, more advanced methods to process the harder stuff. Similar with spectrum: we've only mined just a little bit. Microwave goes up to maybe 18 GHz. But for 20 GHz to 100 GHz - there's some physics involved here - right now technically it's really not feasible to 'mine' that but in the future you would have to assume that with the advances of technology it would be possible."

I ask, "So should we be regulating now with that in mind?" "That's a real toughie. The oil analogy still works. You go back to the

turn of the century, people were going around getting mineral rights in Texas - buying the stuff up then selling it later, maybe not developing it themselves. Then people just go out and buy spectrum rights with really no intention of developing it - they don't have the funding or the capacity to do that. Just to resell them later and not develop it, is that fair?"

It's clearly a rhetorical question, so I move on to a bit of Eppley folklore. "There's a story I've heard round the office that when Lap Link 3 was being developed you had a brainstorming session and you said, 'w ouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to install Lap Link on both ends?' and your colleagues said it couldn't be done so you wrote it to prove that it could. Is this a true story?"

He says yes: the idea came up at trade shows. "Vendors would come up and say, 'I forgot my software Silt-inch disk and 1 only have a 31/2. What am I going to do? I've got to load it up there.' And we'd say, 'Have you got Lap Link?' And he'd say, 'Yeah, I do, but I've only got a 31/2 disk, what am 1 going to do?' And we kept running into that problem. So we wondered what we could do. Was there any way we could install Lap Link? So we started playing around with that. With DOS mode and CTTY command and LapLink can clone itself to another machine. Just type in a couple of commands.

"LapLink 3 has been selling very well and it's a very good product. But it's like music, it's like we recorded that last year, now what else is there? You want to create something new. What do you really want? You mentioned that you're working at home. I do the same thing and I send stuff via different services - Mel and BIX - and we also have direct links to the office, but if you want to GHz with someone who doesn't have communications software or isn't previously set up it's difficult. We've got to make it easier. Easier and bullet-proof. I want to be able to Lap Link onto a machine at the other end of the telephone.

"Stay tuned. Whatever we do, software is like music. The satisfaction is that - say I'm at a plant and I'm walking down the aisle and somebody's using a laptop computer and they're saying 'Yeah, I've got Lap Link.' And that's satisfying, that's neat."

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Gordon Eubanks

Photograph courtesy of Symantec

Bankable Asset


Appeared: November, 1991

Gordon Eubanks is President and CEO of the utility specialist software company Symantec. Unlike the other interviewees here, who have built their companies' success primarily on inventing products and technology, Eubanks has followed a strategy of growth by acquisition. Nonetheless, like his fellow interviewees, he was involved in the industry from its earliest days, and Symantec as a company has managed to remain tightly focused on software utilities.

Eubanks became involved with computers in the early 1970S as a member of the US Navy's Nuclear Submarine Force. In 1975, he worked with Gary Kildall, founder of Digital Research and creator of the CP/M operating system that dominated the pre-PC era. In 1977, Eubanks founded Compiler Systems to market one of the first versions of BASIC for microcomputers, CBASIC, which he wrote. In 1981, Compiler Systems merged with Digital Research; in 1983 Eubanks founded C&E Software, which merged with Symantec in 1984.

Symantec itself was founded in 1982 by Dr Gary Hendrix, a leading US specialist in artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Other acquisitions since that first merger have included Peter Norton Computing (1990), the UK company Zortec (1991), and Dynamic Microprocessor Associates (1991). More recently Symantec has swallowed Contact Software (1993) and leading Norton competitor Central Point, and in late 1995 was completing the acquisition of fax software specialist Delrina.


Symantec is always battling the trend of including more and more facilities in the computer's operating system. Nonetheless, the company had revenues of $246.3 million for the first nine months of fiscal 1995.

How do you manage to make acquisition work when so many companies find it difficult to 'fold' a new company into their culture and force the people working for it to move to a central location? My number one priority is developing the company's strategy of building a broad product line in areas where we can be leaders. Either we develop in-house or we find products that will fit into the long-term strategy for the company - if we see a sector where it would be worth competing, we look at whether acquisition would make sense. A lot of people think we are just trying to build a company on size, but that's not really the objective. We don't force people to move where we are. If everyone were in one place, that would be helpful. But we live in a very mobile society. If you move people around, you are generally going to lose them - it is a much bigger advantage (when developing acquired products) if you have the people who created them to work long-term in developing the products. The important thing here is that our strategy with acquisition only works if we can build the product and enhance it. We are doing it because we believe in the products and we have to grow and extend the products. By keeping these people, we are able to maintain and build on the products we acquire. For example, we have almost tripled sales of Norton's existing products and developed innovative new products subsequent to acquisition.

Just how important is Norton Desktop for Windows to Symantec? Right now, it is probably our highest volume product. It has done exceptionally well because it is an integrated environment for Windows which gives Windows advantages in user interface and delivers an extremely wide range of utilities - giving them significant improvements to the use of Windows. The combination [of these utilities 1 is really what we are delivering - the initial successes have been very, very strong and we have good demand. More than that, we are seeing corporates looking at this as a product they can put on every machine. It offers good longterm potential.

Did Microsoft leave important things out of Windows that allowed you to take advantage ofa 'hole 'in the market? Whatever you do to a product, you are going to leave a lot of room to add value. DOS, for example, is a very successful product - but the whole Norton company was built around adding value to that. We think that

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over time, Microsoft will build some of these ideas into Windows. But we will continue to innovate Norton Desktop - and, in fact, we have worked quite closely with Microsoft on it. It would be unfair to imply that Windows isn't a good product. We'll see some new things in Windows. DOS, for example, has always had a backup routine and some simple utilities. Our success has always come from adding significant value.

How do you react to comments that sales of Apple Macintosh software have not been as healthy as were expected when the new, low-cost machines were announced - apparently because the people buying them don't have lots of money to spend on software and therefore tend to pirate more? I think what has happened is pretty logical. Apple has had an interesting time over the past few years. The company has moved from Jean-Louis Gassee's 'high and right' strategy [where the company made the 'right' move by keeping prices and dealer margins high, although volumes were somewhat lower than the company would have liked]. After he left, [Apple president and CEO John] Sculley brought in a new team and adopted a 'low and left' strategy with a pretty good line of credible lowend machines. The problem is that they won't necessarily run the same software as those high and right machines - so what was needed were products appropriate for entry-level machines. For this reason, our utility products and GreatW orks are doing extremely well. Claris is also doing quite well on those machines. There is an element of piracy, which has always existed in this business. I don't think that it is significantly worse in the Mac Classic market than anywhere else. People pirate because it's easy to do. If people paid for petrol by putting it in their cars and then telling the attendant how much they put in, I think there would be a fair amount of piracy there as well. I guess it will continue until people realise that they are getting quite a bit from software - including an opportunity for upgrades and support.

You appear to be increasingly interested in the horizontal applications market with the development of products such as GreatWorks and Just Write. Will this mark a change in the way Symantec is moving? Weare very committed to the applications market, but we also have two other markets we are very active in - utilities and development tools -which we are beginning to playa bigger role in. There is probably more growth in development tools and utilities than horizontal applications, but I think all three are strong markets.

With August's acquisition of the New York-based communications company DMA, you have moved further into the communications arena and acquired its PC Anywhere remote control application. How does that fit in with your overall strategy?

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We see that as an extension of the utilities business. I think it is growing incredibly well now. One of the interesting things we see now is that the laptop business is having the strongest growth of any area. There has been a huge growth in the remote control market. The growth DMA has seen is as strong as the utility business as a whole - although DMA has strong competitors in that sector, it is technically the best and has a good position in Europe.

What does Peter Norton do for the company these days? Peter was never really involved day-to-day in the company. He's active on the board, is involved in a high-level strategy area and does a lot of public speaking. We also use his image as part of the marketing for Nortonbranded products. But posing for pictures is not a time-consuming task -so he spends a lot of time talking to people about the company's strategy - in fact, he just gave a big speech in Washington about it. That's really where he's offered his authority.

Are you optimistic about the future? One of the great things about our industry is that there's so many opportunities - we will be in a world of multiple platforms, and having a strategy of developing for multiple platforms will be key to success. I am really excited in seeing the opportunities in helping corporates develop and make their development processes more efficient - Object-Oriented Programming will really add value in this area. The problem with stuff like OOP is that it's sort of a buzzword. But software building blocks and the idea of building applications using components will really happen and will have a big impact in the industry when it does happen. It is more than just a buzzword - we are finding true value for our customers in this technology. The Zortech purchase and our own development processes are part of this. We need to make sure that people don't treat OOP as they used to treat artificial intelligence [AI] - as if using OOP will automatically make life easier. The industry overdid that once before. Just because it was using AI techniques or expert systems didn't necessarily make it good. We have to focus on what the benefit is from this technology and what our customers will get from it - and make sure that the innovation we are fostering will really benefit the customers. I think this industry is really driven by innovation and if we continue to let that happen we are going to be in good shape - the opportunities really exceed the risks over the next few years - innovation will open up tremendous opportunities for software.

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Peter Horne


For Pete's Sake


Appeared: January, 1993

All the British companies that got a running start in the pre-PC era struggled. Potter, Hauser and Sinclair all spoke of the roller-coaster rides that followed the release of the IBM Pc. Apricot was no exception, as Peter Horne explains here.

Horne is Managing Director of the British company Apricot, which he joined as Technical Director to set up a research and development division in February, 1983, when Apricot was the number one British computer manufacturer. Founded in 1965, like Acorn Apricot lost an early lead - it continued with a proprietary system long after most of the world had gone to PC-compatibility. It was bought by Mitsubishi in April, 1990.

Horne got his degree in electrical and electronic engineering, and has a PhD in statistical pattern recognition. He was heavily involved in early networking at CERN (1975-78) and spent two years at Cambridge Scientific Instruments designing a multiple-processor system to analyse images from chest X-rays and satellite photographs.

Horne became Managing Director in 1989.

Peter Horne must be one of the only directors of a computer company who would start an interview by admitting that computers are a disappointment. "The fact is that the usefulness of computing has not been as great as everybody thought it should be," he says. "If you


measure It III terms of the profitability of companies, then it's very difficult to say it's actually achieved anything."

Horne sees problems with today's networks - and says the industry isn't really equipped to handle them. This, he says, has become apparent as more and more large corporations want to downsize from mainframes and minis to PC networks. The reason, he thinks, is that traditionally all the complexities of wiring things together were left to the major manufacturers, like IBM, DEC and ICL, who "basically did most of the integration work for them."

What the smaller organisations did was "bespoke software and project management, but their knowledge and depth of knowledge on overall systems integration - middleware software and how to make it work for an organisation - I think is fairly poor."

The answers needed are different now. "When you come to our world, it isn't go out and design another bespoke program to solve the problem, it's saying, somewhere in the world is a solution to this problem, where do I find it? This is a big cultural change."

Moving into consulting, he says, "is everybody's answer, to some extent. Even Apricot is saying we're going to have to do a lot more than we thought we had to."

Horne was just discovering this sort of problem when in 1982 he saw what he describes even now as a "strange job ad." A company in Birmingham was looking for a chief engineer; what was unusual was that the remuneration included shares in the company.

"I already knew of the company - it was the only company likely in Birmingham - because I had bought a product called the Sirius from them for my own business."

At the time Apricot was the number one computer manufacturer in the UK. IBM hadn't started selling here yet, and Apricot's computers were Sirius compatible. Who knew? Even in the US the leaders were Tandy and Apple; Apricot, then known as ACT, discussed with Tandy the possibility of launching an Apple-beater in the US. Tandy declined to get involved, and Apricot made the attempt by itself, unsuccessfully.

"The US market had gone compatible by then," says Horne, "so we didn't sell many products." In 1984 Apricot, by then renamed for its computers, introduced early 286s - but even these were still Sirius compatible.

"By then we knew it was too late," says Horne frankly. "Those should not have been Sirius compatible, they should have been IBM compatible, so we were a year late." It was June 1986 before Apricot started selling IBM -compatible PCs.

"We were pretty successful with the product despite that, but many of our larger resellers had by that time shifted away, and were carrying

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Compaq and IBM, so we'd lost a lot of our channel that we should have maintained. We ended up with a very interesting channel of resellers in the UK, very competitive, very VAR-like, compared with the one that had gone the box-shifting route with the pc."

Compatibility remained an issue at Apricot even then, "like a smoker giving up smoking." The company was not just going to be compatible: it was going to be really compatible. And that's how it came to decide to make MCA machines instead of ISA. Horne believes Apricot is almost the last company making its own PS/2 clones.

"We waited too long on not becoming IBM compatible," Horne sums it up, "and when you've made a mistake once you try not to make it again. But the whole industry flipped. Today we take a pragmatic approach; we listen more to customers, like everybody else."

Selling MCA clones opened the way into some of IBM's accounts, however: "Like Compaq in 1984-1985, we were the only company offering complete compatibility."

There is a common impression that PS/2 architecture is somehow proprietary, or at least more expensive to license. Horne says this is absolutely untrue.

"There is so much bunkum and bullshit about licensing," he says. "There is no such thing as licensing MCA. IBM has a straightforward patent licensing policy that covers three different major areas and categories. One category covers about 9000 patents, and you take out one licence and it covers everything. Anybody can take it out; it costs maybe $25000; it's not expensive. It's no more expensive to make PS/2 clones than PC clones."

Other than the licensing, though, PCs are cheaper, if only because there are more parts available from more suppliers, which tends to drive the price of parts down. Apricot now makes a line of clones, too.

"For the desktop user, neither MCA nor EISA has any benefit for the customer that they can clearly see today."

For Horne, the argument over which architecture to use is as unimportant as the arguments he used to listen to ten years ago between Ethernet and Token Ring.

The exception is servers. "In the server you do need a decent bus, because you'll be connecting a

lot of high-performance peripherals to it. But, "Most customers make their decision based on price, performance and functionality, as opposed to what the little piece inside the engine does."

The way Horne tells it, Apricot has something in common with Apple: it tries to put as much as possible in the machine so all the customer has to do is plug the thing in. The company started building in networking in 1984, and its recent multimedia machines come complete with built-in

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sound. But trying to get customers to see the benefits of that is uphill work in a market which has been trained to consider price first, second and third.

"The bad news of the compatibility market is that innovation is almost out. As a small company, it's very difficult to sell innovation because the customer says the standard machine looks like this, and it has eight slots, and unless I can plug cards in, it's not a PC, is it?" So small companies have to conform, and the only hope for change is if the larger manufacturers do the innovating. Unfortunately, IBM and Compaq, who could lead the way to change, are in fact following the trend by launching low-cost lines.

"We feel we're a lone voice in the world saying there's a better way of doing this, because the world at large doesn't want to listen. The only thing it can think about is price, and therefore innovation is getting pushed even further away. Products are being driven down in all aspects of quality for the customer. Clearly there's a good side - the customer can now buy great technology at a very low price - but there are penalties to pay for that in the future."

Horne believes having Mitsubishi as a parent helps Apricot. "We can afford the investments and the time to start the education, but it's a tough battle. I do see that the next couple of years are going to be really traumatic for the industry, but unless it does change, in two years' time a lot of customers are going to be really pissed off with the industry."

Horne has problems with an even more basic tenet of IT marketing: the idea that people throw out computers every couple of years and buy new ones.

"y ou go in to a corporate customer and see computers that are eight or nine years old. Nobody throws computers away. None of them upgrade them, either, and they won't, because you can't upgrade part of a PC if you're going to use the whole thing." When people talk to him about upgrading every two years, he says, he asks them, "Look at that chair. Do you throw it away every two years?"

"y ou don't do that in an organisation; you move it to a suitable function." He himself has run a 386 at 25 MHz for the last four years, even under Windows.

It's fast enough," he says, "because I can't type faster than I can think. We're creating a demand and expectation and a worry about the machine being superseded the day they buy it that is unreal."

The obsession with speed carries over into the way the industry produces software, too.

"If only by now we could have accepted a level of - not wastage, but inefficiency. With the power we have now and the amount of memory, do we really have to rewrite every service routine and interrupt routine

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every time we change the operating system?" Several organisations have goals to produce libraries of standard routines, but, he says, "It's still a long way off.

"Every time, someone says, 'but if I change a byte there I can make it go so much faster,' so there's a tendency always to improve it. But that introduces the next problem. So somehow we need the wheel, the reusable part, the tyre again, that doesn't change - maybe minor things change, but basically you're not going to get it dramatically wrong. Like a 747 - that's been going for 20 years with only minor refinements, and at least you've got all that history of reliability behind you, whereas software basically gets rewritten every time."

We need reassessment: "What we've done in many cases, especially in the PC market, is make word processing prettier. But are the words any better? Or the quality of the information coming out?"

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V olker Dolch

Dolch Vita


Appeared: May, 1992

Photograph by Wendy M. Grossman

However difficult it is for Symantec to keep finding niches in the software market, it's infinitely harder to find a niche in the overcrowded PC hardware market. Nonetheless, Volker Dolch managed to do it.

Dolch is the founder and owner of Dolch Computer Systems, which specialises in power portables with the capabilities and internal capacity of high-end desktop machines. Based in Milpitas, California, the company has racked up a string of firsts by being the first to design a portable with, in turn, the 50 MHz 486 chip, an active matrix colour screen, five expansion slots, liquid cooling, full-motion video, and, more recently, mobile videoconferencing and dual Pentiums.

Educated as an engineer at the University of Frankfurt, Dolch was born and raised in Heidelberg, Germany. He went into research and development, and worked on the team that designed the scanners that read bar codes in supermarkets. Dolch has subsidiaries in Germany and the UK; its 1994 turnover was $50.2 million.

"In the early days of my career," says Volker Dolch, "I wanted to invent new things, and I actually did. I wanted to invent new science and new physical laws and that kind of thing. At a later stage of my career, I wanted to make money. I don't know exactly where the transition came, but it came gradually."


Dolch says initially his computers appealed to a niche market, but that they are beginning to compete even with Compaq and IBM.

"We address our activities to the 20 per cent market opportunities -which is still a very big market by itself." What Dolch calls the 80 per cent market is the mass market of battery-powered portable systems -laptops and notebooks. The 20 per cent is the AC portable market, the high end, which the company believes, based on market research figures, will reach one million units and $3 billion in 1995.

Dolch is still an engineer at heart, but, he says, "I've lost my personal drive for patents. I actually got the Diesel Award" - Germany's equivalent of the US President's Award or the UK's Queen's Award - "for the bar code stuff ten years after the fact, and the Diesel Award is the highest award Germany has to give to an inventor or scientist. I was very proud at the time, but it doesn't buy you anything. Maybe if you sold it for the silver content..."

Wanting to make money instead of create great science has changed his perspective somewhat. "What you learn in business - and I've been doing that now for 15 years - is that this scientific solution looking for a problem isn't necessarily what people pay money very freely to get. If you blend a scientific solution with the marketing aspect, and you have a more market-driven product than an engineering-driven product, you have a much more saleable product. The world needs both. The question is how much of what."

From Dolch's point of view, what matters in his computers is functionality: if the only alternative is to carry around a desktop machine, he reasons that his target users would rather carry an extra pound than give up an expansion slot. These are not portables for people who need to work on the move; these are portables for people who move from desk to desk and AC outlet to AC outlet.

Besides the new multimedia system, one of Dolch's recent innovations is liquid cooling. Dolch says it's nothing new - it just hasn't been applied to portable computers before. A Cray supercomputer, for example, submerges the electronics in liquid nitrogen.

In Dolch's portables, liquid gels transmit the heat, and the metal in the casing disperses it. This allows the company to pack more power into a smaller space and at the same time get rid of the fan.

"I work at night," he says, "and that's the worst thing. During the day it's not a big problem, but at night you sit there and this thing whistles and whistles."

Innovations like these are part of Dolch's game plan. "There are two schools of thought. One, take a set of computer resources which is fairly accepted to be adequate for people, and make them as small as you possibly can, and call it a notebook. You have to make compromises."

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The threshold of what is considered adequate, of course, keeps going up. Now it's a 386SX; doubtless before long it will be a 486.

Alternatively, says Dolch, "Let's reverse that. Let's talk about what is acceptable as a physical envelope which we accept as being portable. It used to be 30 lb to 40 lb. There is a threshold of pain, which, obviously, seems to be lower and lower. Now it's about 20lb - and you can see a time when anything over 10 lb won't be considered portable. However, we have embarked on that school of thought: let's take that envelope that is acceptable and put as much power and computing resources into this envelope at any time that the technology allows us. Being true to that kind of philosophy has allowed us to build continuously, unbroken at any time, the fastest and highest-performing portable."

In his market, "Any compromises you put in the computing power would be a bigger restriction than having to carry another pound. That kind of line is what we've been driving, and as a result, battery power is not an issue for us."

Other areas the company is researching, he says, include packaging electronics, surface mount technology and the higher density of integration of chips. However, says Dolch, the company recognises its limitations, and doesn't try to work on technologies that are already well covered by specialists in their field - Dolch wouldn't, for example, try to make its own chips in competition with Intel and AMD.

"We embrace as much as we can the industry standards," says Dolch, "and innovate in those areas where we can."

Being committed always to producing the fastest and the first doesn't, he says, necessarily give the company's computers a shorter life cycle. "It depends what you compare it with. In the computer field, life cycles are indeed very short. If you embark on a trend and say you always have to have the fastest, how often do you have to change it upward? I would say, at least twice a year, because there's always someone nibbling on that." What's next after the so MHz 486, though, he says, is not a 100 MHz chip - "SO MHz is an awesome speed for the silicon to take" and there are physical limitations on gates - but multiprocessors.

"We're working on using a multiprocessor in a portable, because whatever you find in the desktop and tower environments eventually will find its way into portables, so why shouldn't we be the one to do it?" Parallel processing, he says, is an obvious trend.

Dolch is still very much involved in the research and development side of the company, spending at least a third to a half of his time with the engineering staff - "more on the conceptual side than on the execution side," he says. The company's entire operation is based at its headquarters in Milpitas, California.

Being in California is important.

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"If this company were in England or Germany," says Dolch, "it would have to be much bigger, because we couldn't rely on the resources for what we call manufacturing." Essentially, Dolch's manufacturing operation is final assembly: "All the manufacturing is done outside. The big part of our research and development is actually done outside, where we employ specialist groups in certain areas that specialise in specific things and work with consultants on projects." If Dolch wants a differently designed display, for example, or set of chips, it goes to specialists.

This way of working - made possible because of California's infrastructure of technology companies - allows the company to stay small, which in turn allows it to jump on new technologies quickly. Dolch was, he says, offering a colour screen two years ago, even before Sharp. TFT screens are expensive - they add an extra £2795 onto the price of Dolch's 33 MHz 486 machine - because producing what is essentially a large wafer with one million transistors and having them all perfect is just plain difficult. Even though it's the same technology used in those little, mass-produced 5-inch pocket TVs, computer applications are not as forgiving: the slightest blemish is a problem for a computer user.

Ironically, colour screens are one of the things Dolch can't source in California. Not only are they produced in Japan, but the US is claiming that the screens are being shipped below their cost, and has slapped an anti-dumping suit against all the Japanese manufacturers. To Dolch, this is counter-productive.

"The idea is to help the US manufacture them," he says, "but no one in this country is making them, and probably no one ever will, because of the up front investment. You have to be willing to make a long-term investment over five to ten years. The US companies don't have the funding or the investor attitudes like the Japanese do. You have to be willing to invest several hundred million dollars and wait for that investment to hatch in four to five years' time."

"We don't intend to pay 62 per cent and then some tariff on something which is very expensive to start out with," he says.

Dolch doesn't believe that innovations in the computer industry are flattening, even though some areas have slowed down owing to the changes in world politics - and he doesn't believe he's going to run out of ideas for the company's product line.

"What I have enjoyed tremendously in the computer business," he says, "more so than in the science and engineering business, by a wide margin, is the incredibly short pace of technological change all the time, driven by such a tremendous, big market that has so many forces going. In the science and engineering world, technology moves much slower, because the markets are slower, and don't have the leverage to invent all

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this latest and greatest, maybe test and measurement, maybe analytical, equipment. You can't afford to change it every year. In computers, there's a new revolution going on every day."

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A. c. Mike Markkula


Neurons from Outer Space


Appeared: April, 1992

None of the interviewees in this book can claim as profound an impact on the world of computing as A. C. Mike Markkula, one of the founders of Apple, the company that has best managed to survive with its own standards in a world of PC compatibility.

Markkula is one of the most passionate engineers you'll ever meet. Sttill on Apple's board, in 1992 he was launching the first products from a new venture, Echelon, which makes inexpensive chips that can intercommunicate over a variety of means so you could create programmable systems with a minimum of wiring. The goal: smart houses, wireless airplanes and cars, and programmable lighting, heating and security systems that can all interoperate or be controlled by the same remote device. Markkula believes that Echelon, like Apple before it, is founding not just a company but an entire industry. It's too soon to tell if he's right.

"People thought I was crazy when I started Apple," says A. C. "Mike" Markkula. "What are people going to do with a personal computer? But I was totally convinced that it was the right thing to do. You couldn't talk me out of it. I knew in my heart, in my mind, that if I could get the right thing out there, people would use it." Even his father-in-law when told that the gift Apple computer Markkula was offering him could be used to


balance his chequebook and cost about $1000, thought carefully, and finally said: "$1000 would buy an awful lot of pencils."

Now, Markkula is just as certain, just as convinced, and just as passionate about his new start-up company, Palo Alto-based Echelon, which is creating the technology to give us a scenario straight out of science fiction: light bulbs that can talk to toasters that can talk to security systems that can talk to VCRs. They call it an intelligent distributed control network.

The story starts in 1983, when Markkula was handing control of Apple over to then new CEO John Sculley. The problem: how to explain the computer industry to Sculley, whose background at Pepsi didn't necessarily teach him to, as Markkula puts it, "market a company as a technology leader" or compete with IBM.

"I was finally able to create a chart with multiple axes," Markkula says. These were things like dedicated purpose-general purpose, expensivecheap, easy to use-hard to use, consumer market-industrial market and performance - all kinds of ways to measure types of computers. I called that a computer universe, a universe of computer technology, and I tried then to plot different products in this universe ... I had everything from supercomputers to calculators on this."

The chart revealed something unexpected: "The interesting thing was, down in one corner of it there was a void."

The empty space had these characteristics: very, very low cost; very, very high volume; something with a specific purpose but that is suitable for as broad as possible a set of markets.

"I didn't know what the hell would fit in there." So he started thinking about it, off and on.

It was late 1984 or 1985 when the idea occurred to him: an integrated circuit on a single chip that was really cheap - less than $1 - that could turn something off, on, or in between, that could sense which of those states something was in, and that could communicate with any other device by way of any medium - radio frequency, twisted pair wiring, optical fibre, infrared. Ifhe had such a thing, what would he do with it?

"It didn't take me very long to figure out that you could put one in every light bulb, you could put ten or 15 of them in every TV, VCR and stereo, you could put several thousand of them in a home, you could put 500 of them in a car, and I started adding up what the volume would be if that all happened and it was staggering, completely staggering: multiple billions a month."

What Markkula couldn't work out was why it hadn't been done before, so he hired three engineers to do a study. The objective: to prove it couldn't be done.

"They spent about three months," Markkula says, "and they really

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exercised all the technology ideas, and they came up with some things that were difficult about it, but they finally came back and said, we don't see any landmines; we think it can probably be done, and probably the reason why it hasn't been done before is, there are a whole lot of technologies that are getting good enough to be put together to do this that weren't good enough even two years ago" - things like EEPROM (abbreviated to E-squared), and advances in computer architecture and networking.

And, apparently, Markkula really was the first to think of it. "At least," he laughs, "that's what the patent office says." Echelon has already filed for some 40 patents, 11 of which have been issued.

"To really fine-tune all of those technologies and get them all to work together to do this little, simple job took almost 400 man years of development time," says Markkula.

Markkula carries around the first Neuron chip that was ever produced. "It's my first baby" he says. "I wouldn't lose that for all the tea in China." The ones being produced now have three microprocessors instead of the four in the original design, they are much smaller and they have less I/O circuitry.

"Four hundred man years of hard work and many millions of dollars later," he says, "we've worked out all of the intricacies of the combination of these technologies and implemented them on a single silicon chip that today costs between $5 and $10, depending on which company you ask to quote and how many you tell them you want to buy." He wants to see it get nearer the $1 mark he had in mind.

One difficulty persists: the problem of combining analogue circuitry, digital circuitry and EEPROM technology in the same manufacturing process. When it came time to manufacture the chips, Markkula said that of all the many semiconductor companies there were only two who could do it: Toshiba and Motorola.

Part of Markkula's idea was that the technology would be implemented by a variety of companies - "Company A puts these things in light bulbs, and company B puts them in light switches, and company C puts them in their stereos, and company D puts them in their wall thermostats, and one thing that happens is that all those products can now communicate and operate together, so if you want to have one little controller on your coffee table, instead of 43, that can do the lights or the stereo or turn up the heat, you can."

The usefulness is this: a security system with a sensor on the window that tells if it's open or shut can use the common protocols to send out a message warning that the window's open. Assuming that everything around the house has been implemented with Neuron technology, the message can be received by the heating system, which could respond

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appropriately. The message could set off a flashing light or a TV display to warn you that the window's open. If the security system's in alarm mode, that same message might prompt a call to the police. This sort of prospect excites Markkula, who says there are already hundreds of companies designing products with Neuron technology built into them.

Like PC networks versus mainframes, Neuron technology is the opposite of the ways engineers have classically implemented control systems, with a central computer and lots of radiating wires.

The classical style has a major disadvantage: "If this computer breaks, everything's dead." Instead, "We've distributed the intelligence to the network. Each little node in the network has its own little piece of the code that it runs. And, like, if you're the heater and you hear the message from the window that says, hey, I'm open, if there's something that goes wrong with your program this doesn't interfere with the security system's hearing that message and calling the cops.

"When you distribute intelligence, anyone node can have a problem -the cat walks in front of the sensor, or goes to sleep on top of it - and it doesn't bring down the whole system. The rest of the network continues to work exactly the way it's supposed to. And you can have another little node that runs around and checks on people." This node can identify nodes that are down and alert the owner.

From the consumer's point of view, how the network runs is mostly irrelevant. Products which use Neuron technology will bear a "Lon" trademark, for "local operating network." Neuron chips themselves all use the same protocols.

Manufacturers will handle the lower-level programming, like telling a particular Neuron it's a switch; this operation is known as giving a Neuron its "personality." But consumers might take a room full of light bulbs with Neurons in them and assign them to different groups, so that pushing a particular switch turns on all the lights in one group. In an office block, where offices are periodically shifted around, this reprogramming ability eliminates the need to rewire. Because the chips all answer a common protocol, consumers should be able to choose whichever remote control/programmer they are most comfortable with and use it with everything.

Lon technology also means less wiring. In a house built using Lon technology, you would run wires only to wherever you wanted to put the light bulbs. You could put switches anywhere - on the wall, on the coffee table, or in your back pocket - and run them on AAA lithium batteries that last for ten years.

On top of that, Neurons will do things ordinary switches can't. For example, they can read quadrature, that is, knobs that, unlike ordinary dimmer switches, turn around and around with no lock - so you could

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install dimmer switches at every location. (The demonstration lighting system created "dimmer wars" at Echelon's headquarters, as everyone tried to see who could control the lights fastest.)

This may all sound unnecessarily fancy for domestic applications. But take aviation. "There is a bit more than 25000 miles of wire in [a 747]," says Markkula. All that wire is installed in a wiring harness, with bundles of huge cable that takes a year to build.

"Then they go and install it in an airplane, and then they haul it around with them for the life of the airplane." The weight means added fuel costs.

"And then," he continues, "one of the wires breaks, and it can take months ... sometimes they just give up and either replace that whole section of harness or run a new wire." Plus, he says, the more the connections in a system, the lower its reliability. Implement all of the system with Neurons, and there's almost no wiring: "You've saved the weight, you've reduced the maintenance expense, and you've increased the reliability by orders of magnitude.

"Plus, what you can do is hook onto the network with another Neuron and a computer and say, give me your configuration, and you have a selfdocumenting wiring harness. Then you can go around and there's a little personality built into each node that helps you diagnose if it's working properly." Similarly, build a car with Lon technology and you could drive it into a service station and get a complete printout of your car's network in detail, down to something like, "the front brake pads are 52 per cent worn." One vision of the future: two guys in a garage in Los Altos or somewhere inventing a consumer gadget to read the networks.

"The only thing I'll say about Apple," says Markkula, who is still ViceChairman of the company, "is the analogy of the excitement I feel about this. I was sure when Apple began that we were going to be able to put something out into society that would be a useful tool, that would change the way people lived and worked in a positive way, and that was really exciting. That's something that gets my juices flowing.

"I think that exact same thing can be said about Echelon. I think that ten years from now, when there are lots and lots of products that use this technology, things will be cheaper, they'll be easier for people to interact with and deal with. I think it will change the way people live and work and run their lives in a way that makes things better. I think that we'll be able to build products in factories that are more complex than products we can build today, for a lot less. I think we'll have things in our homes that we can control without being confused."

It's been hard work, says Markkula. But, "The compelling thing for starting Echelon was, I'm getting a chance to start a new industry. I consider myself unbelievably fortunate to find another chance to do that. I don't think those chances come along more than once in a lifetime. I

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think I'm really lucky to have been able to do Apple and then have Echelon. If it happened a third time ... that's probably not fair. Somebody else should get it." He stops to laugh over the idea. "But I'd jump on it."

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Michael Dell

Photograph courtesy of Dell Corporation

The American Dream



All of the interviewees so far changed the face of computing by inventing new technology. Michael Dell is different: his great idea was a sales method. Dell started one of the first companies to sell PCs direct to the public, eliminating the distribution costs. It opened a European manufacturing facility in Limerick, Ireland, in 1991. Dell remains the CEO; the company is now a Fortune 500 company with 1995 revenues of nearly $3.5 billion.

Michael Dell is a very 1980s sort of computer company founder. He has no grand vision, he claims no great mission. Since he was a boy, all he ever wanted to do was make an honest buck. Now that he's a man (just -he is 25 years old) he seems to be more or less fulfilling his ambition. This year he expects to make half a billion of them. Many, including him, see his Dell Computer Corporation as a giant in the making.

Dell is in many respects a perfect representative of the world of the Pc. He even looks the part: his neat, compact, well-packaged dimensions hide what is obviously considerable processing power. He does not sit so much as whirr restlessly like a cooling fan (though, like his company's PCs, he is not obtrusively noisy). More to the point, he is totally committed to the PC in the way he runs his business. He suffers none of the patrician airs that characterise the mainframe and minicomputer industries, where manufacturers are more inclined to tell customers what to do than the other way around.


The result of this commitment is a company that, like him, is new to adulthood but well prepared to face it. This year Dell Computer Corporation confronts the severe tests of maturity. It intends to open up a European manufacturing arm, and has launched a new range of highpowered, upmarket PCs.

Dell is famous less for what he sells than how he sells it. He has cut out the middleman, the computer dealer, by offering his products direct to his customers. Smaller customers - single users and small businesses -are reached through advertising, larger ones - the corporate users that now account for about half of his business - by sales teams.

Like all PC manufacturers, Dell is particularly keen on corporate custom. Nevertheless, the people he has probably served best are the small businesses. Dell's products, while not particularly innovative, are well-designed and well-built as well as cheap. As Dell points out, people appreciate the small touches, like quiet fans and screws with nicely engineered knurled heads, that characterise the products. They especially appreciate the no-quibble money-back guarantee and a level of backup and support that earned the company top place in a 1989 Computer Weekly! Datapro user satisfaction poll.

So what is Dell's secret? An unusual dedication to sales and a linear attitude to business. He was, almost literally, a born salesman. He got his first cheque book at the age of nine, and had made $2000 selling stamps by the age of 13. Then, at 14, he developed a strong interest in marriage prospects - not his own, but everybody else's.

The scheme that was to make him his first fortune was simple, the way he explains it: American marriage licence applications are public record, and each couple has to provide an address to which the completed licence will be sent. "Where you are going to stay is usually somewhere new because you're getting married. So you probably want a newspaper. .. So we [he and schoolmates hired on a piecework basis] did a direct mail shot to all these newlyweds that said, 'Okay, now you're married you get the paper free for two weeks. If you don't want it call us up but if you do don't do anything because it will keep on coming.' A lot of people just kept taking the newspaper. We made $3 each [per subscription]. It was a huge success. I made $18000 when I was 17, still in high school, doing it Saturdays and Sundays."

Dell arrived at this simple but clever sales scheme as only an entrepreneur can, by striking out on his own after a short stint working as a salesman for the local newspaper, the Houston Post, convinced him it was a hard way to make money. Besides giving him enough money to buy a BMW, the scheme gave Dell a taste for dealing direct.

It was around the same time that he began to develop an interest in computers, through competing in mental arithmetic contests through the

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"number sense" club. "They allowed the people in this number sense club to use this teletype terminal after school. So I'd go in there and write programs in BASIC and send them off to some far-off place and an answer would come back and I was real fascinated with this thing, and so I kept playing with it and then I'd go to Radio Shack and hang out there, play with the computers, and I saved up my money and bought an Apple computer, wondered how it worked, took it apart and played with it..."

The seed of another idea had been planted, which germinated when Dell went off to the University of Texas with instructions from his mother to become a doctor. "I was still playing with these computers and taking them apart and I sort of had this way of upgrading them. I'd get a computer and soup it up and sell it to somebody ... kind of like you do with cars." Kind of like Michael Dell would do with cars - most of us would probably miss out the selling part.

Finding there was a "nice little business" there, Dell also discovered that "the cost of the materials was a whole lot less than the price they were selling for. So when I investigated I found that the dealers marked the computer up by 30 or 40 per cent over the price they were buying it for from the manufacturer, and charged that much for whatever they were providing - they'd call it support. If you constructed a business where you just made these products and sold them direct to the user without the dealer - didn't charge that ridiculous mark-up for something you didn't provide, but indeed provided something that was better but more efficiently provided - you'd have a wonderful, fantastic business."

In over an hour this was the only time Dell deployed any sort of superlative. Clearly, if there is one thing that excites Dell, it is finding a way of cutting out the middleman.

"Most people generally realise that the dealer doesn't provide much expertise. You can call us for free and we will give you lots of expertise. Obviously we have a semi-biased approach because we only sell our products, but the reality of the situation is that dealers will typically sell you the one they make the most money on instead of the best one for the end-user."

This healthy distrust of middlemen resulted in a computer company that dealt direct with its customers. When Dell's strategy first came to public notice, few took it terribly seriously. Most people assumed that somehow dealers were better - less risky, more personal - than a mail order operation. How wrong they were.

Dell comes from the same mould as Alan Sugar of Amstrad. Both are celebrated entrepreneurs - Dell is currently Inc. Magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year and has been the Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Young Entrepreneur of the Year for three years on the trot. Both have

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built their companies up from humble origins. Both are aggressive, market-oriented salesmen and neither is particularly interested in technological innovation. Like Sugar, Dell is not disposed to say how the computing industry should develop; in a remark that echoed a little less memorably Sugar's promise that he would build personal nuclear weapons if there was a demand for them, Dell said: "Weare basically a company that's just going to respond to what the customer demands. If they want pink keyboards, blue monitors and green computers, we're going to make them. It's not our job to decide what the customer wants. That's totally the wrong approach to business."

The right approach means a stoutly conservative attitude towards technology. It stands in total opposition to the approach of traditional computing heroes like Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, and head of NeXT. Dell's entire technological philosophy is based around the IBM PC standard, and his devotion to it is uncompromising:

This explains Dell's less than respectful attitude towards Apple. "I think they had their chance and I think they screwed it up. I think they didn't let the standard get big enough. They could have accomplished it by having low-end products and proliferating them at low cost. If they had had a $1500 Mac in 1988, 1989, 1990 there would be twice as many Macs as there are today."

There are few cracks to be found in this wall of technological agnosticism. For example, he professes no opinion as to which operating system will prevail beyond expressing a measured confidence in DOS. "Certainly Windows, OS/2 and UNIX have bright futures too, but there's such a huge installed base of DOS. Never in the history of the transistor has there been such an event as the Intel microprocessor and DOS. I think that momentum is not just going to click off."

But might not Windows take over from DOS? "Depends. Windows penetration on new PCs is probably about 35 per cent, so there's still a number of users who are saying: 'We don't need it, our applications don't run under it, and we are not going to pay the extra money for the extra megabytes of RAM, and the program itself, and the mouse, and the extra power of the machine.' Equally, others are saying that they've got to have it."

There is one flaw in this edifice of professional detachment: MCA -Micro Channel Architecture - the technology that underpins IBM's entire post-PC strategy. For Dell there is simply no argument: "Software that runs on MCA will also run on ISA. Software doesn't really know about what bus it's running on. All your software's going to run no matter what you've had.

"We've actually developed Micro Channel machines. We've got them in the labs, we could show them to you, we could show them to

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customers. Nobody wants to buy them. We're in the business of selling things people want to buy."

But even when persuaded to speculate about the future, Dell remains conservative. He seems to see nothing other than a version of the present with a few of the numbers changed and a few more markets conquered. "In 1992 we'll have the [80]586, which will offer several orders of magnitude performance improvement over where we are today. I think what you're going to find is that either with OS/2 or UNIX - I'm not going speculate as to which one is going to be more successful - there will be a proliferation of applications coming off the mainframes and minicomputers onto large, PC-based networks. You'll have the fault-tolerant characteristics common in minis. Starting in the early to mid-1990s the progression of microprocessors will begin to degrade the mainframe market, as the mini market started to decline."

His future may not sound all that exciting, but Dell doesn't care. Sitting atop a potential Fortune 500 company, he has sensibly stuck to the wise old adage that if it ain't broke, you shouldn't mend it. If anything is going to be broke, he clearly thinks it will be his competitors. And by competitors, he does not mean other mail order companies like CompuAdd. He means companies like IBM. And just to prove it, he managed to make one faintly incautious prediction. By the middle of the decade, he thinks the PC will have dispensed with the need for mainframe makers. "We'll be selling mainframes in 1995."

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((

Men in Suits

The early computing days saddled users with incompatible and unreliable hardware and technical complexity, but for those who braved those difficulties there was the sense of wonder and enchantment that comes with being one of the first to discover something new. Those who fought with computers in that era made heroes of visionaries like Apple's (now NeXT's) Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who liberated computing from the tyranny of IBM and the data processing department and gave it to the masses. But as small companies became large companies, many of the early visionaries either left of their own accord or were dismissed, unwilling or unable to adapt to the large corporations they had founded. In their place came marketers, to whom the computer was not so much a revolutionary device as a commodity. In Britain, the early pioneering native companies were replaced in the market by marketing subsidiaries of US successes. These industry leaders are less fun, perhaps, but they will shape the technology of the near future.

"

Mike Newton

Photograph courtesy of Apple

Voyage of Discovery


Appeared: April, 1991

In 1991, Mike Newton was the Managing Director of Apple UK. He has since been promoted to Vice-President and General Manager with responsibility for the UK, Ireland and South Africa.

Apple revolutionised the personal computer with the Macintosh, whose graphical capabilities have been much copied in the PC world. But with a proprietary system that isn't PC compatible, Apple is swimming upstream. Nonetheless, it's one of the top few computer manufacturers in all the major markets, and its customers are loyal, almost fanatical. In late 1990, Apple launched its first bargain range and moved to compete seriously in the mass market. The initiative was successful. But many saw this and other changes as a sign that Apple was losing its madcap, risk-taking edge, and mourned the loss.

With the launch of Windows 95 it's fashionable to predict that Apple's technology is no longer different enough for it to survive. As this interview shows, the same prediction was fashionable in 1991 - and Apple has increased its market share since then. In mid-1996, however, Apple announced substantial losses.

In 1994 Apple finally announced it would license its technology to other manufacturers, opening the way for Apple clones. In 1993, it launched its first successful portable, the Power Book.

Newton left Apple in early 1996 to become Managing Director of Dell UK.


Apple's first, pioneering computer was sold under the slogan, "Newton ... 'A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought'." The Newton concerned was Isaac and most certainly not Mike, the man who was last year selected to head Apple's UK arm. Mike Newton shares little with his namesake and Apple's first role model. His mind is not to be found forever voyaging. He concentrates on the less turbulent waters -indeed, some might unkindly say the shallows - of businessthink. His mental voyages are unwaveringly set towards one destination: "We've got an opportunity to become a $1 billion operation in the UK within the next three years," he says.

That's where he wants to go, and notwithstanding recessions and slump, where Apple UK will imminently be.

Newton is not - pardon the pun - Apple to the core. He spent 16 years in ICL and Prime Computer. Neither is remotely like Apple. ICL was the Leyland of British computing, an uncomfortable conglomeration of struggling firms with an unhealthy dependency on public contracts. Prime is one of the many minicomputer companies that has been chased into niches by precocious microcomputer manufacturers like Apple and Sun.

Migrating from this sort of world to Apple was, "Very much a culture shock."

But the shock was not just the result of changing from one culture to another. Apple is more than a company. It is, at least according to its own mythology, a way of thinking. "There are very special things about Apple. The people have a passion for the things they sell. That's something I've never come across in any other company I've b~en in."

Was it wise, then, for the head of Apple Europe, Soren Olsson, to bring a man with such a colourless background into the crazy, madcap world of the Mac? Newton suggests a John Major style of leadership: efficient, capable, but undemonstrative, undramatic and understated. Even his sales talk is measured. Is this what Apple, the corporate icon of entrepreneurial individualism and technological innovation, needs?

Apparently so. Even Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, the pioneer of personal computing, and now the head of NeXT, has taken to wearing suits (but what suits).

Newton's selection was widely welcomed within the industry. The new range of machines demands a strong marketing background, an enthusiasm for dealing with the mechanics of sales and distribution, and a steady hand. Newton seems to have all of these qualities. He recognises that one of his major challenges will be creating the infrastructure necessary to support what is set to become a high volume operation.

"Suddenly the systems you have in place today are inappropriate for a company $1 billion in size. So the systems, the procedures, the

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organisations, and everything, need to be reviewed with a mind to becoming that $1 billion company."

How else will he change Apple UK? "I think I'd like to encourage us to be less introspective, perhaps. Our products can achieve many, many things for many people, and I think what we have to do to really secure our success is to focus far more on how we can present those products to large corporations, how we can extend our leadership in education, and how we can be more successful in selling to small businesses."

This sort of talk is a far cry from the excited chatter that greeted the Mac's precursor, the Lisa, an alien machine with a little box you rolled around the desktop, a power switch that wouldn't respond unless the Lisa decided it was time to switch off, and a floppy disk with more notches in it than Casanova's bedpost. These days, personal computing is a professional, big budget, multinational business demanding people who will manage change rather than precipitate it.

The biggest change that Newton has to manage is the move into the mass market. In recent years, under former Pepsi boss John Sculley, Apple has concentrated most of its efforts on cultivating an image of exclusivity, principally to attract corporate buyers and develop new niche markets such as publishing and graphic design.

But Apple has now to become a company big enough to embrace the entire market. "We rationalised that the high margin was required to maintain the proprietary operating system and everything that goes with maintaining a proprietary product range."

Even with the price cuts, the Mac is still no budget option. A 386 PCcompatible system remains cheaper, and it can now support the Mac-like Windows 3 graphical user interface which in many respects - notably in the areas of multitasking and virtual memory management - is more sophisticated than the Mac operating system.

Newton, however, rejects the idea that the new systems are a panic response to the growing success of Windows 3. We also have the imminent launch of System 7 - don't we?

"As you know," Newton replies, "it has slipped reasonably considerably." You could put it that way.

However unspecific its launch date, System 7 is clearly seen as a crucial development. "It isn't just another rev[ is ion ] of the Mac OS [operating system] with a few bug fixes and new features," says Newton. "It is a fundamental step forward." It will offer all the advantages of Windows 3, seamlessly stitched into the Mac environment.

But will System 7 and cheaper systems be enough? Without high price margins to protect it, how can Apple continue to compete alone against companies harbouring behind the protection of industry standards, when even manufacturers producing high-end products, like Sun, are

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allowing their products to be cloned? "The bottom line is you've got to be better. If you can't be better, you

might as well join the rest." And this is a philosophy that will not, he insists, be undermined by

Apple's new, mass-market strategy: "I think it's important that the Macintosh experience is one that is consistent across the range of our products, and I think we've always held out that we don't want to compromise at any point and say this is a cheap Macintosh. Any Macintosh might be low cost, it might be high priced, but it will give you the same basic solution ... and experience."

The purity of the standard is clearly seen by Newton as essential to the Mac's success, as the key advantage. "I think it's critical. It is a purity that's fundamental to what we're offering people and which Windows 3 is already beginning to sacrifice." He is ready with examples of inconsistencies.

However, Apple's control over the Mac standard has been absolute, despite one or two attempts to develop a clone market. Can this last? There are heavily coded signs that a little flexibility may be on the cards.

"The secret is the operating system, as opposed to the hardware architecture," Newton says. "I think the open question at the moment is, 'Will Apple be prepared to license this operating system in the future?' In principle that question doesn't have a big 'No' at the end of it." We are left to draw our own conclusions.

One new direction might be towards the development of portables. This is a nut Apple has so far failed to crack, despite an attempt last year.

"I know that a substantial part of the company's R&D funds and efforts are going into positioning us in that market in a strong way."

One can speculate - Newton won't - that the processor such portables could use might be based around a RISC chip. It's an intriguing idea, given Apple UK's decision to take a 30 per cent share in ARM, the company spun off from Acorn to develop RISC technology. It is certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that the investment may indicate a future line of product development.

"We see an exciting technology in the ARM chip. It is one that is particularly well addressed towards high-powered, low-cost RISC applications - cellular phone technology, portable computing, controllers within existing PC systems. There are many ways we could make use of RISC so our investment in the ARM project was to try and get closer to a particularly exciting example of the technology."

The real cause of the excitement over the ARM initiative, however, is that it is an initiative, a sign that Apple's UK subsidiary might be shaking off its old subsidiary attitudes. Newton, naturally, disagrees that there ever were such attitudes: "I think we've seen a number of innovations,

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such as the Apple Centres, which have been adopted throughout Europe and are now being adopted in the United States. Certainly within Europe we're one of the two largest subsidiaries, second to France, and making the pace."

Nevertheless, Apple UK, unlike Apple France (and Apple Europe, which has its headquarters in Paris) remains just a sales and distribution operation, making no contribution in terms of research and development or manufacturing. The French subsidiary has always exercised far more influence, culminating with the promotion of former Apple France General Manager, Jean-Louis Gassee, to president of the company's products division in Cupertino.

The balance of power, however, is changing. After a year of management musical chairs, culminating in Gassee's departure and Michael Spindler's ascent to the presidency, Apple Europe is now run by Soren Olsson, who achieved considerable success running the company's Swedish subsidiary. A new product range is in place. The international market now accounts for 42 per cent of Apple's turnover and growth in Europe and the Pacific Rim is likely to increase that proportion. Newton's job is to secure a more prominent role for the UK as new alignments and power blocs form. It is a job which begins at home, with raising the company's market position.

"I think in France, for example, we're rivalling IBM for market share, in Sweden the same. I see no reason why we shouldn't be doing the same thing in the UK in a few years."

According to Frank Rose's book on Apple, West of Eden, in January, 1983, a year before the Macintosh's launch, Steve Jobs outlined his vision for its future at a meeting for the machine's development staff. On his flowchart he wrote an epigram: "It's better to be a pirate than join the Navy." It was a revealing summary of the attitudes that prevailed at the company under Jobs's leadership.

The company has changed since then: Jobs has gone, Sculley's in charge, Apple is a Fortune 100 company. Newton is no pirate. The man wears a suit - a dark, blue suit, an IBM suit. He tries to stir up some of the old passion - "Apple started with the concept that we were going to change the world, one desktop at a time. And I think that feeling is still alive and well at Apple." He is unconvincing. Apple - and who can blame it? - has been press-ganged by its own success into signing up. Its days of buccaneering across the high seas of strange thought are just a fond memory.

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Howard Ford

Photograph courtesy of Cellnet

Howard's Way



Every interviewee in any part of the computer industry talks about IBM, which set the standards for microcomputers with its release of the Pc. Peter Horne and Hermann Hauser both talked about the devastating effects on their companies of IBM's domination.

Oddly enough, IBM itself suffered from its own success in setting the standards. The world's biggest computer company, IBM has lost ground in the PC market, but it still sells more software than Microsoft - and also is a leading manufacturer of mainframes, minicomputers, UNIX workstations and chips. In 1991 to 1993 IBM famously declared the first losses in its corporate history.

IBM was already in the red when Ford, then Head of the UK's Personal Systems Division, gave this interview. At the time, then CEO John Akers was attempting to salvage the situation by breaking the company up into chunks. Ford, as Head of the Personal Systems Division, was responsible for selling PCs and PS/2 computers into the UK market. By early 1993,

Akers was replaced by Leo Gerstner, who reversed the break-up and started welding IBM back together; the company returned to profitability in 1994.

Ford left IBM in 1993 to become Managing Director ofCellnet.

Howard Ford likes the circus elephant that features in all those ads for OS/2.


"It's a joke against ourselves," he says. Ford is head of IBM UK's Personal Systems Division, and he's well aware of how others tend to see the company: "Large and lumbering." That's why he likes the elephant: "This is a very nimble, quick, versatile, multi-purpose kind of elephant."

Elephant or no elephant, Ford is in charge of his own particular circus ring.

"I am totally responsible for everything that the PC business does. So if it does well, there's only one person to say 'Well done' to, but also there's only one person to blame."

Ford calls it, "running your own business within a big company," and says IBM intends to do more of it.

Ford has been with IBM for 19 years; he joined it almost straight out of Cambridge University, where he studied chemical engineering, and travelled what he calls the "classical IBM route," from sales and marketing into sales management. Ford spent a fair bit of time in the retail industry - but he's also worked in other sectors, like government, general manufacturing and commercial business.

Ford took up his present position in January 1991 after spending about a year in Paris as assistant to Renato Riverso, President of IBM Europe. That, Ford explains, was primarily an educational assignment, "To see how the IBM company would run, how it was formed and how it operated in every different country in Europe. They're very different, and that's the surprise."

This was even before the changes of the last year. Ford makes the old IBM sound somewhat like the US itself: a group of disparate entities with a sort of federal governing body but individual rights.

Devolution continues on through the division. "My vision is that we push the decision-making down as far as we possibly can in the organisation. Many service-based companies talk about pushing decision-making to the point of sale. The people that I have in this particular business will have quite a lot of power, and they can take risks and decisions."

Not everyone likes this, as Ford admits. "People fall into two camps. Some want to be told what to do, have an ordered life, a structure in which they work. Then there are people that thrive on having an unstructured environment, at least at the edges, so they can try new things. And what I say to my people is, if they're not making mistakes, they're not trying hard enough. But if they keep on making the same mistakes, they're not learning, and they will be changed. So, with responsibility comes accountability."

Ford says the experience of seeing the other national companies was broadening. "In an ideal world we'd all be in the same place, but you'd be surprised how different the markets are in different countries around the world."

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Partly, this is because IBM started up at different times in different places, but partly, according to Ford, "it has to do with the differences in the way the markets are structured in different countries." IBM can't ignore these differences. "What might work in one country, you're probably sure that you can't apply it in every country, or other countries." Ford stresses that these differences are more in the way IBM gets products to market than in the products themselves. Ford's 15 months in Europe also showed him how the company works financially.

Ford's division is broader based than it sounds. First there are products: PS/ls, PS/2s, portables, ruggedised industrial PCs, software, plus all those options and add-ons like keyboards, screens, disk drives, cards and memory. Personal systems doesn't include printers, which were spun off into Lexmark, or RS/6000s, which have their own division. Beyond that, there are services and consulting businesses, which are being built up, not just here but worldwide. Finally, there is a small finance group, with its own chief financial officer.

Ford also sits on two boards. One is national, the eight-man board of IBM UK. The other is the pan-European personal systems board, which meets once a month in Paris and has weekly conference calls. Ford's freedom is not absolute.

"y ou have to run a PC business - products, pricing and some of the other things - from a European perspective. You can't do very different things in different countries. We work within bands, but we have a panEuropean pricing strategy."

Ford also has the freedom to compete, not just with companies outside of IBM, but with IBM itself: this spring IBM announced it was going to start making its own clones, to be badged by a wholly owned subsidiary, Ambra. The first ofthese machines appeared in the summer of 1991, and they are widely seen as competition for IBM's own PS/l range.

This impression, says Ford, is wrong. To begin with, he argues, in other industries no one thinks anything of it when, for example, Sony starts up a wholly owned subsidiary (Aiwa) to sell budget-priced imitations of its products. If people are determined to buy a cheaper brand, maybe giving up a few features and functions in the process, Sony still benefits - but the image of its own brand doesn't suffer. Why should Sony let that business go to another company? Why shouldn't IBM follow this tried and tested path?

One might argue that whereas lots of people don't know that Sony owns Aiwa, almost the first thing anyone says about the Ambras is that they're IBM's clones. This, says Ford, was not intended; it's mostly due to the press coverage. Since Ambra was launched, Ford also notes that a number of IBM's competitors have announced similar low-cost products, but within their own brand names.

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Taken all together, he says, "What it shows us is that the strongest and most endearing feature we have is three letters called 'IBM'. The brand we have is extremely powerful."

Ford describes Ambra as an experiment, and says the company has learned more from it than just the value of its own name. For example, the machines are made in the Far East, following established clone practice.

But, says Ford, "What we learned by doing this, by going to various component manufacturers, in terms of how we ourselves, in manufacturing and development capability, compare to the best of what the industry has around the world was invaluable, and we now know, are absolutely sure, that in our manufacturing plants in Greenock we can build those products to equivalent or superior specification for less cost. So you can probably guess that if we can do it ourselves, then the question is why not? That's one of the debates at the moment."

For Ford, there is no competition between the Ambras and the PS/ls. The PS/1, he explains, is for the person who wants to buy a computer, take it home, plug it in, and start working. The Ambras are for people who know about PCs, know how to stick them together, and just want to buy an ordinary box to run their applications on.

We tend to think of IBM as a hardware manufacturer, and for good reasons: mainframes, minis, PCs and even Selectric typewriters. In fact, according to Fortune, IBM sells five times as much software as Microsoft. In the battle of the operating systems, however, IBM is definitely seen as the underdog.

Ask Ford what advantage OS/2 2.0 has over Microsoft's Windows NT, and he'll smile and tell you that it's a big advantage that OS/2 is shipping now. Otherwise, both are 32-bit operating systems, both support DOS and Windows applications, and both are graphical user interfaces.

To Ford, one of the most important things OS/2 has to offer is reliability - he cites the beta test programme, which went on for a year and involved 30000 users. More than that, he points to IBM's track record.

"I think one thing IBM's good at if you think about it is operations systems software. That's basically been its business."

Pink, the operating system IBM is developing under one strand of its agreement with Apple, is due sometime in the mid to late 1990s. OS/2, Ford explains, will feed into it. "Part of its core and its heart will be OS/2."

Pink is only one of five areas in which IBM is working with Apple. The others are: Kaleida, a multimedia project; Taligent, the development of object-oriented software; PowerPC, an initiative that also includes Motorola to develop a new family of RISC chips and Power Open - a new open systems environment using AIX, the Mac interface, and the Power

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RISC architecture that will enable a system to run both Mac and AIX applications on RISC-based hardware from both Apple and IBM; and Enterprise networking, which is intended to make it easier to connect Apple Macs to IBM networks.

Of this last, Ford says, "In the world in which IBM exists today we fully recognise that there are very few customers that only use our products. Virtually all customers use a variety of different people's products. We need to work in an open environment."

Apple is, of course, not the only company with which IBM has agreements. A July cover story in Fortune magazine put the number of alliances at over 4000 for IBM North America.

Ford says, "If you look at many of the alliances we form it's because some of the developments are so expensive, so costly, that it's just impossible for one company to shoulder all the costs and risks involved. Take the joint development of colour screens with Toshiba. That's a $1 billion investment for the two companies to produce one component of a portable product."

The alliances also help IBM keep at the leading edge: "If you want to have technological leadership in a technological age, you need to invest a hell of a lot in these sorts of ventures. And so you see us recently with Toshiba and Siemens on the 256 megabit chips."

IBM also has a close relationship with Intel; the two companies have a joint development facility near Boca Raton, Florida.

"Weare the only company that can amend Intel designs, and the only company that can manufacture Intel products," says Ford. The two companies had a ten-year agreement that expired this summer; a new ten-year agreement has been signed.

Alliances and technological advances are one direction IBM is going; the other is to beef up the services it offers and run, or "drive," them as separate businesses. The consultancy practice and services group are both part of this. Essentially, as Ford explains it, IBM has now started to sell separately the expertise it used to bundle with its products.

"Weare intending to be the biggest services company in the UK, and we're well on the way there." To run its consultancy practice, IBM hired a senior partner away from Booz Allen Hamilton, who is managing the accreditation process for IBM's consultants - who, Ford hastens to add, do not simply install IBM products.

"We work, and we believe we need to work, in a truly heterogeneous world."

That heterogeneous world, though, is changing fast, and not just at IBM. Ford says it's a textbook marketing pattern: industry grows rapidly, pulls in a lot of new entrants who see they can make money, matures and then comes to a shakeout.

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Ford thinks the shakeout that's happening now in the business will leave the IT industry with a small number of larger companies. For customers, he thinks figuring out who to buy from is a key issue: no one wants to be left with the equivalent of a Beta VCR.

"It's difficult for customers these days to decide what they're going to do," he says, "and who they're going to buy from. Certainly, IBM is the market leader and intends to stay the market leader."

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Rikke Helms


At the Helms



Borland, like Symantec and Microsoft, dates its founding to the pre-PC era of microcomputers. Like Howard Ford, however, Rikke Helms found herselfworkingfor a company in trouble.

Danish-born Helms is one of the few women in a top business position in European computing. She helped found Borland Scandinavia, and was Managing Director of Borland UK from 1990 to 1994, when she left to become Managing Director of MapInfo.

Helms was speaking a little less than a year after Borland's merger with Ashton- Tate, which had been a market leader in databases (it was the publisher of dBase) as far back as the CP/M era. Borland's share prices had dropped after the merger, and a number of analysts believed the merger had hurt Borland badly; although Helms defended the decision here, by 1993 Borland was in trouble. As then Borland CEO Philippe Kahn discussed in his interview, the company did enter the office suites market. By 1995 Kahn agreed the merger had been a mistake.

In the fall of 1995 Helms, now Rikke Helms- Wienszezack, moved to IBM to become General Manager of IBM Software Marketing for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), which put her in charge of 2500 people and revenues of$3 billion.

When Rikke Helms isn't running Borland UK she's looking after her farm, stocked with four horses and a variety of dogs. Only one of the dogs comes to work with her.


Helms talks about herself as "addicted" to Borland's culture, which, she says, "is pretty much a bunch of fighters that think it's great to compete with big companies like Microsoft. I think that is first of all what I'm here for, still being very, very eager to wake up in the morning and say, 'Yahow! I'm going to work and I'm going to compete with Microsoft!' or whatever."

She is not, of course, talking about Borland as a direct competitor to Microsoft, except in certain areas. Borland's traditional strengths -databases, languages, development tools - are the areas it still expects to concentrate on. The company has no plans to take on Microsoft or Lotus on other grounds, such as office solutions.

"We don't have that. It's never, ever been what the company believed in. Weare building what we've always believed in: best of breed products within the categories where we are represented. Of course, there are always temptations to start seeing what we can do to meet that competition, but it will never, ever be what Microsoft or Lotus have in their office solution. That's where they're competing against each other."

Borland, she says, is built on databases, object-orientation and programming tools.

Object orientation in particular, she says, "is something that Borland has believed in for many years, because it makes programming much easier for users." She adds, "It doesn't go only into our programming languages; it will go into our mainstream product line, and it's part of our overall product strategy for the future."

At the same time, Borland is committed to developing products on all platforms - DOS, Windows, OS/2, UNIX - except, at the moment, the Mac, an area where Helms says the demand isn't enough to warrant the investment.

"Weare not a one platform only company," she says, "we don't believe in that. We believe that we have very independent users out there who want to have a mixture of platforms for whatever need they have." And, she says, "Users get more educated. They know about spreadsheets, and word processors, and databases, and they will pick the tools that they think are the best tools for them to believe in. But of course - we have the saying 'Nobody's getting fired for buying IBM' - and nobody's getting fired for buying Microsoft now. Microsoft wants to own the world; that's just how it is." Does it make sense, she asks rhetorically, to try to enter already crowded markets?

Helms greets without enthusiasm the suggestion that Borland could acquire a word processor or other office solution by buying or merging with another company. Partly, this is because her memories of the merger with Ashton-Tate are still so vivid.

"That was a very, very difficult period, not only for Borland but for me, because seriously I didn't know whether I was going to hang in there or

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whether they were going to choose Ashton-Tate's director of operations in the UK. We had operations of equal size, the same amount of people, and his experience in the UK market was much stronger than mine. They kept me as Managing Director, but the following month was a nightmare.

"You're forced to take two parts of two cultures - Ashton-Tate's and Borland's were so different - and put them together, make them work together and make them believe in each other's products from day one, when they have been competitors for years."

By now, she says, it's hard to look around the company and remember which people came originally from Ashton-Tate and which from Borland. At the time, though, she says, "I was ready to hang myself, because people just did not want to work together or try to go for the same goals. 1 think you had to be very tough and say in the end, come on, if you're going to fight each other, we will never be able to win out there."

Helms seems to have no doubts about the takeover, even though Borland's share prices have dropped since.

"The reason why the shares are dropping is not because we acquired Ashton-Tate. The shares dropped because some analyst in the US thought that we were too late on the market with our Windows products, which we are in a way. But we want to make sure that when we do bring products to the market they are ready."

Even after the acquisition, which brought the company to about 2200 people worldwide, Borland remains tightly controlled, with a streamlined style that doesn't allow for spending money on departments with little impact on sales - or training. Helms's answer, for example, to the difficulties of getting the former Ashton-Tate and Borland staffers working together, was not to send them all out on a team-building course.

"I was once invited in Scandinavia to go to one of these stupid survival training sessions. It was horrifying. The people were just cracking up, all of them. They were crying when they came back - they were scared to death. It's the most stupid thing I've ever attended. 1 don't believe in things like that."

Similarly, she says, "I would never, ever ask my team here, let's go out team building, let's go sit in a round circle and know about each other's weaknesses and forces, and stuff like that. For what reason should we do that? Weare a team here working together."

Just as Helms stresses Borland's strengths as a company, so she believes in building on people's personal strengths.

"When people come in and say to me, explain to me about my weaknesses, where do you want me to be better? 1 tell them, why do you always have to look at your weaknesses? Why don't you play on your strengths? Your strength is how you cope with your day-to-day life.

"If I get out in a stressed environment, or if I'm stressed generally, I

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use my forces, which is my energy. I use my determination. I use my very tough way of dealing with things, you know, decision, decision, decision. That's how I cope with a stress situation. I might one day crack and fall apart - nobody knows - but that's how I deal with those things, and those are my strengths. It could be my weakness as well, but those are my strengths and that's why I'm using them."

Helms believes that a lot of the company's spirit still comes from its CEO, Philippe Kahn.

"He's a very, very great motivator. He's a great visionary person, and he is still the guy who is driving the company. Philippe is in touch with almost everybody around - I receive messages daily on different stuff from him, and he wants to know what is happening."

When Helms talks about Borland, she credits Kahn in a way that most other UK managing directors don't.

She thinks this is only partly because of Kahn's driving influence. More than that, "Excuse me for saying it, but I think there is a lot of male dominance - protectionism - when they don't want to talk about anyone but themselves, not the leader of the company or the CEO." And most managing directors are men: at a recent dinner for women in the computer industry, she says, there were just two managing directors.

"I hope that I'll see more females in this position in the future; I think it's a need. I think we have another view. I think we are more family oriented, more loyal. We don't have to have this huge ego; we don't have to stand in front and say, 'I am the father of this company, I have built this company from scratch.' Of course, I'm proud of what I've been doing, no doubt about that, but there are so many other things that I prioritise in my life. I don't have to have a glorious role."

At the same time, though, she says, "Business is fun. I think the reason why I also think it's fun being in this job is because it's something I've grown up with. My grandmother was the first female MD of a company. She was building up her own cookie company in Denmark selling these butter cookies, and that was in the end of the 19th century. That was just so unusual that she as a woman was building up this company, and so that's a part of the whole tradition, that we have a lot of independent women who are just used to doing business. The whole background of my family is business people, and it's fun.

"I love business. I think it's great fun. I love trading. I love all the things that make things happen or make us sell more, whatever, that's in your blood."

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David Svendson


Playing to Win



David Svendson is the Managing Director of Microsoft Limited, the UK and Ireland branch of the biggest software company in the business. Like Helms, he found himself in charge of an international subsidiary of a major us software company. Svendson's battle, though, was not to lead his company through difficult times but to compete for the top spot in desktop applications software.

It may seem surprising now, but at the time of this interview Microsoft had only just become the number one UK software company: until early 1991 that spot belonged to Lotus. Microsoft has remained there ever since.

The database product here referred to as Cirrus was released as Access. The Justice Department eventually (in 1995) acquitted Microsoft of the

complaint that it had taken unfair advantage of its dominance of the operating systems market to take its lead in applications software. However, a proposed merger with the personal finance software company Intuit, then the number two consumer software company, was stopped. By 1995, Microsoft held 90 per cent of the office suites market.

David Svendson's earliest days with Microsoft were spent making telephone calls from the toilet. While he has been the Managing Director of Microsoft UK and Ireland since 1988, this was back in Australia, where he started with the company in 1984. At that time, Microsoft's Sydney outpost was a corner in the company's warehouse, and Svendson, who


was the sales and marketing manager, explains that the building was covered with a tin roof.

In high summer this roof let through all the blistering summer heat. Even worse, he says, "during the peak summer season you'd get this tropical summer downpour, and being a tin roof it would just ring with noise. So there was only one place in fact where you could hear."

Before joining Microsoft, Svendson did what he calls the "usual travelling stint," spending about five years touring around Europe and north Africa, mostly on a motorbike. He is a qualified accountant, and between trips he had a variety of jobs, including working for an insolvency company.

When he finally settled in Sydney he decided that accounting really wasn't for him. But insolvency work had given him experience in general management, running companies while they were winding down. Svendson decided on a plan that included getting some experience in sales and marketing and he also completed an MBA at Sydney's Macquarie University.

"It was purely by accident that I fell on Microsoft, back in 1983," he says. "It was through a mutual friend who had set up the first high street dealership in Sydney for micros." Microsoft had been shipping Multiplan for some time, but DOS and the first version of Word had just come out, and the company was on the eve of shipping its Macintosh products. "Microsoft in those days was a technical company that shipped an operating system, languages and Multiplan, full stop."

Svendson's move to the UK coincided with the beginning of Australia's bicentenary year, 1988. "I had a very sad New Year's Eve on a Singapore Airlines plane," he says, "mid-somewhere saying Happy New Year to my fellow passengers in the middle of the night. I got here about 7:30 on a very depressing, cold, wet, grey morning, and I almost decided I'd made the wrong decision." Now, almost five years later, he says, it was "the best thing I could have done."

When he arrived, Microsoft UK, which celebrated its tenth birthday on March 23rd of this year, had about 40 people and was generally felt to be performing under par. "Clearly there was a lot more potential for Microsoft here in this country," Svendson says. "Microsoft UK was in fact the first subsidiary that was started outside of the US." At that time the French and German subsidiaries were doing better than the UK bran<;h, which he attributes partly to differing market conditions and timing.

"The secret of success in all industries has been to get into local markets early, and with France and Germany that was the case. They started soon after the UK, they localised early, they met the local market conditions early, and as a result of that - and, of course, the fact they did

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a very good job - they are now the leading software vendors over there by a long margin. Both France and Germany left the UK well behind."

However, he says, "It's not fair to say that the UK was therefore doing a poor job." He sums this up simply: in France and Germany, Microsoft was the first software company, while in the UK, Lotus got in first, got on top and stayed on top until this year.

Lotus, of course, wants the top spot back. To that, Svendson says only, "Well, it's a pretty competitive world out there. They're good at their job, I think we're reasonably good at ours, it'll be fun fighting it out." He obviously relishes the prospect.

Svendson has a proprietary way of talking about the company. He is, for example, Chairman of the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) and asked why, he says simply, "I didn't like people stealing my software."

Microsoft itself is facing two legal challenges, one the Apple suit and the other an investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Both centre on Windows.

In the Apple suit, he explains: "The judge for the case has reached the conclusion, still up for appeal, that says Apple does not have a case to show (a) it has copyright and (b) we have broken that copyright for the Macintosh interface." Essentially, the case came down to ten points of similarity and Apple had to show that those things were not included in the licensing agreement between the two companies.

The FTC inquiry is more complex. "The starting origins were clarity as to why we would put forward a joint strategy of OS/2 with IBM but then come out with Windows and go on terribly well in that way. It was a general and administrative inquiry and still is, but it's now a bit more specific. "

"But of course, to the whole charge of steering the industry wrong by pushing or advising them about OS/2, the answer is absolutely, categorically 'no'. We have always, always, been missionary zealous about the graphical user interface and we have always had a Windows strategy along with the OS/2 joint strategy with IBM. It was a joint statement that said, "Windows for this layer of PC and OS/2 for that layer."

In fact, he says, when Windows 3.0 was launched, Microsoft had more programs working under OS/2. "But the fact of the matter is that when Windows 3.0 came out, it took the world by storm. It actually caught us somewhat with our pants down. We were surprised at how fast the movement to Windows happened."

Svendson puts Windows in the operating system category. Partly, this reflects Microsoft's marketing plans: as of July 1992 DOS and Windows are sold bundled together. But it also has to do with a vision of the computing world where everything runs under Windows, from pen-

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based notepads to PCs running under the Windows/DOS combination, to file servers running under NT Windows.

Svendson says he is in an applications war; he's also in an operating systems war and he compares OS/2 unfavourably with NT Windows. "NT Windows is 32-bit, which is where all the new, powerful operating systems should be operating. It's everything that OS/2 should have been."

On top of that, it's Windows. It has, says Svendson, "all the personal niceties that the PC industry has brought to the party, and that's largely Windows-based, a nice front end system, easy-to-use interface."

But it crashes. This objection doesn't impress Svendson. His theory seems to be that there were always crashes and it's just that we see them now because of the millions of users, although he agrees it would be nice to get rid of them entirely.

Applications, however, are Svendson's favourite subject, and they are some 60 per cent of Microsoft's business. He says the company has always had to fight hard for what he calls a "decent share" of the applications market, attributing this to the company's having been a late starter in that area.

"Certainly in the English-speaking countries it's been a huge barrier to our aspirations," Svendson says, "because somebody else owns these standards" - like Lotus with spreadsheets, or W ordStar and then WordPerfect with word processing. Svendson actually derives inspiration from WordPerfect's climb to the top of the word processing heap.

But, he says, Microsoft has gained the advantage now: "What has changed that whole situation has been the advent of Windows. We were very early shippers of the Windows versions of Word, Excel and so on. Bear in mind we cut our teeth on the Macintosh products, so we were a good many iterations into our GUI application products."

He adds, "What that has given to the industry is a whole new fresh start, and it's made it easier for companies like ours, who have made the right strategic choice of investing in Windows, to actually gain market share, and we have leadership now in the Windows market."

The one major application area that Microsoft hasn't been involved in until now is databases. That is changing: this year the company merged with Foxbase, and it's also working on its own database, codenamed Cirrus. The Fox products will give Microsoft access to the xBase market, Svendson explains, while Cirrus will target those who want to write Windows-based database applications.

The key to the company's way of thinking, however, is that it wants to be number one in any market it's in.

As for what being number one actually means, Svendson says: "It's not so much beating everybody else. It's being number one, being the best, doing the best job, satisfying the customer the best, making the best

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spreadsheet and the best word processor, and making the best job of integrating all that - but not winning. Because winning then goes into tactical battles, unfair tactics and so on, and we absolutely don't do that."

In the end, though, he doesn't name either applications or operating systems as the big issues in the industry for the 1990s. Instead he cites "service, providing service in the most effective way." To that he adds, "Survival."

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Dieter Giesbrecht


Looking After Number One



As David Svendson explained in the preceding interview, which was conducted a month after this one, Lotus was for a long time the leading software company in the UK, and had just lost the number one spot to Microsoft. Giesbrecht, who had only been in the job for a few months, believed he could get the spot back.

It never happened. In late 1994, Lotus reported poor results in Europe, and in 1995 the entire company was sold to IBM, primarily for its Notes group working software. Giesbrecht is still with Lotus as general manager of the central region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland and eastern Europe).

Dieter Giesbrecht is used to competing with Microsoft: he's been doing it ever since 1985, when he joined Digital Research as its Senior Vice President in charge of its European operations. In December 1991, he became managing director of Lotus UK - his actual title is Director, Northern Region, Europe.

Giesbrecht started out as an engineer; born in Munich, he graduated from one of Germany's technical universities with a degree in information technology. He has worked for American companies ever since, almost all of them based in the Boston area. He began, in 1969, with Mohawk Data Signs, the first company to sell a system to key data directly, first on to magnetic tape, and then on to disks. After that, it was


quality control in Xerox's Dutch office, and then a Boston company specialising in electronic testing equipment. There he moved into sales, ending up as sales manager for Europe. In 1980 he set up the central European operation for a spin-off company, and finally, in 1985, Giesbrecht was recruited into Digital Research by Paul Bailey, who also preceded him as Managing Director of Lotus UK. Bailey, who is now Lotus's Vice-President of International Operations, brought Giesbrecht into the company.

"I have quite a long relationship with him working in this industry," says Giesbrecht, who is glad to have come to Lotus. "This was a very good opportunity, coming from a very small company. I had more responsibilities there, because it was all the European sales and marketing activities, plus you had engineering and manufacturing here in the UK. Coming to Lotus, the responsibilities are smaller, but they're within a larger company, so overall I'd say my revenue responsibility and how much I will contribute to the overall success of the company is higher than it was at DR. This is a very exposed position, there's no question."

Giesbrecht has had to learn about the company very quickly, and what he saw surprised him.

"Before I came to Lotus, my impression was that it was a two-product company - not a one-product company, as a lot of people thought in the past because Lotus was well known for its spreadsheet success and its ownership of that marketplace. I knew from experience in the marketplace that Lotus was also very well established in the presentation graphics market, so I saw these as the two key products. I was positively surprised when I joined the company to see it has a much wider portfolio. Today, with that portfolio, Lotus is very well positioned for the changes we will all see in the industry in the forthcoming years."

This is not just a question of products: it's also a question of platforms. "DOS and Windows are the two most important at this very moment,

but also UNIX and OS/2 - I personally hope that IBM is successful with the latest release of this product. Lotus is also committed to offer products for this platform - and of course the Mac marketplace. This is very important for a company like Lotus, because we cannot assume that, for example, the large enterprises will have a common platform."

In the 1990s, he argues, everything is going to be connected; in such a situation having common products across all the different platforms is crucial to selling into large corporates.

"We have the product portfolio. That's why I see Lotus as very well positioned in the marketplace. We are a real competitor to Microsoft."

Specifically, what surprised Giesbrecht were the communications products - cc:Mail, other mail products, and, most of all, Notes, Lotus's so-called "groupware" offering.

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Notes, explains Giesbrecht, "is becoming a major, major focus." There were other reasons why Giesbrecht feels encouraged. He praises

the motivation of the people within the company. But beyond that, he believes the company did well to restructure itself the way it did.

"It has been proven very successful," he says, "as we can see from the first quarter results. I think these are very encouraging, more than 35 per cent growth compared to last year, which is very encouraging and shows the company took the right steps."

Within the UK, Giesbrecht himself has been instrumental in changing the emphasis from products to markets. Both Lotus and Microsoft, he says, are focusing on corporate accounts.

"They are our prime customers in the end," he says, "there is no question. And what you can see in these large corporates is that in the 1970s, for example, the decision-making power on IT investment was clearly at quite a high level in the organisation, in the MIS department". With the appearance of the PC in the marketplace, this power diminished, and it became more a departmental decision, what to buy, what kind of equipment to buy, what kinds of applications should be used in the departments, so the MIS department lost some power: it was no longer a centralised decision-making process.

"But now, in the 1990s, this is changing again, because companies are no longer only looking for improving personal productivity, but for improving the productivity of complete departments, of the complete organisation, by using PCs. But they have to network those; networking is becoming a very important decision-making criterion and a big investment for the corporates. Therefore, this decision making is going back out of the individual departments and back into the MIS departments."

Central to this focus is Notes. "They're all talking about downsizing or rightsizing organisations,"

says Giesbrecht. "The large organisations are trimming down the middle management. It happens everywhere - in large companies like BT or the banks. So you need to put something in place to help, to compensate for that by using technology, and groupware software is an ideal tool to help that. That's an area where Lotus is focusing, very much so."

Part of Lotus's plan for Notes, he says, is to take it into multimedia -not in the common sense of games and entertainment, but in a truly business-oriented sense.

"You will see in later releases of Notes, for example, voice annotations, media annotation, so these are real business-oriented multimedia applications, we would say. That's an area we are addressing now." The company expects to add these facilities to Notes within the next 12 months. At the same time, graphical upgrades of both versions 2 and 3 of 1-2-3 for DOS are due out at the end of the second quarter which will include smart and

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context -sensitive help using multimedia - users will be able to toggle in and out of CD-ROM animation to help them learn the product.

The idea behind adding multimedia to Lotus's products, says Giesbrecht, is that, "Instead of writing a lengthy report explaining the spreadsheet and the scenarios you have played with, you can dictate your thoughts to the system, and at the other end the person who's working with your work will get that information immediately. That saves a lot of time, and increases productivity dramatically."

The company invests some 17 to 18 per cent of turnover in research. Most of this is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, although its word processing development is in Texas, home of Samna, which Lotus bought in J 991, and development for cc:Mail is in California. UNIX research and development is in Dublin, Giesbrecht explains, because there is simply more UNIX expertise in Europe, where the shift away from proprietary systems came much sooner than in the US.

What's surprising is to hear that Lotus is the largest software supplier in the UK - bigger even than Microsoft provided that you only look at products sold here through dealers. Giesbrecht admits the gap is closing.

"Two years ago we were selling twice as much as they were. But even last year we were larger than Microsoft. This year we'll probably be number two." Giesbrecht feels strongly about getting Lotus back to number one.

"I inherited a position where Lotus is number one, and I want to keep that, but that's a tough challenge. But I'm prepared to take that on, and I have a very motivated team here to do that."

One of the main planks in Giesbrecht's campaign is the potential for networking growth. There are some 70 million pes worldwide. Of these 25 million are connected in some way - but most only for sharing peripherals. Only about 3.5 million are actually properly networked.

"So," says Giesbrecht, "there's a real growth potential there, where we have seen only the tip of the iceberg, and by working with our channel partners and establishing a loyalty with them I think Lotus is in a very good position to be the major player in the marketplace."

Product for product, Giesbrecht says that Microsoft is definitely Lotus's main competitor, even though Lotus competes with other companies in small areas of the market - such as Borland and Quattro Pro in spreadsheets, for example. The one area that Microsoft has now entered (by buying Fox Software) that Lotus hasn't is the database marketplace. Giesbrecht says this will remain the case.

"Lotus does not have a database and is not developing one," he says categorically. "Database applications are the only area in the applications market which is not growing, and growing rapidly. Actually, the PC database market is stagnant."

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One of Giesbrecht's aims is to reduce the bureaucracy he finds around him, even though he says he thinks that "Lotus is more entrepreneurial than Microsoft, in some respects." He is still trying to streamline the operation. "On some issues you can discuss things until the cows come home, instead of analysing them and going forward and solving the problems."

Giesbrecht seems to relish the challenge of all this. "I am not afraid of competition," he says, adding, "Competition grows the market."

He goes on, "At that time Microsoft let a lot of developers believe that they thought OS/2 was the right one. That was the way of the future - Bill Gates said it - it will be on every Pc. And they changed, because they couldn't develop OS/2."

Microsoft, he says, "doesn't have a very good track record in developing operating systems, not at all." DOS, after all, wasn't developed by Microsoft - Microsoft bought it, and tinkered with it - not always to its advantage.

"It was a buggy product," says Giesbrecht, looking back at DOS 4.0. "They didn't do a thing until Digital Research came out with its DOS version, which I must say was very late in the game, anyway. Coming up with a competitive product should have happened at a much earlier time in Digital Research. Until then, Microsoft completely defocused on the further development of DOS; they focused on OS/2, and let the whole world believe that OS/2 was the thing for the future. And when OS/2 came out in its first release - well, everybody knows what the product was like. It needed a lot of PC performance, it was very slow, and the companies didn't take it up."

Even with Windows, Giesbrecht says, "again, it took them quite a long time to get it right. Release 2 was not a very good one, and was not successful. Release 3 became very successful, but again, a lot of corporates have not taken it up because of the low performance. It crashes and has low performance." However, he adds, "with 3.1 most of these problems have been solved."

Of the other trends Giesbrecht sees, one is to do with Notes: public services are emerging in the US which use Notes as their interface and offer storage for smaller companies that can't afford to build up their own storage capacity. He also looks forward to improvements in mobile computing and remote and wireless communications. He, like many others, dreams of a future in which he can put up an antenna anywhere he happens to be and dial into the network at his home base, rather than having to hunt around hotels in Sweden or elsewhere for the right plug to use.

"This technology will come," he says. He adds, simply, "I want it."

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Robert McConnell

Photograph courtesy of AMD

Chipping Away

Interviewer: David Brake


Andy Grove has already presented the view from Intel, the biggest and best-known supplier of processor chips for PCs, whose successive generations of chips - 286, 386, 486 and Pentium - have defined the market. One of the new threats Grove was facing came from AMD, which had begun to produce clones of Intel chips, just as Dell is a clone PC manufacturer. At the time of this interview, AMD had just won a legal decision that allowed it to begin production of its 486 clone chips, which used AMD hardware designs but Intel's microcode. AMD's chips are increasingly found in computers from even market-leading manufacturers like Compaq.

Robert McConnell, who has been with AMD since 1972, has moved to become Vice-President of the Embedded Products Division. In 1995 AMD was the fourth largest US supplier of integrated circuits and announced a merger with rival NexGen. Intel and AMD finally reached a full settlement in January, 1995. By 1995, AMD could count six out of the top ten PC makers among its customers.

Robert McConnell is Vice-President of the Personal Computer Products Division of AMD and in charge of the development of present and future CPUs. His division has big plans - by the middle of next year, AMD aims to produce a million 486s per quarter in its own plant. The company is also looking for partners with spare capacity.


"We think a reasonable objective is to have 20 to 25 per cent market share - at least by the end of 1994," says McConnell. He wouldn't be drawn on which third-party foundries might be considered to manufacture the additional parts, but said: "Anyone with 0.7 micron capability is on our list, from Japan, the US or Europe. Not Korea or Taiwan, however, due to some lack of intellectual property protection there."

He wasn't prepared to pre-announce the specifications of the 486s AMD is developing either, but dropped some pretty broad hints. To get the kind of market share AMD wants, he expects to have to offer most of the same variations of the 486 that Intel has, plus some of its own - but always following the same architecture. "Whenever we stack up against Intel we will be better or the same. We're going to consistently avoid the Cyrix game oflabelling things inappropriately."

You may know AMD only as a maker of Intel clone processors, but it is a billion-dollar semiconductor firm which employs more than 11000 people, and the processor side, known internally as AMD 1, provides less than 35 per cent of AMD's revenues. The rest come from sales of flash memory, programmable logic devices, embedded RISC processors and telecommunications products.

AMD 1 has already announced 486DXs running at 25, 33 and 40 MHz, plus a clock-doubled 50 MHz processor. The current CPUs use Intel's own microcode, thanks to a recent court decision in AMD's favour, but in early July AMD is expected to broaden its range of CPUs to include lowpower parts including 486SXs and to move its processors across to reverse-engineered microcode. AMD has promised its first Pentium-like processor by 1995 and the Chairman, Jerry Sanders, has stated the company's intention to launch a P6 equivalent at the same time as Intel.

McConnell believes that clock-doubling and clock-tripling are good compromises to keep bus speed at a reasonable level while improving performance, though he says the process doesn't make much sense after triple. It's fairly clear how AMD will use this: "99 MHz technology is a lot harder than 80 mHz. The 40/80 is likely to hold a unique place in the hearts of AMD engineers and customers." AMD hasn't yet announced that part, but McConnell said that AMD was going to be able to push its chips past 66 MHz by early next year.

He had some cautionary words about the speed improvements users can expect from processors next year. "There is a difficult transition ahead from 5 volts to 3 volts because the process technology will not support 5 volts any more. But when you move from 5 volts to 3 volts if you're lucky you can keep the frequency the same. The transition is going to leave people wondering, 'what happened to the performance improvement we are used to?' Usually there is a straight line - decreasing cost, increasing performance - and we're about to have a flat period."

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According to McConnell, prices should gradually decrease and not plummet. "It's in the long-term best interest of everyone for prices to decline in a controlled way, but it's important that this happens in sensible ways rather than 50 per cent price cuts like Intel made in the 386 arena last year."

The 386 market remains important for AMD, despite the increasing prominence of the 486. McConnell expects to sell 1.5-2 million 386s per quarter through 1994 and 1995. AMD's 386s and 486s come from different plants, so production of the former doesn't hold up production of the latter, which AMD claims is the case with Intel.

McConnell doesn't think 486s will outsell 386s until 1995, though the revenue AMD gets from 486s may exceed that from 386s by as early as the end of this year as prices for 386s decline further. "We'd expect SX prices to be in the $20 range by the end of the year - they're in the high twenties at the moment. We want to continue to sell as many 386s as possible and we can continue to make money as we lower the price."

Intel has heavily marketed OverDrive and Cyrix has plans underway to upgrade 386SXs and DXs to its 486SLC, but McConnell doesn't think much of upgrading. "Upgrades are a bad deal for the customer. You spend money to upgrade a processor, but you've still got the old hard drive, the old video card, the old everything. Consequently, people rarely do it. If they look at the reality of the situation they need a new pc." AMD is staying away from directly offering upgrade products, but not just because he thinks it's a bad idea. "We're not interested in developing a major retail channel and being out there competing with our customers. They don't really want us there - it prevents them from selling more systems. They would rather sell a new box than have someone upgrade their processor." That's not to say that AMD chips won't be used as upgrades through third parties, however - Kingston is one of AMD's customers and is involved in the upgrade market.

AMD is on the record as being sceptical about the Pentium's gaining significant market share before 1995, and McConnell concurs.

"Intel said they'll make about 100000 units this year and maybe a million next year into a 40 million processor market. Even in 1995, a lot more 486s than Pentiums will be sold, though if five million Pentiums are sold the revenues from each line will be pretty similar. On the current process and die size Intel can't make very many, and even in the next generation it will use four or five times the fab[rication] capacity of a 486, so there will have to be a long transition. The 386 was introduced in 1985 and didn't become the dominant processor until 1988; the 486 was introduced in 1989 and wasn't dominant until 1993. By that timetable, Pentium might be dominant in 1996 or 1997.

"We have argued about whether we should spend money developing

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Pentium or whether perhaps we should throw our hat in with MIPS or Alpha or PowerPC and go in a different direction. When you look at the situation objectively, though, Pentium will dominate."

Looking into the future at AMD's planned 586, he expects it to be significantly faster than the Pentium Intel will be selling at that stage, though not as fast as the P6. It will be fully compatible: "Whatever compiler helps programs run faster on a Pentium will help run [them] faster on our chip too - and it won't have to be our recompile. A Pentium recompile will make it run faster on our processor." Nonetheless, clock frequency improvements will not be AMD's only advantage. "It will be better superscalar than Pentium. Mike Johnson, who really wrote the book on Superscalar design - literally - is working on advanced x86 stuff."

Cyrix has announced plans to produce a superscalar processor that will run x86 software significantly faster without recompilation more than a year before AMD. McConnell is not impressed by this. "Cyrix is probably going to call their part a 5-something and try to take advantage of that without doing everything it takes - that would be my suspicion based on what they are doing so far. Weare not very pleased with that idea because it confuses the hell out of the marketplace. The Cyrix approach is an opportunity for fraud at the retail level. Period."

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Carol Bartz


Success Story

Interviewer: George Cole


Like Rikke Helms, Carol Bartz had to lead her company through a radical reorganisation. Like Dieter Giesbrecht, she was brought in from outside to take over.

Autodesk is a niche software company: its name is almost synonymous with computer-aided design (CAD). Based in Sausalito, California and founded in 1982 by John Walker, Autodesk hired new CEO Carol Bartz away from Sun in 1993 to reorganise the company. Its market-leading product, AutoCAD, lists for about $3500 and represented 86 per cent of the company's revenues in 1992-1993.

Bartz continues in her job. In late 1995, Autodesk began to move into geographic information systems; the company's projected 1995 revenues were $542.6 million, up 23 per cent from the previous year.

One of the hazards of being a woman in the information technology business is that you occasionally get asked really dumb questions. Carol Bartz, CEO and Chairman of Autodesk, received her fair share during a recent trip to Europe.

"Do you," asked one enlightened (male) journalist, "really think you are qualified for the job?"

"How do you cope with running a family and a business?" asked another.


These are dumb questions because Carol Bartz has a long and proven track record in the IT industry. After graduating with honours in Computer Science from Wisconsin University in 1971, Bartz sold computer services to the US banking industry before moving on to 3M, where she worked on computer output microfilm (in the days when everyone thought that disks would be too expensive for data storage). She then worked for DEC before joining Sun in 1983. Bartz held a number of positions at Sun, and in 1990, took on responsibility for the company's worldwide field operations. Last year, she joined Autodesk.

Autodesk is one of the fastest rising stars of the computer business. It was founded in 1982 by 16 people with just $59000 in capital. Today, Autodesk has 1533 employees, and is the world's sixth-largest PC software company and the leading supplier of desktop CAD systems, with revenues of $368 million. Much of this success has been based around one product: AutoCAD. This revolutionary software package opened the door to complex design and drafting on desktop PCs.

Autodesk boasts that AutoCAD offers 80 per cent of the functionality of a high-end CAD system for just 20 per cent of the price - the current version costs around £2800. All this has helped AutoCAD to set the standard for the desktop CAD industry, and over 788000 copies have been sold in more than 80 countries. AutoCAD has also spawned a giant support industry and there are now over 1100 application programs from third-party developers. According to Daratech, in 1992 Autodesk accounted for 56.3 per cent of world PC CAD software sales.

Autodesk spends around 14 per cent of its budget on R&D. Says Bartz, "It's not only how much money are we spending, but what kind of engineering are we doing? As a software company we know how to manage a product that's got well over a million lines of code and get it to the market on a regular basis. There are a lot of people who can't say the same."

Bartz adds that third-party developers playa key role in the shape of the final product: "Developers are vital to us. We provide the engine and they take us into so many, many vertical markets and that is really the breadth and strength of the company. People say to me, 'Autodesk is a one-product company, why do you want to get involved with it?' But it's not even close to one product. AutoCAD goes into so many market places, with so many applications and solutions when it finally reaches the end-user, that it's a 3000-product company."

The past year has seen Autodesk undergo some radical restructuring. The company now has two main groups - the Design Automation Group (DAG) and Emerging Businesses. Bartz sees design automation as an important next step for Autodesk:

"I believe that the growth of the company should centre around what it

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does best and so we have a strategy that uses AutoCAD as the engine and places adjacent products or product extensions around it. So you can cover the design space from the conceptualisation of what it is you want to design and manufacture, through to designing it, detailing it, drafting it, through to building, constructing and manufacturing it, and finally maintaining it. Not to mention the underlying concept, which is, 'how do you manage all that data?' "

The DAG includes the Autodesk Mechanical Division (AMD), which is developing a series of products that can be integrated with the AutoCAD engine during all stages of the design and manufacturing chain. Other groups within DAG are focusing on the traditional architectural, engineering and construction markets, as well as geographic information systems (for example, utility companies that need to use object-positionrelated databases to track roads and other geographic elements) and power plant design. This summer, AutoDesk announced a new strategy for its CAD family, which saw the Retail Products Division (RPD) absorbed into DAG. The Retail division was responsible for low-cost products like the AutoSketch and Generic CADD, which are designed for users who don't need all the features offered by AutoCAD.

The Emerging Businesses group includes multimedia products like the highly acclaimed 3-D Studio design and visualisation software. Bartz admits that she's a little cynical about the term "multimedia." "It means many things to many different people and while it continues to conjure up wonderful images in people's minds, we'll use it. In fact, true multimedia really has to combine voice and video and all sorts of other things in a product, so we don't technically fall under this definition, but I do think that the area of animation and visualisation is important to us for two reasons. Firstly, it's very clear that most things that will get built and produced in the future will have to be visualised ahead of time, whether it's for a presentation to management for them to understand the product or for a client to understand a building. There's quite a large investment made when you produce things, and there's an ever-growing need for users of AutoCAD products to be able to render in a high quality way, inexpensively. That's a space we're clearly after.

"The high-end visualisation market splits into two, so you have videography, people in film production using it for pre- and post-production. You also have it being used for images in commercials - a lot of the flying company logos you see in these were made on 3-D Studio. A lot of the games being developed are made with 3-D Studio, so it's a leading edge product. This market is growing dramatically because of people's need to understand things in three dimensions."

The idea of a designer's adding voice annotations to describe his or her work sounds appealing, and Bartz adds that it could also be used for

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editing: "I can imagine someone walking around a site and editing the design in real time using voice and mobile processing. There's a lot of interest in this area. This company is idea-rich and you are going to see a lot of products coming from us in lots of different areas."

One of these could be virtual reality: "VR is a good example of how we can bring ideas into the market from a variety of places. While we are working on VR applications inside the company I actually believe that there will be a virtual reality application that will be built in somebody's garage faster than a major corporation's going to bring it out, because there are a lot of people with great ideas and the proliferation of thousands of toolkits means that we will find applications which we can hopefully end up marketing, distributing and maybe even owning."

Other potentially big markets include the legal and medical professions: "Our multimedia products have already found themselves in these markets. In the legal market, a lot of crime and accident scenes are being re-created in the courtroom. There's a lot of controversy about whether you are swaying the judge and jury in an inappropriate manner, but what's interesting is that in some trials we're seeing competing concepts of re-creation, so here's my 3-D Studio image of what happened and here's yours. The point is that you're trying to help make it easier for the court to visualise a situation. This market is really going great guns.

"There are endless possibilities in the medical arena - to be able to show surgeries and medical techniques on screen without having to look at a real patient, to use multimedia as a training and consulting tool and as a way to extend medical documentation. My medical file is just paper, but it should also include video and images of whatever the doctor's trying to document."

Bartz stresses that Autodesk's research will continue to be driven by the design market: "We're putting a lot of effort into the new technology because first and foremost it enhances our design automation space and that's our main goal."

Bartz also has strong views on the place of women in the IT industry: "Classically, the IT industry has been growing so quickly that it's been a good place for women and minorities. That's changing a bit because it isn't growing so quickly and when businesses are tightening up is when it's the worst time for them and we see that's happening now. As far as women becoming CEOs is concerned, it's a big problem. The fact that I'm one of few points to that. I like to believe that it's because CEOs are picked by boards and most boards are dominated by white males in their sixties who only worked with white males in their careers, so they're not as comfortable having us running their companies. I happen to have an enlightened board that looked through that."

Schools are also partly to blame says Bartz. "I'm taking more interest

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in this subject because I have a five-year-old daughter. I can't speak for the UK, but in the US there have been studies that prove that young girls are being discouraged from doing science and math. I was lucky in that I did so well in math and science that my family didn't discourage me, but that's what happening to girls today: 'wouldn't you rather do this?'

«I think there are two main problems. One is that little boys are more aggressive than girls. I sometimes watch my daughter's class and the boys push themselves to the front of the line. She stands at the back - and is this what's going to happen in her life? Is she going to get her selfconfidence built up? It's a confidence issue and females do not have the confidence to believe they can do it. You also have female teachers who were brought up to believe that it was OK for their position to be secondary. Now, I'm sure that if you talked to many teachers they'd deny it, but you are a product of what you came from.

«So if you grew up being a half step or a full step behind, that's not an uncomfortable position to be in. I do a lot of speaking to women and I say to them that as long as we allow ourselves to be in this position, we will stay there. The biggest problem is that many women who break through say to other women, 'it took me 20 years to get here, it's going to take you.' I'm no hard-line feminist, but women do need to unite and help each other."

Every new company head has a vision for her company, so what is Carol Bartz's? «I think the challenge is to build upon the wild success of the AutoCAD engine and to grow even more. When I looked at Autodesk I saw a company that was undermarketed, and that by taking some advantage of global marketing and real product positioning there were just so many unparalleled opportunities, and I believe that even more 18 months later. One thing I've learned in business is that you are your own best competitor, and what that means is that you have to constantly be forcing better product on yourself. Regardless of how much a product seems to be successful, there has got to be a better one that gives it a run for its money. And if you don't do it, somebody else clearly will."

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((

Cops and Robbers

New crimes inspire not only new legislation but also new types of law enforcement. The democratisation of computers, as J. J. Buck BloomBecker observes in the first interview in this section, has led to the democratisation of computer crime. The mid -1980s saw increasing concerns about the damage that trespassers - hackers - could do to safety-critical computer systems. In Britain, lawmakers' attention was focused on this subject comparatively early because of the 1984 arrests of Rob Schifreen and Steve Gold; they had hacked into Prince Philip's Prestel mailbox. They were convicted under the Forgery Act, but on appeal the House of Lords ruled that the Act could not be extended to cover deception of a computer. The case raised many issues for legislators, law enforcement personnel and computer users which continue to develop to this day.

"

June Rokoff

Photograph by Shawn G. Henry

The New Lotus Position



Dieter Giesbrecht's interview took place at a time when Lotus had only just slipped to number two in the UK, and Lotus worldwide was Microsoft's biggest competitor. Contrary to Giesbrecht's expectations, Lotus slid further, along with Borland, as we've seen from Rikke Helms and Philippe Kahn, and IBM, as we've seen from Howard Ford. By the time of this interview, two years after Giesbrecht's, Lotus was beginning to reorganise and was only months away from announcing large losses. June Rokoff is a senior vice-president.

Lotus was in many ways responsible for the overall success of the pc: its 1-2-3 spreadsheet was the application that fuelled corporate purchases of the machines. The company moved into other applications areas, and for most of the late 1980s and early 1990S was competing directly with Microsoft.

The company was, however, slow to move into Windows, and Microsoft Excel was established in a dominant position by the time 1-2-3 for Windows was released. Lotus does have an early lead in the new market sector known as "groupware" with its Notes product. Nonetheless, the company's results faltered in 1994, and in mid-1995 Lotus was bought by IBM.

June Rokoff understands she's been lucky. "As opposed to most women in my position," she says, "I've had almost no troubles. It's been almost flawless." She has been senior vice president in charge of software


development at Lotus since May of 1992; with the recent restructuring, her role is changing to senior vice-president of the worldwide services group. She's not sure exactly why she had such a comparatively easy route, but she thinks the key was having a mentor - Dan McLagan, who worked with her at two companies, Lotus and Data Resources - who encouraged her along the way. She's keen to encourage other women to achieve the same kind of success, and says she's not alone: "The women 1 talk to, we're much more interested now in saying, if we don't help, who will?"

Born and brought up in Queens, a borough of New York City, Rokoff got a BSc in math and computer science from the State University of New York at Albany. She was "acquired" by Lotus in 1986 along with the company she was working for at the time, Isys, where she was chief operating officer; before that she had worked for Data Resources for 13 years. Both companies were financial services specialists. Data Resources sold time-sharing services and built econometric models; Isys put large financial databases onto CD-ROM. Last year, Lotus spun Isys off again.

So Rokoffs experience was in large systems, rather than the kind of small platform product that Lotus has always specialised in. When she discovered that the success of the UNIX/v AX business she was involved in building for Lotus depended on getting the next version - release 3 -of 1-2-3 to market and that this project had stalled badly, she volunteered to take charge of it.

"I took it on because when I kind oflooked around inside Lotus for the skills to do large project management they really weren't there," she says. Six managers had tried - and failed - to get the product out. But this was the kind of work she'd been trained to do at Data Resources, and she had been head of development at Isys.

She had to do some lobbying to get the job: "It took a little while to convince him [Frank King, then Senior Vice-President in charge of the software business group and himself new to Lotus] that I really did have the skill sets to do this." Nonetheless, she says, "None of us really knew what I was getting into."

It took nine months and a lot of management to get the product out the door. Not just by Rokoff, she hastens to add: Frank Ongari, since gone from Lotus, took over the business side while she took on managing development.

"The first thing I did," she says, "was roll up my sleeves and try to show the team that it wasn't that management kind of got a nine-to-five existence and they got to kill themselves trying to ship." Some of what was needed were small, morale-building things like making sure the heating got fixed in an office if it broke. But a lot of what was needed was strong decision-making.

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"There were a lot of different choices as to what priorities to do the project in. We don't think of projects this way right now, but at that point - you could fix the bugs or you could get the thing running faster. We were doing it to be portable across operating systems - what order to do that in." More than just making those decisions was sticking to what had been decided in spite of the temptations to reconsider: "Do you leave all the features in that everybody promised two years ago, or do you go with only those features that people wanted two years ago, now that the world has changed? What happens if you let those things fester and your decisions never get made is you're circling around with a team who are more than happy to work really hard to build something good but they can never finish it."

As a first step, she and Ongari took the senior management team offsite; the idea was to layout all the things that needed to be decided and make decisions - not, she says, necessarily the very best decisions, but decisions that would get the project moving.

The thing about software, she says, is "You can always make it better; you can build forever."

Overall, she says, about 50 per cent of the time was spent "shipping the product"; the other half was spent supporting the people - things like making sure that group meetings didn't eat up people's time and thanking the families of those working on the project "who weren't seeing these people very much." Her own three children, then all under 10, and husband, a lawyer with whom she celebrates their 25th anniversary this year, were some of those family members.

"I felt really strongly that even if we got the thing shipped, if they all left right after or didn't feel good about it that we had failed." The product shipped, Lotus was saved, and she acquired, briefly, two nicknames: the Iron Lady and the Saint. These were revived earlier this year when the New York Times interviewed Frank King, their originator.

"It's tougher for a woman to have a tough stance," Rokoff says. "If you were to check me out, you wouldn't mostly hear people saying Iron Lady - it was the comment of a day five years ago. At different points in life you act differently, based on what you're doing."

Once 1-2-3 version 3 shipped, Rokoff was promoted to Vice-President and moved on to manage the Freelance group, which was then known as the information management group and which included Notes, then a tiny development project off to one side. Freelance was in the throes of a major change, "from being a hard-to-use DOS product that Lotus didn't even recognise was hard to use" into a Windows product. This was when Lotus discovered usability and built its lab (it now has others scattered around the world). Much of the kind of testing brought in during the development of Freelance is now standard practice: testing not only

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Lotus products but competitors' products to get an idea of what they're doing right as well as wrong, observing all aspects of a user's interaction with a new product, and, most important, requiring that developers actually sit in on the usability tests.

Rokoff doesn't take the credit for that: "The group [working on Freelance 1 should take credit for it." It is, she says, key.

"What tends to happen - and I make a lot of speeches about this - is that the people who develop software hardly ever use the things they write. They don't do budgets. Most developers, most documentation people don't give presentations like Lotus management gives presentations, and they're developing it. To them what is intuitively obvious is probably not what's intuitively obvious to the end-user." Most users of a presentation graphics package spend 20 minutes with it every few months and have to relearn everything each time.

"The labs made a cultural change at Lotus - not just building the lab but the requirement that they had to sit there and watch it. We have some wonderful old stories about the development community sitting in the lab saying, 'Where did you get that person? You must have found that person in Harvard Square. That couldn't really be .... ' You know, the title would say IS manager, or whatever the person was. And then the next person comes up, and they'd say, 'That's a dumb person, too. Where'd you get him?' And then finally after five, six, seven of these saying, 'Oh, my God ... no wonder.' But they would have to live through people suffering."

At the same time that this was all going on, Notes was heading for its first release. This was a product few people either inside or outside the company understood at the time.

"We were client/server technology before client/server was understood; we were networking in the year before networking was important to anyone; and with a product that could not be explained. People have mixed reactions about how we introduced Notes, but the feeling was high ticket, go to the big corporations, get them to agree that it was of value, because if you just put it shrink-wrapped on the shelves in stores at that point it would have gathered dust." Since then, five out of the big six consulting firms have adopted Notes.

But, "in the early days the issues were, find some proof of concept that somebody besides us believes in this. And most people didn't get it. But there were a lot of leading edge chief information offices and technologists who looked at it and said, 'I can use this to change my business'."

The last couple of years Rokoff, teamed with John Landry, has managed a single development area - the company restructured into functional units. The idea was that this would eliminate waste: why, Rokoff asks, develop five different graphics engines if you can develop

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one and use it in five products? Besides, Lotus's current goal is to integrate its products as much as possible.

"We have this mantra called 'working together'," she says, "to bring our products so that if you were to use more than one of them they should feel like one system, like in the old, integrated days." The results are being seen now, with, for example, version 4 of Notes's dumping its old email interface entirely in favour of ceMail.

"The integration of Notes and ceMail and the products together is kind of where the focus has been, and I think a lot of good work happened. You know, when we shipped 1-2-3 release 5, what we said is people build budgets in groups. You don't really go off in a corner, close the door, and build your budget. You have to share it with your finance people, your management people, with other people. Why not build applications that let you share it? And so more and more you'll see Lotus differentiating on the fact that we have an understanding of how people work together and we're building that into products to make it easier." Lotus is, she says, watching the work of a group of researchers at MIT on the whole problem of how people work cooperatively, "so that if you're going to share a calendar, how do you really share a calendar, as opposed to, I'm going to go off and have this list of features that somebody told me I want, and I'm going to plug this list of features, and then you come out and you find out you have to change the way you work in your team to do that."

Nonetheless, Lotus is restructuring again, back into business units. Under the new plan, Rokoff will head the worldwide services group, which, she says, is increasingly important and fits her background. Besides supplying long-term solutions, services include training and education, plus research into cooperative work from Lotus's Zurich institute and information services.

All of this is leading Lotus in one direction: "What you hear us being is much more focused on corporate clients and their needs." Look at the investments of the past year, for example, she says: Lotus bought Philadelphia-based SoftSwitch, a manufacturer of connections for big corporate mail systems, and announced a deal with Oracle to make its database servers and Notes compatible.

"Everyone of the announcements we've been making, in terms of the applications we're building, is filling in those gaps. We're building video capability because people deploying large applications want video as part of those imaging capabilities, and again, more and more scripting tools so that you can build better applications. So we're more and more focused on business, where in Microsoft it's solutions across the gamut."

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J. J. Buck BloomBecker


Crime of the Century


Appeared: March, 1991

j. j. Buck BloomBecker was one of the first people to take computer crime seriously. Besides tracking computer crime statistics through his National Center for Computer Crime Data, BloomBecker is author of Spectacular Computer Crimes (Dow-jones Irwin, 1990) and Computer Crime Laws (Clark Boardman Callaghan, 1993). BloomBecker's work has been overshadowed in recent years by that of several organisations he talks about here - the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility - and another he doesn't - Stanford Research International.

BloomBecker continues to collect computer crime data and information about the emerging field of computer law.

J. J. Buck BloomBecker likes to juggle when he talks about computer crime. That doesn't mean he doesn't take the subject seriously, just that he thinks people listen better when they have something to look at. BloomBecker is Director of the National Center for Computer Crime Data, an organisation he founded and which has been fighting to make its opinions heard since its establishment in 1979.

BloomBecker attended Harvard Law School graduating in 1968 "at the bottom of my class." While he was there, he founded the Computer Law Society - the first of its kind at any law school, he says. From Harvard,


BloomBecker moved on to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office. After working for ten years as a prosecutor, he founded the NCCCD, which first functioned under the aegis of the DA's office and then became independent.

"I realised that what I should be doing is looking at computer crime, because that's the intersection of prosecution and computer law."

BloomBecker envisioned the fledgling NCCCD as a service organisation: "I decided I was going to help all the other prosecutors who, like me, were interested in computer crime, and set up a database. Whenever they wanted to do their first computer crime prosecution they could plagiarise search warrants and the components of other documents that other lawyers had written before them."

The point of this, he explains, is that whereas burglary is a familiar crime with well established procedures, computer crimes are not. Newcomers to a DA's office prosecuting their first burglars can go to more experienced staffers and ask what form to use. In 1979, however, there was no one to advise on computer crimes. BloomBecker's new database aimed to fill that gap.

The idea turned out to be less useful than it sounded. BloomBecker says, "There weren't very many prosecutors interested in the topic." Instead, BloomBecker received calls from the computer security community - accountants, systems operators and ex-policemen who had moved into the field.

"We were the only database about computer crime law and computer crime prosecutions. For the first year we got more from the people who contacted us than we gave to them." However, "They saw the need for a clearinghouse for this kind of information, and they were willing to contribute their stuff to help us circulate it. But over the years it became clear that to justify our existence we needed to create data." Now, he says, "We're the primary source of information about computer crime laws."

The NCCCD tracks the developJ?ent of both federal and state computer crime laws and circulates the information in its annual Computer Law Reporter. Things are changing all the time. In the last year, for example, four states have passed laws against spreading computer viruses, and changes are being made, similar to those being made in Britain, that will define computer trespass as a crime.

In private-enterprise America, the NCCCD has struggled for funding. For example, it would like to publish a computer crime report every year; so far, it's just managed to find sponsorship for two, released in 1986 and 1989. The 1989 report was sponsored by a host of companies including Ernst & Young, Southwestern Bell, DEC and the Racal Corporation.

"Britain is way ahead of the US in that its National Computing Centre

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(a clearinghouse for information about the computer industry) is a government-sponsored organisation that has paid a lot more attention to social issues, particularly security issues."

BloomBecker approaches computer crime from a law-enforcement perspective, but that doesn't blind him to the problems of over-zealous enforcement. In 1990 the US saw the conclusion of Operation Sun Devil, a two-year Secret Service investigation involving 150 federal agents, as well as numerous local and state law enforcement agencies, all backed by the security resources of a host of telephone companies and American Express. When Operation Sun Devil reached its dramatic conclusion that May - law officers served 27 search warrants in 14 states - the Secret Service announced it had shut down numerous BBSs, confiscated 40 computers, and seized 23000 disks. Operation Sun Devil was a precipitating factor in the decision to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

To many, Operation Sun Devil was no more than its target - a group of mostly teenaged hackers calling themselves collectively the Legion of Doom - deserved. But the crackdown raised serious questions of civil liberties and constitutional rights. The electronic publication Phrack, for example, was shut down because law enforcement officials do not perceive it as analogous to the types of publications - newspapers such as the New York Times - which are rigorously protected by the First Amendment. To others, hackers are being unfairly portrayed as evil when they're simply the best and brightest exploring "cyberspace," science fiction writer William Gibson's term for the uncharted frontier inside computer networks, where reality is represented by binary bits.

BloomBecker falls somewhere between the two camps. On the one hand, he defends Kevin Mitnick, who was pilloried in the press and whom BloomBecker agrees is unlikable but classes as minor league in terms of the damage he caused. "Most of the audiences I spoke to cared not a whit that this guy was being held without bail, because the media was saying this guy was the worst computer criminal ever." In contrast, he thinks Robert Morris, author of the worm which paralysed the Internet in 1988, was guilty of what you might call "reckless computing" and should not be excused on the grounds of his intelligence. (Mitnick went to jail; Morris did community service.) Rationalisations offered in defence of hackers - that they perform a service by exposing weaknesses in system security - he dismisses as "poppycock."

These non-mainstream views get him criticism from all sides. "I think I've managed to be the Lenny Bruce of computing; I've offended everyone," BloomBecker says.

One of BloomBecker's ruling passions is to encourage the growth of responsible computing. To achieve it, he suggests joining (or founding, if

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necessary) an organisation like Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR).

"The alternative," he says, "is waiting until you become a victim. One of the reasons that no one cared a lot about Mitnick is that an increasing number of the people in the audience had been victims of computer crime and viruses, and what I call the 'victim class' tends to be kind of blood-thirsty and intolerant, but also highly motivated to stop crime, like Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. When someone's victimised, suddenly the need for responsible computing becomes a lot clearer." This principle can be seen at work in Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg, in which Stoll is transformed from your basic 1960s anti-establishment type into a varmint-chasing, enraged systems operator cooperating with the FBI.

Hacking - in the sense of breaking into systems, which hackers say should more properly be called "cracking" - has perhaps been somewhat tolerated because of timing. Its precursor, "phone-phreaking," was acceptable in the late 1960s American mood of rebdlion: ripping off a monolith like the phone company was just fine with many people. The democratisation of computing came at a time when those attitudes persisted, and the trend is to make computer systems as accessible as possible.

Further, the explosion of technology has left many people feeling they're being left behind and have lost control. In such a situation, it's only natural that law enforcers - who generally don't understand the technology - should try to wrest back control from people they see as lawless. Operation Sun Devil was just such an attempt.

BloomBecker's central thesis is that the democratisation of computers has brought about the democratisation of computer crime. There are now all types of computer criminals committing all types of computerrelated crimes.

"In terms of what they're doing," says BloomBecker, "a lot more computer crime prosecutions involve theft of money or traditional criminal acts that involve a computer because it's there." Most computer criminals, he adds, are disgruntled employees - not the media's stereotypical antisocial teenager. This concentration on stereotypes, as BloomBecker points out, has detrimental effects. "If the only thing we're worried about is the bright, young, male hacker, then our security is going to have a lot of holes."

BloomBecker argues that we must educate users to compute responsibly. He believes religion might playa part in imparting ethics to young computer students.

There are other issues, too. BloomBecker says, "One of the things computers and communications are doing is making us rethink how we value and protect information, and to some extent the old rules are being

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challenged. The question of what is legitimate in terms of acquiring information is being asked again by at least some computer criminals -although, as I say, I think most of those who use that defence are rationalising. The EFF, though, is sincere in wanting to see those issues resolved."

BloomBecker admits that the EFF, with Lotus founder Mitch Kapor at its helm, is finding it easier to get its voice heard in the informationinundated US than the NCCCD is. "I think they've made a significant contribution - one, frankly, that we've tried to make, but we haven't had the resources or the media." Instead, he says sadly, "I've got rubber chickens. "

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John Austen

Hacked off




BloomBecker's data suggesting that the most common computer criminal is the disgruntled, usually former employee is to some extent borne out by Detective Inspector John Austen's experience in the field as head of London's Computer Crime Unit. The CCU was the first such specialist unit in the world; Austen is also chairman of Interpol's computer crime committee. To a large extent, Austen is working in a field where the crimes are still being invented and where investigative and enforcement techniques have to be invented to match. At the time of this interview, Austen was seeing through the courts the first prosecution under Britain's Computer Misuse Act (1990). Austen expects to retire from the CCU and move into private consultancy in the autumn of 1996.

"I don't think of them as hackers," says Detective Inspector John Austen, "I think of them as criminals. This is known to be a criminal act now. These are not people who are doing it as a pastime; they are people who are deliberately flouting the law." Austen is head of the London-based Computer Crime Unit (CCU); it was, he says, the first such dedicated unit anywhere in the world.

Austen was chosen to head the CCU, he says, because he worked in the computer industry before he joined the police force. In addition, he had worked on white-collar crime - fraud - including some crimes involving


computers as long ago as 1976. It was in 1984 that he was handed the job of setting up the CCU.

For comparison, the US's FBI didn't start a similar unit until the end of 1990 (although even before that the FBI did have agents trained in dealing with computer crime). Since the CCU was founded, units have also been set up in Australia, Germany and the Netherlands, and there are other offices and individuals dealing with computer crime in Italy, Sweden, Belgium and France.

A dedicated unit helps, Austen says: "You can plan for your response, you can plan how evidence is going to be assimilated and presented before a court. You can make arrangements for particular prosecutors to take charge of cases or particular barristers to present cases in court."

In addition, he says, the CCU has a wide range of consultants, technicians and contacts generally, so that whatever the unit needs to know about a particular type of computer equipment or software is readily available. Co-operation from the industry, Austen says, has been "fantastic." This helps, since the unit can't afford to train everyone - five investigators and three technicians - in everything. The unit serves as a resource for the whole UK, although its only area of direct responsibility is London.

"We help other police forces as and when they think it's necessary," he says. Surprisingly, though the officers in the unit are trained in this specific type of investigation, they don't stay in the unit - police policy is to move people around every five or six years or so.

The CCU's field of activity is fairly narrow. It doesn't deal with crimes where the evidence is held inside a computer or straightforward theft, only cases where the computer itself is the object of the crime - unauthorised access, virus attacks, and so on. Fraud - even if it's committed with a computer - doesn't come within the unit's purview. Computertransmitted pornography does, but in a limited way.

"It's morally wrong," says Austen, "but I don't think it's something the police want to get involved in particularly. Graphic representation is not something we'd normally take to court. However, on the other hand, if there are fully digitised photographs transmitted by computer software packages of pornographic material to do with animals or children, then that's something we would take action about." The other area of concern, he says, is if paedophilic organisations use BBSs to exchange information. Still, Austen sounds reasonable on this topic.

"I'm not trying to make a big issue about pornography, but yes, as normal people are getting onto the networks, as it were, then this sort of material is becoming available, and if we have a chance to stop it - and I'm not just talking about myself, I'm talking about my colleagues in the Netherlands, Germany and the US - then we will."

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The Computer Misuse Act follows the EC recommendations of 1989 to legislate against "Any type of computer theft or forgery, and unauthorised access, and modification to computer systems - what is colloquially known as hacking - the archetypal, or stereotypical computer crimes. All of those are recommended to be outlawed. In this country they are, as they are in the US, Australia, France, Germany and Sweden."

Austen is even more involved with international issues than most; he is chairman of Interpol's European computer crime committee. Europe, in Interpol's terminology, is everything from Ireland to the Ural mountains. Many of the countries included in this swathe - particularly the Baltic countries but also Belgium and Spain - do not have computer crime legislation yet. That doesn't stop those countries from being hit by computer crime. Paul Bedworth, for example, is on trial for accessing computers in Luxembourg, Sweden and Belgium.

International cooperation is, of course, a key issue in prosecuting computer crime, since even the most law-abiding comms user is likely to exchange information with more than one country just collecting a day's worth of electronic mail.

"One of the good things about the CMA," says Austen, "is that it gives joint jurisdiction, so if there's a substantive link to this country it gives the law officers in this country jurisdiction to deal with it." At least, that's the theory: the reality is less easy than that, since the accused would have to be extradited to stand trial. Those who follow these things remember the CCU's one extradition: Dr Joseph Popp, who was brought over to stand trial for disseminating the notorious AIDS disk, an attempt at hightech extortion. Popp showed up, it was widely reported, with metal foil on his head and rollers in his beard, and was judged unfit to stand trial.

Austen says, "In practice what we're recommending through Interpol is that prosecutions be conducted in the country where the person is resident, because that's much more suitable."

Collecting statistics on the CCU's activities is difficult. The unit has needed time - Bedworth's case took two and a half years of investigation before the arrests. You certainly can't count individual offences: the unit lost count in Bedworth's case at 20000. Bedworth and the two men arrested with him, who pleaded guilty, were three of maybe six or seven arrests the CCU made in 1992. By comparison, in the first three months alone of 1993 there were ten.

Other statistics are easier: in 1992 the CCU received 114 reports of crimes; Austen says the unit achieved a clear-up rate of 85 per cent. But these figures don't give any sense of how much computer crime is actually out there. Austen believes, unsurprisingly, that the true figure is much more. Besides the usual explanation that businesses are

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embarrassed to admit there are holes in their security or don't have confidence in the police to investigate successfully, Austen believes that certain types of system crashes typically attributed to hardware failure are actually the result of hacker activity.

Like others involved in tracking and investigating computer crime, Austen says since June, 1991, hacking is no longer the most common type of crime the unit gets called in to investigate: after a number of arrests, it largely stopped. Now, aside from viruses, the current biggest problem is logic bombs planted in small business systems by contractors who have had contractual difficulties. A lot of damage is also caused by disgruntled employees, and the unit has prosecuted several of those. Recently, the unit has also made several arrests on charges of distributing viruses - just writing them isn't illegal.

"I think there certainly is a case to say that writing a virus should be a crime," Austen says, "but you then get into very difficult areas of law, because you'd have to define exactly what a virus is." Further: how would you prove authorship? "Trying to catch people in the act of writing a virus would be very difficult indeed."

Austen disagrees with the popular idea of hackers, especially the idea that they are unusually clever.

"The difficult things in technology are actually creating something yourself, not poking around in somebody's else's system or trying to break a control system that somebody else has made. That's like saying that if I'm a carpenter 1 can make a beautiful door for your front door and 1 put some locks on it ... do you say that the guy who comes along with a sledgehammer and knocks it down is more creative?"

Aside from anything else, he says, hacking doesn't require cleverness. "Because you're assuming, aren't you, that the lock itself is very difficult to unlock, when our experience is that there are loopholes in these very elaborate systems, and they take advantage of these loopholes." Schifreen's case would appear to bear out this contention: he says he gained access to Prince Philip's mailbox by putting together a phone number he'd seen one year with a password and ID he came across the following year.

A lot of hackers claim they were only exposing flaws in a system's security. But Austen has an answer to this, too.

"If I were driving past your front door and saw it open, I don't go in and remove something and then say, ha, ha, I've removed it. What 1 should do is try to find you and say, you've left your front door open, please don't leave it open any more. I'm sure I'm right in thinking that's the responsible attitude to take." While some hackers have been known to do this, Austen says it's very, very few.

"Most of the time, they find this loophole, and then they go around

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telling everybody else about it, and they think it's fun. And there seems to be some idea, some sort of moral bug in people's brains, that this is a clever thing to do." Even if many people do think it's somehow morally acceptable to rip off the phone company - and Austen thinks this is dangerous reasoning - Austen fails to see the humour in, for example, Bedworth's having hacked into a cancer research facility.

"Even the RNIB was a victim of a case several years ago," he says, adding that, "There's an idea that insurance companies are fair game for any sort of crime. But then when the insurance premium goes up, everybody complains. Eventually, we're the ones who pay."

The one good thing, though, is that of the general computing population relatively few are hackers.

"It's not so prevalent as people make out," he says, when you figure that most kids start computing as young as five years old in school, and a fair number go on studying computer science through college or university. "The percentage of people who actually go into this nefarious activity is minuscule. It's blown out of all proportion for the number of people who could do it who actually do."

It's a lot like stealing cars: "What we tend to find is a few people doing it a lot, rather than a lot of people doing it once, very much the same as other sorts of crime. I mean, not everyone's a car thief, but you have groups of people who steal cars every day of the week."

If those preconceptions are wrong, the common perception of what hackers tend to be like is so far borne out by the unit's experience.

"The people we prosecute - and we prosecute more than anybody else - tend to be introverts, because, you know, human interaction's quite difficult for them. Speaking face to face, quite often they can be stereotyped - everybody says we shouldn't stereotype people now, but they do tend to fall into it - they generally, for example, don't have girlfriends, they have difficulty because they have this human communication problem. They don't tend to have outside interests; they tend to be all-consuming."

Talking to a machine, he says, gives them a sense of power: it will do what they tell it.

And, he says,"There's nothing physical about them at all." This, of course, didn't stop the US Secret Service from bursting in, guns at the ready, during the 1990 Operation Sun Devil raids. Austen's reactions are mixed to that.

"We don't carry guns. But I can understand their viewpoint, because of course you don't know who's at the end of the computer terminal."

Those things, he says, are difficult, and the responsibility placed on policemen only adds to that. "All policemen go through very scary moments. You're under intense pressure, and you have to understand

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very difficult things very quickly and try to do something about them. People try to get you to do the impossible, and sometimes we do but quite often we don't. We've been fairly successful, in fact more successful than most, but that's really through dogged persistence."

After Bedworth's acquittal, the Independent newspaper asked why, instead of spending £1 million of taxpayer's money on a trial, in addition to two and a half years of investigation while Bedworth and his coarrestees continued to hack, the police didn't issue a warning first? What's important, stopping a hacker, or making an example of him?

Austen couldn't be reached for comment after the trial, but something he said may provide an answer: "When I started off, I didn't really want to go into a lot of research; I wanted to find out what was going on. The only way to find out what's going on is to be successful. To be successful in police terms, you have to investigate and prosecute. That's the adage I've always held to. Unfortunately, rightly or wrongly, the way you gain respect is by getting results."

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Bob Hay

Photograph courtesy of FAST

Policing the System



Although they're what John Austen focuses on, hacking and fraud are not the only computer crimes that are investigated and prosecuted, although they're the ones that tend to grab the headlines. In 1986, software companies allied to form the Federation Against Software Theft to lobby for legal protection and educate users on the newly named crime of "software piracy," that is, the practice of copying software instead of buying the appropriate number of copies.

Former policeman Bob Hay was chief executive of the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) from 1986 to 1993, when he retired. He took very seriously the claims of the software companies who make up FAST's membership that they were losing big money - FAST's 1990

estimate was £300 million a year - to illegal copying. FAST's main targets are corporations whose users outnumber their paid-for copies ("overuse") and rogue traders who either pre-load a computer with ''free'' software ("hard disk loading") or sell bootleg or counterfeit copies. FAST has spearheaded a number of high-profile raids and successful prosecutions in these areas.

Speaking as an experienced policeman, Hay had a number of scathing criticisms of the Computer Misuse Act. These were prescient: his central objection was the acquitting factor in the trial of hacker Paul Bedworth, 18 months later.


Loot, the newspaper people advertise in when they want to get rid of unwanted possessions, maintains a list of telephone numbers that it is not supposed to print in ads without checking first. The telephone number of the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) is on it: some joker ran its phone number at the bottom of an ad for free copies of pirated software, and FAST got a lot of calls (it did not take down names and addresses). FAST gets other phone calls, abusive ones: a policeman's lot is not a happy one.

Or is it? According to Bob Hay, FAST's chief executive, he never wanted to do anything else. Hay was born and raised in Scotland, and came south to join the RAF in the days of compulsory military service. Unemployment, then as now, was a serious problem in Scotland, and Hay, some of whose family were in the Scottish police service, stayed on in England and joined the police force. He loved it.

"I had a predisposition to the police service," says Hay, "and 1 did 31 years, and if I had my time to do again, I'd do it all over. I thoroughly enjoyed every day, and never really wanted to do anything else." By the end, Hay was Chief Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police, in charge of Southall, where he went to take charge after the 1981 street riots. He was assigned to restore peace after the October 31st, 1984, assassination of Indira Gandhi, when Southall's Sikh community danced in the streets and firebombed two Hindu temples and a newspaper office, burning a deputy editor to death. After that, Hay was assigned to take 500 men up to the coalfields of Yorkshire to "do battle with the miners." He also ran the forward command HQ in 1981 when Iranian dissidents stormed the London embassy and took hostages. He left the police force in 1986 to join FAST as its chief executive.

"After 31 years, I was due for a change," he says, "and I would have had to leave on age limit three years later anyway." So, when the chance to join FAST arose, he took it as the best available option.

"The great buzz when I came into this game was that it had never been done before. How," he asks, taking hold of the sides of the PC on his desk, "do you take what's in here and turn it into evidence that will stand up in court?"

FAST was founded in 1984 by a coalition of software companies as a lobbying organisation seeking, as Hay puts it, "to persuade the government to ensure that the UK copyright law would be applicable to computer software." William Powell, one of the MPs who got lucky in that year's lottery for the right to introduce private legislation, sponsored the bill, which became the Copyright (Computer Software) Amendment Act 1985. Powell is still FAST's Parliamentary adviser. Also important was the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

FAST has 140 members, who pay subscriptions of £300 to £5000.

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Members include heavyweights Microsoft, Lotus, Ashton-Tate, Borland, ComputaCenter and distributor P & P. FAST's membership also includes smaller companies, such as Maidenhead-based Cams oft, which produces educational software, and also, unexpectedly, Shareware Marketing. Twenty-two member companies have an annual turnover of less than £250000.

FAST is now less a lobbying organisation and more what Hay calls a "proactive, anti-piracy organisation, actively seeking out and dealing with cases of infringement."

Tell Hay that making "unauthorised" copies of software doesn't feel like a crime, and he says, "What does a crime feel like? If you can tell me, I'll interview you," and adds that chances are that most criminals don't lose any sleep at night. Besides, people do steal things when they think they won't get caught - like ashtrays and towels from hotels.

Tell him that the relationship between the major industry companies and their customers often seems adversarial, and he says, "I've always felt that since they're all in business, surely they value their clients."

Tell him that the high prices of software are a contributing factor, and he talks about the money businesses make with those tools and asks what's wrong with shareware. He adds, "I can't afford a Rolls Royce; does that give me the right to steal one?" He goes on to claim that the most widely pirated program is Norton Utilities, which costs under £100 (it lists at £139), and that piracy is a serious problem in the £10 games market.

He blames the technology. "The medium is so copiable. If I had designed something specifically to ensure that it was something that could be abused very easily, I would probably have come up with what we've got."

In July 1990, FAST released figures claiming that software piracy was costing the industry £300 million a year in the UK alone. FAST asked MORI to conduct a poll, by telephone so respondents couldn't read through the questions in advance, of senior managers of firms with turnovers in excess of £50 million. Fifty-five per cent of the senior managers surveyed said they had, wittingly or unwittingly, copied software.

The survey also showed an average of 2.2 installed software packages per PC - shrink-wrapped software, not including utilities packages, disk managers, games and the like. From software sales figures from market research organisations Romtec, Context and lEE, FAST derived an actual ratio of 0.85:1. Allowing a cost of £250 per software package and multiplying that against actual sales and expected sales, FAST arrived at a shortfall of at least £265 million. Adding in utilities packages, disk managers and the like, brought the figure to £300 million.

"It's not been seriously challenged," says Hay.

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Hay doesn't believe that companies set out deliberately to break the law. "It's not that respectable companies are deciding that on this particular product they will become rogues, vagabonds and thieves, it is simply that in the main corporates have not addressed the issue in terms of management," he says.

Hay gives an example: an employee's laptop develops an electrical fault. Because it cannot be repaired immediately, the systems department replaces the laptop with another one and reinstalls or transfers the software via Lap Link. The user goes back to work. But in the meantime, that laptop still has the software on its hard disk, and once repaired is likely to be sent to another company employee. The company is now guilty of software piracy, unintentionally.

Hay says this sort of unplanned "overuse," as he calls it, is the most common problem. "I can't in all conscience get all steamed up about the situation," he says, "but I use it as an example of how easily infringement can occur."

But, he says, "We have not yet come across a case that is capable of proof in court where deliberate overuse was being sanctioned and condoned at boardroom level. Never yet. It's simply that the company is not aware of its responsibilities."

One way FAST finds out about violations is from unhappy employees who know the law but are being instructed to contravene it by copying software. In such cases, FAST keeps its source of information confidential, but writes to the company involved suggesting a software audit. Often, the companies write back thanking FAST. But the exercise is expensive: one such company estimates that it will cost it £7 million to, as Hay put it, "clean up its act."

Just as London stalls sell fake Rolex watches, there is a trade in fake, name-brand software: the disks are copied here, and the manuals imported from the Far East. Hay's office sports a row of computers seized in evidence and an impressive collection of counterfeit software manuals - poor quality reproductions of the originals, bound in new covers. The difference is you pay the full price for the counterfeit software.

One of the ironies is that chances are that the licence in the shrinkwrapped software you buy would not be enforceable in a court oflaw.

All this aside, for Hay, "If you're looking at the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, the law is quite clear." For Hay on these issues, there are no shades of grey (he won't even give out unauthorised photocopies).

Hay may respect the law, but he is unhappy with the Computer Misuse Act, particularly the clauses which define computer crime in terms of intent. "How do you prove a state of mind in retrospect?" says Hay, who calls the Act, "the most useless piece oflegislation that's come across the statute books."

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Other complaints include the special requirements for getting a search warrant (application must be made to a judge in chambers rather than a magistrate's court). The Act is not strictly speaking part of Hay's job, but, "These are the sorts of things that I find very challenging, very fulfilling," he says, and people talk to him about them because of his background.

Hay agrees that an ongoing problem is the ignorance of computer technology on the part of law enforcement officers and the judiciary. This is, he says, a particular difficulty when law enforcement officers are trying to prepare evidence that will stand up in court - and in trying to explain to non-computer-literate people (such as judges) what exactly, if anything, is stored inside a computer.

Hay believes that software piracy is a contributor to other, ongoing industry problems. For example, he says, "One of the regular complaints that end users have is about the level of user support and help desks. But perhaps a significant part of the delay that is occurring in the legitimate user's getting that hotline support is because the guy in front of him in the queue is an illegal user and is accessing the same service."

There are other, futuristic issues of considerable complexity. Who is, for example, the author of automatically generated information such as weather patterns generated from data from American satellites? Who is the copyright owner of, say, the financial information that is electronically transmitted from the world's stock markets? These points were considered during the drafting of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

There was also a general debate: should computer software be assigned its own category, or should it be classed as a literary work? In the event, it was classed as a literary work, consistent with the rest of the world, and the European Parliament has followed suit.

For now, though, FAST's work is fairly clearly limited to two main areas: "We deal with the professional pirate, and we deal in the corporate situation," says Hay. "At the same time, one cannot simply ignore the laissez-faire attitude in relation to software being used by individuals." But, he says, "We shouldn't be about to approach that task with a loaded gun. We should be approaching it with a very much more sympathetic view, and that I hope we try to do."

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Emma Nicholson, MP

Photograph courtesy of Emma Nicholson's office

The Perils of Emma

Interviewer: John Diamond


John Austen owes the laws under which he operates in part to Emma Nicholson, the conservative MP for Torridge and West Devon. She was a strong supporter of the passage of the Computer Misuse Act (1990); earlier, she had introduced a computer crime bill of her own that failed. Both pieces of legislation were inspired, at least in part, by the case of Gold and Schifreen, although by the time of this interview there had been other well-known hacking cases, especially that of Edward Singh.

In late 1995 Nicholson changed her allegiance to the Liberal Democrats.

So let's get right down to the big question here. When Emma Nicholson, MP used to sit at her own VAX crunching those numbers away, was she never tempted, not even just the teensiest, weensiest bit, to take a quick peek into somebody else's files? Not ever? Just a little one?

Come on Mrs Nicholson, you're among friends here. You can tell us.

"Ummm," says Nicholson. And then again: "Mmmmm." And she pauses. She pours us both another cup of tea, and picks up the milk jug. Her hand, with the jug in it, hovers over the cups as she looks into the middle distance of the House of Commons tea room and thinks.

"Mmmmm," she says again, and pours the milk. She puts the jug down and distractedly picks up her strawberry tartlet and just as the little


silver-plated fork presses, clunk, through the crust, she comes back from her computer-days reverie.

"No. Never." Given the length of the reverie, it is a surprisingly definite answer. She

qualifies it. "Well, we used to fool around and tease each other, computer-wise, by

playing games, without a doubt, but that was just for fun." Nicholson has a good, county voice, the sort of voice an unimaginative

actress might adopt if she had to playa bright Tory MP waiting for the call to leap down from the back benches. Her working costume is just what the actress's wardrobe mistress would pick: something from, I imagine, one of the better West End department stores, the sort of stiffish black and white number that stands out from all the fusty suits round here, but covers for the odd casual - but not too casual - drinks do afterwards.

Together the voice and the frock and the prim milk-in-last tea-time rituals contrive to make Nicholson's reminiscences of her youthful larks in the programming room sound like something from Bunty: Hackingfor St Hilda's perhaps, or Three Bytes for Belinda.

"It was just to make sure that somebody new to the system, who was working next door, that when he came back from his coffee break he couldn't get into it." Well, in truth then, japing rather than what you'd call real hacking.

"But in those days computers were so complex that hacking as we know it today was impossible. I was writing in machine code which is terribly complicated. I was writing the software, in COBOL or something like that. And that is such an intellectual activity that the intellectual satisfaction is so large you wouldn't need the satisfaction of bouncing in and out of other people'S systems."

Yes, I know. I tried to say it. Hacking is as old as computing and the good hackers tend to be the guys who spend their time telling each other dirty jokes in machine code and who use hacking as a bit of intellectual relief. But Nicholson was on a roll.

"The reason hackers don't like the new law is that hacking makes their world more exciting. It gives them power over other people, and that's what I don't like. I am a root and branch democrat, and I think people should have power over their own lives.

"As a computer purist I see the computer as the tool that frees modern mankind from slavery. It stops you having to be on the shop floor - it frees the world, and I don't want computing to be clouded and mucked up by mean-spirited people who want to clutch at scraps of other people's lives."

Now the thing you have to understand about Emma Nicholson is that

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she's deadly serious about all this. She isn't an MP who once spent a couple of weeks punching mailing lists into an old Commodore PET and is now parlaying that experience into a Parliamentary career. She really did spend 18 years at a terminal and really does know COBOL from FORTRAN and FORTRAN from a hole in the ground. She really does think hacking is wicked, and hackers either wrong minded or criminally intentioned. And if you spend your leisure hours playing pass-the-parcel with someone else's data, she really does want to see you in nick.

But is this reason enough for the new hacking law? Is it, indeed, any reason for the even more robust sanctions of her own Bill which she laid before the Commons a while ago, and saw kicked out?

Before we ask Nicholson this, let's set ourselves some ground rules. First off: there are certain activities which we can class as criminal.

Taking my money is criminal, even if the act involves no more than convincing the Lloyds computer that what was my money is yours. Telling Colonel Ghaddafi that if he sends a couple of the lads round to map reference whatever he'll find a few loose missiles is criminal. Phoning up the guy down the street and telling him that according to the police computer he really shouldn't have that senior job with Securicor, but that, for a consideration, you can make sure Securicor never finds out -that's criminal too. So is introducing a virus that persuades my computer that it's a teapot.

Second: there are people around who use computers for criminal purposes. They move money about, they get information that they shouldn't have, they sell the information elsewhere. How many such people there are is hardly the point: they exist. Pretending, as some opponents of the hacking law insist on doing, that (a) there's no real or quantifiable problem and (b) that if there is, hey, it's all anarchy out there anyway so what the hell, won't get us very far.

So here's the basic problem, Mrs Nicholson. All these things are illegal. Why the need, then, for new laws? "At the moment there are five different laws to cover the area that will

be covered by the new laws, and none of those five cover hacking itself. Planting viruses isn't covered by any of those laws and although there has been one conviction for criminal damage, there are many other cases where it hasn't been possible to bring people to court, let alone get a conviction.

"Then there's the need for simplicity in a computer age. You see, judges are not computer literate, nor will they be for a very long time. So it is much more likely that if we define hacking or the planting of viruses or any linked activity, we are far more likely to obtain convictions. The new laws will give the judge a simple statement which defines the boundaries beyond which society considers anything else is illegal."

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Which, I suppose, is a sort of argument. Except that I can't find a single instance of a criminal case where the defendant has been acquitted simply because he was perpetrating his crime on a computer. Generally speaking, judges and juries are technologically competent enough to realise that if my money got into your bank account or my weapons secrets into your copy of Spies and Spying, then it doesn't matter a whole lot how it got there.

Nicholson talks about what the banks say about needing hacking laws, and she talks of her dossiers full of computer fraud notes. But that isn't what this is about. It isn't about stealing money, or selling secrets: it's about basic morality. If we need something on top of the current criminal law to deal with the hackers, then we must be saying that there is something other than the base act of stealing money or planting viruses or whatever that is criminal in itself.

Until mankind invented computer hacking there wasn't a crime in the book that wasn't another version of the crimes that mankind had been committing for centuries. There was material property and intellectual property and we knew how to deal with violations of both. But information held on a computer is something other than property in any sense that we've known it before. You can try to match the pure act of hacking to trespass or theft, or forgery, and it doesn't quite work.

So to find her comparison within the existing canon of possible immoralities, Nicholson has had to go outside the law of property. And so, as far as Nicholson is concerned, when your screen shows another's data you are guilty of voyeurism.

"Being a voyeur is not an acceptable activity in society's eyes and never has been. We don't allow Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all free range to pry into our innermost activities. One of the principal opponents of the law said on television that he couldn't understand why I wanted to criminalise hacking, because, after all, it was only like joy riding, but what he didn't go on to say was that joy riding is illegal."

Now I don't know about you, but for me, if I'm being strictly honest, voyeurism works as a comparison. I've never put my eye to an illicit keyhole, but for somebody who gets their kicks that way I imagine it has some of the same frisson as having somebody else's personnel record on your screen. And equally, if I rid myself of some of my coarser preconceptions and look again at that bit about power, I can see that works too. When Edward Austin Singh explained to the Guardian in June why he used a Teesside Poly terminal to break into any major system you care to name, he explained it in terms of power. I've sat in front of a newspaper Atex terminal with someone else's notes on my screen, and while I may not have felt, like Singh, that I could run the world, there was something to do with power happening there.

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Voyeurism and power: sounds like fun to me. But if I can understand the fun of hacking, and you can, why can't Nicholson?

I ask her whether, for instance, she can see why hobbyist hackers enjoy what they do, but a sentence into her answer we're out of the muddy moral waters of onscreen voyeurism and back into hacking as a dangerto-computerism again.

"I question whether in today's day and age there are many hobbyist hackers. I'm sure there used to be, but now we've moved into the age of the professional criminal using the computer as a tool for his crime. I don't think of hobbyist hackers as such, anyway. I think, instead, of the many people probing around to obtain information which they couldn't achieve by any other means."

Is there no hacking activity, then, which Nicholson would class as innocent?

"I can certainly imagine that schoolboy - and schoolgirl - hackers who bounce into the Pentagon don't know the value of the knowledge therein and cause no damage and bounce out again. But the weakness of that supposition is that because of the complexities of the system people don't know the damage they cause or have caused and that is another reason why, although they say it's harmless, it's only harmless in terms that are dictated by the hacker."

Nicholson does have some sympathy for the novice hacker who has seen War Games on video and fancies their chances at guiding an ICBM from the end of a Nintendo console. Her concession is this:

"The new law offers a rap on the knuckles for that first grade, for simple hacking."

In fact, that rap on the knuckles can involve six months in Pentonville. And while I think that those who point out that the new law can be used to prosecute anyone who interferes with a chip-controlled washing machine add little to the debate, the fact is that at that level the law will be enforced by local magistrates. I can easily see a rural bench with visions of a corrupted DEW system giving the maximum penalty for the minimum crime.

Nicholson has no regrets that those minor acts of hackery might land the perpetrators in jail.

"If we don't observe a boundary and say hacking per se is unacceptable, how can we say that one sort of activity is acceptable and another isn't?"

But for all its strictures and sentences, the law still isn't strong enough for Nicholson, and she aims to try and strengthen it as soon as she can.

I put it to her that one of the reasons so few banks prosecute computerised bank-robbers is because they're loath to announce to the world that their computers are hackable. Surely that makes the new law very difficult to enforce?

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Until now Nicholson has been working from a sort of prepared text. But suddenly we're in only vaguely charted territory, and Nicholson starts to extemporise.

"Mmmm," she says, and picks up the teapot again. "Yes. This is a major structural weakness." She pours. "But this bill has several weaknesses. Several major structural

weaknesses. And I shall have to try to have it amended as fast as possible. And I have the backing of some of the most important people in the legal profession, in the banking profession, in industry."

But the banks, Mrs Nicholson. What about the banks? "Well, one of its deficiencies is that it carries no duty to report a crime.

r would want a duty to report without a doubt." She pauses again. "And also, the confidentiality of the duty to report should be built in. Just to encourage companies to be more open about all of this .... "

Nicholson would like to force companies to tell the authorities what's going on, with compulsory disclosure by defrauded companies and legislation allowing the police to tap modem lines, but for the time being she thinks the August law is enough to be going on with.

We turn to other matters and talk briefly about computers and computing.

"Do you know what Clifford Stoll said to me?" Nicholson claims Stoll, the author of The Cuckoo's Egg and tracer of a weapon-secrets hacker's trail from California to Hamburg, as a personal friend. I try to imagine her in the Commons offering a refined scone to the laid-back Stoll, a man who laced his book with recipes for whole-earth cookies.

"He said that he was told by the FBI that if his trail finished up in the UK he could forget about prosecution. Every other country has a hacking law, you see, except for us."

So this is what it's all about. It's about the right to privacy from voyeurs, and about the abuse of power and it's about holding your head high in the world community of computerists.

It is, as I say, an entirely moral question. So we drain our last cup of tea and Nicholson makes to move to her next meeting. I ask her, as we stand, whether she really would describe any act of hacking as morally wrong.

"I would not myself use that phrase. I see it as an activity which spells danger at worst and insecurity at best. In an ideal world, computer systems should be incorruptible."

She picks up her handbag and thinks over what she's just said. "Of course you understand I use the word 'incorruptible' not with any

moral overtones but as a systems analyst."

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((

Research and the Future

Invention and wonder have not left computing, even if the PC has given the mass market a creamcoloured sameness. Companies like IBM and Olivetti experiment with wild ideas in the attempt to secure themselves a future; organisations like Industrial Light & Magic and Jet Propulsion Labs take the algorithms developed by pure researchers and turn them into practical techniques they can use for their own, unusual requirements. This section turns to the areas where we may again find heroes.

"

Inside the Mind of Dark Avenger

Interviewer: Sara Gordon

Appeared: July, 1993

Painting by David Whyte

All four of the preceding interviewees are on the side of the law. The Dark A venger, known as a leading virus writer, was the kind of person they would class as criminal without a second thought.

A virus is a computer program that takes charge of your machine and makes it do things you'd rather it didn't - erase the contents of your hard disk, say, or play irritating tunes. Because they are easily spread and their effects are unpredictable, viruses can be a great danger, and an entire niche market has grown up in anti-virus software.

A number of people criticised pew's decision to run this interview, but the editors believed it important to understand how a virus writer's mind works. Alan Solomon, mentioned below, is head of anti-virus specialist S&S International. The photograph referred to was a black and white .GIF file sent to Dark Avenger via Christopher Seeley of the UK's DOA BBS. Vesselin Bontchev is Bulgaria's leading anti-virus expert.

Gordon reports that The Dark Avenger has not written any viruses since, and says, "Publicising someone who decides to do the right thing is, I think, a good idea." This interview originally appeared in the January, 1993, issue of Virus News International.

About three years ago I was introduced to the man known as Dark Avenger. Having just purchased a PC, and along with it the Ping-Pong


virus, I found my way to the Fidonet virus echo. (This story is detailed in the proceedings of the Fifth International Security and Virus Conference, NYC, March, 1992.) While I was watching information fly back and forth, suddenly there appeared a new name - Dark Avenger. I was intrigued by his style and the hype surrounding him. At some early point of my participation in the forum, I commented that I would like to have a virus named after me, hoping to draw his attention. Had I understood at that time quite what viruses actually entailed, I would not have made that statement.

As I talked with anti-virus researchers and product developers, I began to understand the issues. I also talked to virus writers. Having a background in juvenile correction, I found their attitude typical of youths in crisis. Their response to public mail demonstrated the attitude so prevalent in interaction between rebellious teenagers and authority figures. Their private mail (which I have not and will not disclose) resembled the private conversations I'd had when counselling in a oneon-one situation: frustration, anger and general dissatisfaction, followed by small glimpses of conscience - often resulting in a decision to at least consider the consequences of their actions. Some, like their more traditional counterparts, never made it to that final stage, but at least we had some stimulating discussions.

Time passed, and Dark Avenger continued to haunt me. Why had he not responded, as had the majority of virus writers?

With the release of the now infamous Mutation Engine, I found Dark Avenger had indeed noticed me. The demo virus which accompanied the engine contained the text: "We dedicate this little virus to Sara Gordon, who wanted to have a virus named after her." Many people asked me about this, and I became accustomed to people's assuming I knew Dark Avenger personally. How could I explain to people that I "knew" him, yet had never spoken with him? I am not a programmer, yet I knew him from looking at his viruses. I have no formal background in computer science, but I could understand what he was doing and how he was feeling, even though some people argued that there is no such thing as "instinctive hacking." Few people believed me; yet the fact is, at that time, I had never spoken with him directly.

When I learned Christopher Seeley was talking on a semi-regular basis to someone identified by both Alan Solomon and V esselin Bontchev as Dark Avenger, I sent him a message to pass on to <dav>. The message was written slowly and laboriously in Bulgarian, and briefly stated that I would like to ask him some questions. His response came quickly. I immediately recognised the author as the creator (not necessarily distributor) of the viruses attributed to him. We exchanged several electronic messages, routed through various gateways. Eventually - with the assist-

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ance of various people - I was able to speak "live" (electronically) with Dark Avenger.

This interview is an edited compendium of messages and conversations over a five-month period. He agreed to allow me to ask him these questions, and I agreed to allow him to remove any questions or responses he was not comfortable answering or making public. Why does he hide behind the name he himself did not even choose? Why did he write his first virus? These are only some of the topics we discussed.

Many people have asked me: "Is Vesselin Bontchev the Dark Avenger?" I can state unequivocally that he is not. Neither is he a crazed technopath nor a maniac intent on destroying the world. He has very little in common with the usual crop of virus writers I have talked to. He is unique.

SG: Some time ago, in the Fidonet virus echo, when you were told one of your viruses was responsible for the deaths of thousands, possibly, you responded with an obscenity. Tell me, if one of your viruses was used by someone else to cause a tragic incident, how would you really feel?

DA v.. I am sorry for it. I never meant to cause tragic incidents. I never imagined that these viruses would affect anything outside the computers. I used the nasty words because in fact the people who wrote to me said some very nasty things to me first.

SG: Do you mean you were not aware that there could be any serious consequences of the viruses? Don't computers in your country affect the lives and livelihoods of people?

DA v.. They don't, or at least at that time they didn't. pes were just some very expensive toys nobody could afford and nobody knew how to use. They were only used by some hotshots (or their children) who had nothing else to play with.

I was not aware that there could be any consequences. This virus was so badly written, I never imagined it would leave the town. It all depends on human stupidity, you know. It's not the computer's fault that viruses spread.

SG: Did you have access to modems at that time? Did you ever make use of virus exchange systems to send your viruses? I've seen your name on some of the mail coming from those systems.

DA v.. At that time I did not have access to a modem. At that time there were no virus exchange systems, I think. I've been on some of them, but that was much later. I never made any "use" of them, I was just fooling with them. I've been on almost no VX systems using that name. If you saw it somewhere, probably it was just some impostor, not me. When I have called any of them they (the

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sysops) insist I have written many more viruses. It's very difficult, when you're <dav> (Dark Avenger) and you upload a virus, to give the impression that you didn't write it.

SG: Did you ever call the virus systems using your true name? DA v.. Not a real name but a name that sounded like a real person. SG: Why didn't you ever contact me? DA v.. I did. I left you a message once. Well, it was not to you, but I put

something in it for you. SG: Yes, I remember that one. Something about: "You should see a

doctor. Normal women don't spend all their time talking about computer viruses." I answered it, if you recall?

DA v.. Yes. You said: "I do not want to be a normal woman, at least not in Bulgaria."

SG: Yes, but why didn't you talk to me directly? DA V: I didn't know you wanted to talk to me. Why didn't you send me

mail? SG: I was afraid of you. Anyway, why did you dedicate that virus to

me? DA V: You said you wanted it. SG: Why did you ask me to send you my photo? DA V: I didn't think you would do it. SG: Yes, but I did. Why did you write back: "Don't you have colour

scanners in America?" The message you sent me via Chris Seeley was rather mocking in its tone. Do you dislike me?

DA v.. I thought you sent me that black and white one on purpose. It was an awful picture. If I disliked you I would not be talking to you, and I would be lying to you like I did to Chris Seeley.

SG: People have wondered why you wrote your first virus. Why did you write it and do you have any regrets about it?

DA v.. I wrote it because I had heard about viruses and wanted to know about them, but nobody around me could tell me anything. So I decided to write my own one. I put some code inside it that intentionally destroys data, and I am sorry for it. I started working on it in September 1988.

SG: Where did you hear about viruses? What in particular caught your interest?

DA v.. There was a magazine called Computer For You, the only computer magazine in Bulgaria at that time. In its May 1988 issue there was a stupid article about viruses, and a funny picture on its cover. This particular article was what made me write that virus. Of course, this was not the first time I heard about viruses. I was interested in them, and thinking of writing one a long time before that. I think that the idea of making a program that would travel

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on its own, and go to places its creator could never go, was the most interesting for me. The American government can stop me from going to the US, but they can't stop my virus. Hahahahahahaha.

SG: It has been stated by Valery Todorov that he wrote his first virus, WWT, because he was curious as to whether he could write one or not, but that he wrote his second virus because Vesselin Bontchev (often called the Number One Enemy of Dark Avenger) gave him the idea. Did you get any ideas from other people's viruses? Have you ever written a virus with someone else?

DA v.. No, but for someone else, yes. SG: For whom? DA v.. For you. SG: How do you feel about the destruction of data? DA V: I think it's not right to destroy someone else's data. SG: Then why did you put destructive code in viruses? DA v.. As for the first virus, the truth is that I didn't know what else to

put in it. Also, to make people try to get rid of the virus, not just let it live. At that time, I didn't think that data in PCs could have any great value.

SG: Do you mean the data in PCs in Bulgaria are of no value? DA v.. As I said (or did I?), at that time there were few PCs in Bulgaria,

and they were only used by a bunch of hotshots (or their kids). I just hated it when some asshole had a new powerful16MHz 286, and didn't use it for anything, while I had to program on a 4.77 MHz XT with no hard disk (and I was lucky if I could ever get access to it at all).

Actually, I don't know why am I saying all this. The real answer is: I don't know. AND, I didn't care. I also don't care very much now, I'm afraid. I just want the other people to leave me alone. The weasel [Vesselin Bontchevcan 1 can go to hell.

By the way, if you really think you should not break any laws, you can start by purchasing MS-DOS, or turning off all your computers permanently. First law of computer security: don't buy a computer. Second law: if you ever buy a computer, don't turn it on.

SG: Do you feel responsible if someone else uses one of your viruses to cause harm to a person's machine?

DA v.. No. If they wanted to cause harm, they wouldn't need my viruses, they could simply type "format C:" or something else that is much more effective.

SG: How can you say this? By writing and distributing the viruses, making them available, you do provide people with the idea and

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the means, in the same way you were initially provided. By doing this, your actions affect innocent users.

DA v.. The innocent users would be much less affected if they bought all the software they used (and from an authorised dealer), and if they used it in the way they are allowed to by the licence agreement. If somebody instead of working plays pirated computer games all day long, then it's quite likely that at some point they will get a virus. Besides, there is no such thing as an innocent user, but that's another subject.

sc: What about the fact that you are giving people the idea, by creating such clever viruses?

DA V: Ideas are not responsible for people who believe in them. Or use them. Or abuse them. Also, I didn't write them to "provide" anybody with anything. The weasel is the one who "provides." I just wrote them for fun. I couldn't care less for all the suckers that see/use them. They were not supposed to make such a big mess.

SC: Still, you have provided them with an insidious weapon. Don't you feel that by providing them with such clever computer tricks, you are contributing to hurting the innocent users?

DA V: I don't provide nobody with nothing. The weasel provides. SC: Yes. How does he provide? DA V: He just "provides." That's one of his favourite words. I don't want

to talk or think about it. SC: Yes, I know he likes that word. What do you think about the new

crop of virus writers, like Phalcon/Skism, nUkE, etc? DA v.. I think they are a bunch of kids, most of whom seek "fame" (and

achieve it very easily with the help of a-v people). Most of them are not good at programming viruses at all.

SC: Well, at least that is some point you and the a-v community agree upon. You have achieved a certain amount of "fame" yourself. How does it make you feel when you see your name in magazines and mail? How do you feel when you see your viruses "defeated" by anti-virus programs?

DA v.. I wrote the virus so it would be killed, like I said. It was not supposed to do all this. I like seeing my name in magazines and in messages, also. I used to read all the messages about me. But I like it most when I see it printed somewhere. And, of course, I liked it a LOT seeing my things in western a-v programs. First time I saw McAfee Scan, was about version 5.0 or so, I liked it a lot. I was just excited, happy.

SC: Where did you get that name, Dark Avenger? DA V: I didn't really "get" the name. What I mean is that I didn't call

myself that. I put those words in the virus and someone else (we

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both know) said it was written by the Dark Avenger. He is the one that made me be the Dark Avenger, that name. I didn't use the name until after he called me that. That phrase itself came from some old song from a long time ago, and not from an Iron Maiden song like some people have said. In many ways, I suppose you could say he made the Dark Avenger.

SG: Are you going to continue writing viruses? DA v.. I don't know that. It depends on what will happen to me. SG: What do you mean? DA V: I meant, I will not normally write/spread any destructive or virus

code, unless something extraordinary happens. Well, not if they put me in jail. If they do, and I ever get out, I will not be in a mood for programming. It is not/was not a crime to write the viruses, so I don't think this should happen. I just am not interested III

writing them now. SG: Do you know the difference between right and wrong? DA v.. Why do [youl ask me this? In American movies, at the end, always

the good guy gets the money, the girl and the applause, and the bad guy gets in jailor something. But in real life, it's not clear who is good and who is bad, and who gets what. It's not black and white. The only thing that is for sure is that good people always lose.

SG: Have you ever considered making an anti-virus product, other than the fake DOCTOR.EXE which is actually a virus?

DA V: I have considered it many times, of course, but anti-virus products are as useless as viruses. I don't think I will ever make a real one. As for DOCTOR.EXE, it's not fake, it really does the job as it says it does.

SG: Why do you say they are useless? Don't you think they help protect the users from common viruses?

DA v.. The users spend much more money on buying such products and their updates rather than on the losses of data damaged because of viruses. The a-v products only help the users to empty their wallets. Besides, viruses would spread much less if the "innocent users" did not steal software, and if they worked a bit more at their workplace, instead of playing games. For example, it is known that the Dark Avenger virus was transported from Europe to the USA via some (of course, stolen) games.

SG: I did not know this. Are you sure about this? You do make a good point.

DA v.. Not 100%. I'm only 100% sure that I've been told that some UN employees "transported" the virus from Europe (Austria? - not sure) to the States through some games. I don't know if it's true or

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not. I guess you should know about these matters much more than me.

SG: But viruses have now spread far beyond the games. Most viruses are known to come by other routes.

DA V: Sure they spread beyond the games. Still, I've never found a virus on any original disk from a package I bought from Borland International.

SG: But I got my first virus from commercial software! Don't you remember my telling that story?

DA v.. Not from Borland International. It's like with whores: at some places you would get a virus, and at others you wouldn't. (I don't mean you, of course.)

SG: It is said that your fellow Bulgarian, Vesselin Bontchev, did many things to provoke the virus writers. Did he provoke you?

DA v.. This is quite true, and I don't think he ever denied it. If he did, it would be a lie. There are a lot of people in Bulgaria who know it and can confirm it, but I don't think this was a big contribution to virus writing - his viruses were pretty worthless. He is not a good programmer.

SG: Do you feel that conditions in your country really help create virus writers as was stated by Bontchev in his "factory" paper? What can you tell me about the conditions in your country that you feel contributed to your writing your first virus?

DA v.. I don't think the conditions in my country help create virus writers any more than conditions in any other country in Eastern Europe. Not after a certain person we both know left the country. As for my first virus, it had nothing to do with that.

SG: What contribution could "a certain person" have made to assist you (or anyone) in writing a virus? Don't you think that the conditions affecting the economy and computer technology of your country have indeed contributed to the overabundance of virus writers coming from former Eastern Bloc countries?

DA V: His articles were a plain challenge to virus writers, encouraging them to write more. Also they were an excellent guide how to write them, for those who wanted to, but did not know how. It never said that he himself wrote some.

SG: Did you ever personally give a virus to Vesselin Bontchev? In fact, have you ever met him? There is such an animosity between the two of you, which seems unlikely to exist for two "strangers." Why is this?

DA v.. Please, lets not talk about him ever again. I don't want you to talk to him.

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John Connolly


Man in a Million



In computing everyone always wants to build a computer that's bigger, faster and cheaper. Even in the world outside the industry the biggest, fastest supercomputer has a glamour to it. Curiously, supercomputers played a role in the founding of the Internet, the latest industry boom.

In a very real sense, John Connolly is the - or at least, a - grandfather of the Internet: he is the man who wrote the cheques that built NSFNet, the backbone of the Internet as it developed from the mid-19Bos to the mid-1990S. Connolly now teaches at the University of Kentucky at Lexington, where he manages the supercomputing centre. Here he talks about Internet pre-history and the future of supercomputing.

The race to build a computer that can handle teraflops (a trillion floating point operations per second) hasn't got the public glamour and attention that the race to get a man into space commanded in the 1960s. Nonetheless, the race is on. The primary competitors are the us and Japan, although last year a consortium of scientists and industrialists sent a proposal to the Ee requesting some £3.5 billion in funds for a programme to build a European supercomputing industry.

One of the more interesting perspectives on the development of supercomputing comes from John Connolly. Connolly is now Executive Director of the Supercomputing Centre at the University of Kentucky in


Lexington, one of perhaps a dozen such university centres in the US; he is a member of the executive board of the Coalition of Academic Supercomputer Centers. In the mid-1980s, however, when the US government decided to invest seriously in supercomputing, Connolly was the man at the National Science Foundation (NSF) charged with administering and creating the programme. Hidden in that job description were significant strides toward building what is now the Internet. The reason is expense: even the US can't afford too many government-funded supercomputing sites, so they must be shared; networking made that possible.

Connolly claims little credit: "It wasn't my idea. I gave some money to some people who had good ideas. I just wrote the cheques.

"Actually," he says, "I wasn't convinced at the beginning that the network was really necessary. I thought the phone company would do it all, and give us the right service - in fact most of the network is on lines leased from the phone company. But the phone companies, much to my shock, weren't interested in the network - they didn't see a lot of money in it."

Now, with proposals afoot for national information superhighways, what the Coalition of Academic Supercomputing Centers would like to see is improved communications between centres so that the whole network works together as seamlessly as if it were one computer. VicePresident Al Gore's interest in technology is a definite bonus, according to Connolly, who was based in Washington during his years at the NSF.

"He's a great guy. He's one of the few politicians who understands technology."

Of course, first you have to define "supercomputer." The old definition - the fastest machine on the planet - limits the number of supercomputers at any given time to one; this is why they now talk instead about "high-performance" computers.

Connolly's definition is: "You take the best machine, and anything which is within an order of magnitude of that is a supercomputer." At the moment, Connolly holds that the fastest machine is the NEC SX-3, installed at sites in Japan, Europe and Canada. Speed is determined by a set of scientific benchmarks.

Connolly got into the supercomputing business by accident. Canadianborn, he graduated from the University of Toronto with a math degree that left him facing two choices: go to graduate school or become an actuary (in Toronto the insurance companies snap up half of all math graduates). He went to Columbia University in New York City to study theoretical physics, quit, joined the electronics industry where he says he "tried very hard to understand how semiconductors work" and wound up at the University of Florida studying solid state physics.

"The way to make progress in solid state physics is by doing computer

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calculations, so I got into computers at a very early age trying to understand solids. My whole physics career was sort of connected with computers, so eventually I became an 'expert' just through longevity." It was as a solid state physicist that he joined the National Science Foundation (NSF). He was still there when, in 1982, the Japanese announced their Fifth Generation programme to develop an all-purpose AI machine that spurred US investment in supercomputing technology. Ironically enough, last year the Japanese wound up the program among general agreement that it had been a flop.

It was the NSF that was charged with handling the American response. No one knew exactly what the programme would be, but they had $50 million to use or lose.

"So they looked around the NSF for somebody who had some experience on computers." And they found Connolly: "I was the only one around who had ever actually used a supercomputer. So they said, 'You're it'."

The way he tells it, the next six months were a bit like the Rodney Dangerfield movie Easy Money: he had to come up with a plan to spend $50 million in six months. Very quickly, the idea of the network of supercomputing centres took shape, and a contest was held for the best ideas. Out of about 25 proposals, the top five were selected: Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh, PA), San Diego, Champagne/Urbana (Illinois) and Princeton (New Jersey). All five were set up; four are still going.

Each centre was to be a showplace for prototype equipment - and, since Congress specifically wanted to stimulate the entire supercomputing industry, new machines from a variety of companies. Cornell is the IBM centre, even though at the time IBM wasn't too sure whether it was in the supercomputing business - it had a machine on the drawing board that seemed appropriate.

"I felt that IBM being the major power in the world of computing, they really should have a role," says Connolly. "This new machine looked like a supercomputer, but they didn't call it that, because at the time supercomputers were thought to be very exotic and expensive." Read: hard to sell.

By the time Connolly was setting up the University of Kentucky centre, though, IBM was "fully competitive - the Cray was a little faster, but the IBM had more memory." The University of Kentucky centre needed the extra memory; it bought IBM.

Three of the national centres ended up as Cray centres. To understand this, you have to understand Cray has dominated the field for decades.

"What Seymour likes to do is build the fastest machine. He doesn't care about money: he just wants enough money to build the next fastest

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machine. This attitude has always gotten him into trouble." Cray built his first fast machine in the 1960s, at Remington Rand. He

wanted to surpass this machine with an even faster one, but the powers that were at Rand just wanted to sell the machine he'd already built. Cray quit to form Control Data Corporation.

At CDC, he built a number of machines, but came up against the same brick wall: he wanted to go on building fast, scientific computers while those running the business wanted to concentrate on machines they could sell for business applications. Cray left again, in 1972, to found a new company, Cray Research.

Cray Research took time to produce the Cray-l (1976) and Cray-2 (1984), variants of which are still being sold. Cray himself, however, moved on to found Cray Computer, which has just installed the prototype Cray-3 after six years of work.

The Cray-3, however, has come into a very different world than the one that existed when it was first announced - those years of delay have cost Cray his lead. In early 1992, when the Cray-3 was still more than a year away from delivery, Paul Messina, who chairs the consortium that owns the massively parallel Touchstone Delta, predicted that when the Cray-3 arrived it would be slower than the Delta.

Back then Connolly said, "People have a lot of faith in Seymour; they say, well, he's pulled it out before. He had two customers last year, and he lost both of them; when that happened, everybody said 'he's dead.' We all hope he isn't, because he's been our hero for the last 30 years."

Now, Connolly says of the prototype Cray-3, which uses gallium arsenide technology and was installed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in August, 1993, "Everybody's interested, but the general consensus is that he blew it, it came out too late. When he announced this machine in the late 1980s, he said this was going to be equal to 100 Cray-ls, and everybody went, 'Aaaaah.' But the latest Cray [Research] Y-MP C90, which comes out of his old company is more than 100 Cray-ls, so it's already been bypassed." The Y -MP is a descendent of Cray's machines, but it was designed by Steve Chen, whose own supercomputing initiative recently lost its funding (from IBM). For the first time since the 1960s, the fastest machine is not built by Seymour Cray.

So, for the national centres, Connolly says, "The idea was we needed at least one Cray centre and one CDC centre, but it turned out that the demand for Cray cycles was quite large at the time." Since the NSF wanted to give those doing basic scientific research what they needed, they decided on two Cray centres. "And then there was another proposal that came in that was such a bargain - the Pittsburgh one - that we decided to have three Cray centres."

The one that failed was the Princeton-based "John van Neumann

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Center," the one that was to showcase ETA, a subsidiary of CDC, which was exactly the sort of small start-up that Congress wanted funded.

"It was a wonderful idea, but it was troubled right from the beginning, I don't know why, like it was cursed." Even the name didn't help. "They had management problems, and construction problems." On top of that, the ETA machine used a radical new design that ran at liquid nitrogen temperature - to make the semiconductors run faster and to help with cooling. Rebooting was a slow process, since you would have to warm up the machine any time you wanted to work on the electronics inside. Just replacing a board meant waiting for hours for the machine to cool back down afterwards.

The bigger problem was software, and eventually CDC pulled the plug on its ETA subsidiary because of its financial losses.

"Essentially, they lost their NSF contract because the NSF realised they had no future." The centre suggested becoming a Cray centre, but the NSF was already funding the others. Connolly suggested trying a new design, something massively parallel, but they thought it was too risky. N ow, of course, massive parallelism is the wave of the future, and everyone - Intel, Cray and IBM, as well as smaller companies like Kendall Square and Thinking Machines - is either planning or has built such machines.

With massive parallelism, the supercomputing industry is following the same pattern as mainframes and PC networks: the hegemony of the big, expensive machines is being challenged by hosts of (by comparison) tiny, cheap machines all linked together. The $15 million prototype Intel Touchstone Delta at Cal Tech, made up of 520 RISC processors plus about 50 386 chips, was one of the first of this new wave. The machine was delivered in May 1991.

Connolly's own centre provides a perfect example of the kind of change massive parallelism is bringing. The centre's main machine for the last several years has been a six-processor IBM 30901600J that cost $10 million in 1990. Three years later, University of Kentucky bought a Convex "metacomputer" - a new term for this hybrid machine, which is made up of eight top-of-the-line HP workstations linked to a Convex mainframe - which has ten times the disk space and runs "theoretically" at three times the speed of the IBM. The price: less than $1 million. By next year, says Connolly, they'll have to pay someone to take the IBM machine away. For the university, though, it's worth it: having the supercomputing facility attracts scientific researchers, grant money and better jobs for graduates.

Meanwhile, the Delta is beginning to look a little slow: Messina says it's being replaced already.

"Weare getting an Intel Paragon [in October, 1993] that is similar to

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the Delta in architecture but should be about two to four times faster for many applications." However, he says, "Many users want to keep the Delta as well. Keep in mind that the Delta is still in the top two to four computers in the world as far as speed for real applications. A few other systems are faster, but most are not yet in use for real work."

So after all this, how close are teraflops - real teraflops, not company predictions (1995) or government goals (the year 2000)?

Connolly estimates it this way: "There's a new machine, a very interesting machine, at Los Alamos, which is a Thinking Machines CMS. It benchmarks at about 50 gigaflops - that's within a factor of 20 of teraflops. If power doubles every two years, which is the historical trend -although it looks like it's accelerating - it will be less than ten years. If they really push it, maybe five or six years."

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David Cutler

Photograph courtesy of Microsoft

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"

Rock Steady



Creating ever more powerful hardware means having to come up with software that exploits that new power. This is just as true in the microcomputer world as in the supercomputer world. The key to exploiting the hardware is the operating system - the software that makes all the other programs work with the specific set of hardware components that make up a particular computer.

David Cutler has developed some of the best-known operating systems in the industry including VMS for the DEC V AX minicomputer. This interview focuses on his leadership of the development project for Windows NT, beginning in 1988 when he joined Microsoft. NT is a corporate big brother to the consumer-oriented Windows 3.x and Windows 95. At the beginning of Cutler's work on NT, Microsoft was still contractually tied to IBM, with whom it developed the first two versions of 0512, now owned wholly by IBM. An additional competitor is UNIX, a free system developed at A T&T Bell Labs that runs on many types of computers, making it a ''portable'' operating system; UNIX is specified for many government installations.

Operating systems are designed for specific hardware, just as the most common operating system, DOS, is designed to run on IBM PC compatibles. In the years covered by this interview, 1988 to 1992, the race was on to produce the first 32-bit operating systems that would take advantage of the newer, faster chips (then 386s, later 486s) that power computers. In


1990, the introduction by Microsoft of Windows 3.0 added graphics, changing the face of the operating system market even more.

Bill Gates predicted in 1993, the year of NT's release, that NT would sell a million copies in the first year. As of November, 1995, Microsoft refused to release the number of NT users.

David Cutler could pass for General "Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopfs younger brother. His short hair and his soft-spoken, no-nonsense delivery and plain-talking approach give you the feeling that he would be more comfortable in a military briefing room than in front of 5000 wideeyed PC software developers in the heart of downtown San Francisco.

Yet at the NT developers' conference in July, Cutler was in his element. For more than an hour, he offered a clear, succinct and heavily technical briefing on how to develop in Microsoft's 32-bit Windows NT operating environment. As the man in charge of the project, Cutler would be expected to elicit lots of questions from developers.

He got those, but you could also hear admiration and respect in their voices. Cutler is no fly-by-night technological guru of the month. Bill Gates even admitted that he is the closest thing Microsoft has to a technological "rock star." Although he only joined Microsoft in 1988, he was the man who gave life to DEC's enduring VMS minicomputer operating system. The room was therefore full of developers who grew up using the fruits of Cutler's labours.

Cutler's first major operating systems project was for DEC almost 20 years ago, when he worked on the R611M operating system for the PDP-11. It was a real-time, multi-programming and multi-threading operating system that Cutler felt was heavily constrained by the DEC hardware of the day.

He then became involved with the legendary DEC V AX and VMS project, which would break the limitations of the then dominant 16-bit hardware design. Cutler recalls those freewheeling days with a smile.

"We hired people from a few places and looked at what else was going on. UNIX was just coming to life, DEC's PDP-1O and lOx had been a timesharing system, and we thought we would take the best features out of UNIX and the other systems and combine them."

After the huge subsequent success of the VAX and VMS, Cutler spent two years away from the operating systems arena working on the compilers PL-l and C. By this time, he says, he was getting frustrated with the "big company, East coast" mentality that was creeping into DEC and success, so he successfully lobbied to move his development team away from the fray to Seattle.

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The team's charter was to produce an operating system for two new chip sets being produced by DEC. One became part of the operating system for the moderately successfully Micro V AX; the other, known as VAXillon, died when DEC decided not to have a hardware platform for it. Cutler was not happy about this.

Perhaps sensing Cutler's disappointment, DEC asked the new Seattle team to begin a programme developing the next major operating system architecture for the company. Cutler's ideas for this operating system were, he says, influenced by the interest in the UNIX-based Mach system under development at the time.

He wanted to build a system that could support multiple environments simultaneously, something which Mach really couldn't handle, particularly when it came to sharing files between different environments. Cutler's goal from the beginning was to have a system that would run both UNIX and VMS.

But politics got in the way again and "after too many changes and too many compromises," Cutler and his team decided to start up a company called Crystal Software and began negotiations with venture capitalists to plan the new firm. Cutler now calls these people "vulture capitalists" and credits Bill Gates with rescuing him.

After discussions with Microsoft, Cutler agreed to try to produce a "portable OS/2" to run on Intel's i860 RISC processor. This would not only allow him to take advantage of the superior performance of the RISC architecture, but give Microsoft the opportunity to port the operating system to other processors.

In 1988 OS/2 was only a year old and Microsoft and IBM were developing it jointly as a next generation operating system beyond DOS. When Cutler brought his project to Microsoft, he made it a condition of the deal that IBM would never have anything to do with his "portable OS/2." After working so hard to escape from the bureaucracy that DEC had grown into, he did not want to get sucked into the Big Blue machine.

To his credit, the team did get a version of the portable OS/2 running on the i860, which was known in its early days as the N-I0. To differentiate the portable project from mainstream OS/2 efforts, the N-lO project became NT.

The early OS/2-based version of NT was able to run OS/2 in text mode. It conformed to POSIX specifications in order to meet government open systems requirements, and remains a part of NT today (as does the ability to run text-mode OS/2 apps).

Then came Windows 3.0 and the whole game was changed. Not only was it a far bigger success in just a few months than OS/2 had ever been, but Cutler's original plan to develop NT for the Intel i860 was running into limitations caused by the chip and the way Intel was handling it.

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Cutler jumped horses again. He and his team decided that the thing to do was to build a Windows POSIX system, and that is how work on today's Windows NT system was born.

At the same time, around 1990, Microsoft started talking to MIPS about its R4000 processor as a platform for NT.

Cutler says that although the R4000 was only "a twinkle in MIPS's eye" when the two companies started talking, it was a good alternative to RISC systems being offered by Intel and Motorola. Although the latter had its 88000 range of RISC chips, Microsoft didn't feel it was being handled aggressively enough to become a successful platform for NT.

Cutler had a version of NT on a "big endian" MIPS machine. He went to a DECstation as a target station, then using R4000 prototypes, and finally agreed to expand the project to develop for Intel x86 (386DX and better) processors as well as the MIPS chip.

With the chance to develop for 32-bit and 64-bit hardware architectures, the question arose of how to develop NT without leaving Windows 3.0 developers behind. The solution was a Dynamic Link Library (DLL) called Win32s that runs on Windows 3.1. If developers write to the Win32s DLL, applications will run on Windows 3.1 and Windows NT without any problem, taking advantage of the 32-bit support in Windows NT.

"We had to ask: do we just swap 16 bits to 32 bits or start from scratch?" recalls Cutler. "Those who wrote applications which were less tied to segmentation would have little trouble porting. Windows 3.1 has helped and been incorporated in NT. The OS/2 subsystem is still there and was difficult to do, and we did 16-bit character mode. If 32-bit support becomes important, we can do a PM interface, calls and API. But if you want to run only PM, which program manager would you want to talk to, which task manager, and so on? It isn't clear that we would be able to do as tight an integration with OS/2 as we can with DOS, Windows and text-mode OS/2 applications."

Cutler appears relieved that Windows NT is finally in the hands of developers. He is also happy that IBM will continue to play no role in NT's development: "I am glad to see IBM out of it. I can't remember any IBM ideas we ever incorporated [into NT]."

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James McGroddy


Out of the Big Blue



Behind all computer developments is research, and while IBM is not the dominant force in the market it once was, it still runs one of the great US corporate labs: the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. James McGroddy was Vice-President in Charge of Research, and he presided over Watson and IBM's other labs worldwide.

Watson is research on a grand scale; many of the things invented there have nothing to do with IBM's business of selling computers and software. The company has often been criticised for being slow to get products out of the lab and into the market. In the early 19905, IBM ("Big Blue") skidded into the red. McGroddy's tone here was optimistic and reassuring. But the following year the research division's budget was cut by 10 per cent.

McGroddy is now a personal assistant to IBM's CEO, Leo Gerstner.

"This is the greatest playground there is," research scientist Bob Flavin has said of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, "mostly because of the people."

IBM spends $6-7 billion (about 10 per cent of revenue; in 1988 that was larger than Apple's total revenue) on research, development and engineering every year. About 10 per cent of that ($600 million) is spent on research - both so-called "pure" and applied. Some leads to products; some leads to prestige in the form of awards or publication in internationally respected scientific journals.


"Our goal has two legs," says James McGroddy, Vice-President and Director of Research at IBM. "One is to be famous for our science and technology, and the other is to be a vital part of IBM, and that really means vital, like the heart that keeps you alive."

Worldwide, the research division has approximately 3500 employees, a third of whom are PhDs. Some 2500 are at Yorktown Heights and two other buildings in nearby Hawthorne; 800 are at Almaden, California; and 200 are at Zurich. In addition, the research division has links with labs in Tokyo and Haifa (Israel).

Research at IBM began as early as the 1950s (the company was founded in 1911). At the time, as McGroddy puts it, "We had research without formally recognising we had a research department in quite the way we have it today." This was the period when scientists working for IBM invented the disk drive, FORTRAN, field effect transistor technology and the DRAM chip.

In the 1960s, when McGroddy originally joined the division, he says, "Research had its own agenda, which derived from looking at IBM and the world and the opportunities to do things. We got funded from the corporation and did this agenda we set for ourselves, and we took the results and tried, sometimes with great success, to make those matter in IBM. Some of those were never aimed at mattering in IBM; they were simply big contributions to science. The dye laser, for example, never had a huge impact in IBM. Sure, we use dye lasers in IBM, but its primary impact has been in the world." Other IBM inventions, like the disk drive, have had a huge impact on both.

But, says McGroddy, "By the late 1970s, our view had evolved that our first responsibility was to transfer technology into the development and manufacturing divisions. It wasn't just that we could put it on the shelf and see if they came and took it."

At that point, he says, the division developed two agendas. First was the one it already had; the other was to be shared with the relevant divisions and partially funded by them.

Field effect transistor technology was developed in this way: the semiconductor division was committed to metal gate technology, and Research believed that the future lay in silicon. Discussions were unproductive. However, when the two divisions experimented with working together, they found they could in fact do a lot with the technology Research was proposing.

"We call these things joint programmes now," says McGroddy. "In our society, in IBM, this works well." There are about 20 of these, consuming about a third of Research's resources. Research has, of course, hundreds of other projects in progress, varying in size from two to 40 people.

Both RISC technology and the cell that is the heart of the 4 Mbit DRAM

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chip are the products of joint programmes. In the case of RISC technology, the floating point chip was initially designed in Research, and then the team went to the Austin (Texas) product development labs and participated in the final design - the processor was designed specifically as a target for the compiler.

Joint programmes answer the "be a vital part of IBM" leg. Like the heart, says McGroddy, "to work, it's got to be tangled in."

But joint programmes have their limitations. "It works very well for things that are more evolutionary than revolutionary." But Research is also about making great strides forward - "exploring, not real estate developing. "

McGroddy's passion for this two-legged agenda flows logically out of his personal background. He got his BA in physics with a focus on electronics at St Josephs University in Philadelphia. While he was there, he worked as an engineer. However, he didn't want to go into engineering: he felt they didn't understand enough. At that time, transistors were just beginning to be used, but the project he was on, much to his frustration, wouldn't let him design transistors. He went on to get a PhD in solid state physics at the University of Maryland. His academic studies and his work experience together gave him, as he puts it, "a mix of relatively pure theoretically fundamental stuff, plus a practical background." When he next looked for work, IBM appealed to him because, "I got the sense that at IBM I would be able to do the pure research, but also have some contact with more applied things."

McGroddy spent a number of years doing what he calls "relatively fundamental research," and then spent five years teaching at a Copenhagen technical university. After that, he went back to IBM to manage an applied group that was working on semi-conductor lasers, liked it, and went back to doing basic research. But, he says, he always tried, "to get people hooked into what the agenda is within IBM," so that, for example, a team researching surface physics did its work on silicon instead of nickel.

After that, he was head of the semiconductor division. He was the "godfather" (his term) of the partnership with Toshiba to develop flat panel displays. Then he was secretary to the corporate management committee at the Armonk headquarters, and had various jobs in product and technology development. In 1989, when the previous director retired, McGroddy was asked to become Head of Research.

Speed is one of his concerns. "If you're working on things that are headed for the market, you'd better work out how to get them there, like strawberries, before they rot, or stop working on that because it's not going to take us anywhere, it's just going to frustrate us, and we'll wind up with a prototype that's no use."

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McGroddy believes that speeding things to the marketplace has become easier because of the richness of the industry's infrastructure. Ten or 15 years ago, there were only big, vertically integrated companies in the industry - IBM owned paper-making factories at one time because that was the only way to get cardstock made to its specifications for punch cards. Now, so much is available off the shelf that a small group of people can put a product together in a short time using the infrastructure.

"I think," McGroddy says, "there's not enough recognition of the value of time. Time is the one thing you usually can't get any more of. You can't buy it. If you have it, you can probably convert it into money, but it's not a reversible transformation."

At the end of July, IBM announced the Power Visualization System (PVS); it runs on the RS/6000, and provides graphic displays of supercomputer data. This is not as dryas it sounds: one of the demonstrations transforms ten years of weather satellite data into a shocking, full-colour, three-dimensional, high-resolution picture of the evolution of the Earth's ozone layer.

"This is a major new application of computer technology coming down the pipe," says McGroddy. "It has the ability to take data which may not represent something which is intrinsically visual, such as electron energy density, or a defect in a silicon crystal, and vary the way I visualise that."

PVS, however, has another value to IBM and Research: it is the product of an experimental development process.

"Typically," says McGroddy, "these things start by a new company which has no other agenda." Therefore, Research proposed to IBM's Innovation Council in August, 1989 that the division manage the project as a start-up company with a single goal: to create a system that closes the loop between a supercomputer and a person, and announce it at SIGGRAPH 1991, SIGGRAPH being the Special Interest Group for Graphics' annual conference. The group was set up in November, 1989, and PVS was announced on schedule. At its peak, the group employed 54 people, some brought in from outside, some imported from other parts of IBM. It was left very much to itself.

In a sense, the process has given Research two products: first, PVS itself, and second, a methodology for managing development projects.

"It's not the first time IBM ever did that. The PC came out of something like that." McGroddy adds, "We need to relearn these things."

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, a team is working on virtual reality. This is an attempt to incorporate the natural physical forces -gravity, friction, collision detection - into VR applications. In a demonstration game of handball, the ball bounces off the walls or your hand at the correct angle, and your hand casts a shadow. Vortex tubes in a virtual

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laboratory change light and colour and interact with each other in response to voice commands. Rubber rocks in a real-time simulation break if too much force is applied to them.

The system takes seven RS/6000s to run - and that still isn't enough. But incorporating the physical laws will eventually allow applications like simulating the airflow on airplane wings in test situations in real time, or docking molecules, or trying out new surgical operations. It's important, for example, for a surgeon to know that if he applies a certain amount of force he will cut a hole in a person's heart.

It's easy to imagine a future in which the PVS and VR converge, so that, given a complete enough model, you could investigate what-if scenarios, such as: if we reduce the number of cars in the world by 25 per cent, what effect will that have on the ozone layer over 20 years? Similarly, McGroddy envisions hosts of educational applications for such systems: imagine schoolchildren finding out what it's like to be electrons. Today, we understand these things by writing lots of equations on pieces of paper, but, says McGroddy, understanding such concepts intuitively would make learning the math and physics behind them easier.

This was one of the major themes in Research's contribution to this year's ten-year outlook report - each year, the vice-presidents in charge of IBM's various divisions put together a report on what the world will look like in ten years' time. This includes an annual review - Research, for example, would include its major accomplishments for the year, awards won, and so on. But it also includes extrapolation: what will a workstation look like in the year 2000? If price (plummeting) and performance (skyrocketing) were the story of the 1980s, bandwidth is one of the themes for the 1990s.

These reports are presented to IBM's Management Committee each June, and are used to determine which projects get funding and resources allocated to them.

Science is about 15 per cent of the work done at all three main research labs. But, McGroddy says, this is not altruism; scientific research has some very real benefits for IBM, even if they can't be simply quantified.

"A lot of fundamentals of technology come out of science," says McGroddy. "It comes out in a relatively public way" - that is, through publication in international journals - "but, in principle at least, you're advantaged in using it quickly if you have the people there who did it. Take something like scanning tunnelling microscopy, which was done at the Zurich lab and won a Nobel prize in 1986 or so. Today we use that technology or derivatives all over the place, including in our manufacturing facilities. It's really paid dividends for us."

Besides, "There's a set of issues about the unity of the whole, the integrity, the balance in a research lab. You could argue that you don't

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really need all your hair and you could cut some of it off, but the point is, it doesn't really make sense to do that. There's an integrity in the whole, and it pays off in lots of ways."

For example, "A scientist will, because of what he knows, solve a big problem that's way out of his field." It was, for example, a spin glass theorist who came up with simulated thermal annealing - which is now used as a method of optimising anything from school bus schedules to chip placement. Similarly, McGroddy mentions IBM's mathematicians, who do their research by working on optimisation problems in fields like airline scheduling.

But not all projects work out so well. "One of the hardest things to do in research is stop projects, because you're always guessing." Recently, Bell Labs has gotten a lot of publicity over a project that its director tried to stop; the researcher continued working on it and made it into a big success.

Says McGroddy, "You ought to make some of those mistakes. The only way not to make those mistakes is to never stop anything."

Change is another of his themes. "A lot of people are uncomfortable with change," he says, but "Change is a sign of life," and the world is changing at such a ferocious pace that IBM has to change accordingly.

At the same time, change creates worries. "People worry about it. There are changes in other research labs. It's raining all over the place." McGroddy has to deal with those worries head-on. "We continue to work to ensure that we are vital to IBM. If you're vital to IBM, nobody's going to cut you in half."

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Andy Hopper


Olivetti Reveals Pandora's Box

Interviewer: Ian Burley


Although, as we've seen, the US has come to dominate the IT industry, Britain still has strengths in areas such as networking and telecommunications. Some of the key research in this area, as Hermann Hauser pointed out at the beginning of this book, is in Cambridge, where ATM (for asynchronous transfer mode) was developed before being taken up by companies like IBM.

Andy Hopper is Director of Cambridge's Olivetti Research Lab (ORL), which was originally set up by Hermann Hauser. ORL's focus is on basic research, rather than product development. This piece explains two of ORL's best-known projects. As networks become part of everyday life, the deployment of such technology may become commonplace.

Andy entered the unfamiliar, darkened room. He prodded a button on the small, plastic badge clipped to his lapel. Out of the corner of an eye, he detected a small, red LED blinking its presence on a wall. Noiselessly the lights came up. As he approached, a workstation in a recess flashed into life revealing a familiar and unfinished document. Before he could resume his work, Andy was greeted by the beaming image of a colleague in a small window onscreen, accompanied by a subtle beeping noise. He clicked on "Accept." "Ah, I've found you. Good. I noticed your favourite workroom had been booked by someone else today. Anyway, I've just seen your interesting video fax report from last night, Andy .... "


The above might pass as an undemanding piece of science fiction or an attempt at setting the scene for a hypothetical advanced office perhaps ten years hence. But the keys to some revolutionary concepts in the application of personal computing described above, the Pandora and Active Badge projects, actually exist. In fact, much of the techno-trickery is an everyday fact of life in a modernised section of what used to be the Old Addenbrookes Hospital in central Cambridge. That's where Olivetti Research Laboratories (ORL), set up in 1986, is situated. ORL's sole purpose is to explore the boundaries of computer applications - with a little collaboration with the nearby Cambridge University computing and engineering laboratories. ORL also has backing from DEC.

One might be forgiven for thinking that ORL is somehow related to another Cambridge computer firm, Acorn Computers. A lot of Acorn Archimedes workstations are used at ORL; Olivetti has a majority shareholding in Acorn. ORL's Managing Director is ex-Acorn man Dr Andy Hopper, who was behind the development of Acorn's low-cost proprietary networking system, Econet, and later helped to design the Cambridge Fast Ring network. One of Andy's bosses is ex-Acorn cofounder Hermann Hauser, who heads up Olivetti's advanced research wing - besides developing the troubled Active Book.

The extrovert and jovial Hopper appears to be the life and soul of ORL, although he's not an easy guy to keep tabs on. Hopper does get his hands dirty. Right in the middle of my Pandora demo, the Cambridge Fast Ring network crashed; it was Hopper who got it going again. Hopper, born in Poland, must surely be unique in being the only top-flight computer research scientist to have had an arcade game named after him; "Hopper" was Acornsoft's clone of the once popular "Frogger" game.

Most of the 30 or so researchers at ORL are Cambridge graduates, many with doctorates. ORL's relationship with the Cambridge University Computer Lab is intimate. Students are welcome at ORL and often get help and advice there. It's not unusual for ORL to take a close interest in certain students' project work. Over the five or so years ORL has been operating, its symbiotic relationship with the university has been not only successful, but also valuable.

ORL's purpose is not necessarily to develop projects which will directly end up as commercial products. Some ideas, like Active Badges, for example, have clear commercial applications but it will probably be another part of Olivetti that will engineer them into products. Xerox has already licensed Active Badge technology, which Olivetti has patented.

As Dr Tony King, an ORL research engineer, explained, "Once a research project here stops being reasonably difficult, it's time to pass it on to somebody else to develop. Then we can turn our attention to the next cerebral exercise." The payoff may not be immediate commercial

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product innovations, but there can be spin-offs and valuable experience is gained in technologies which may be fast maturing.

The Pandora multimedia communications system and Active Badges are two of ORL's most exciting projects. The former is for UNIX workstations connected by a fast network, in this case the famed Cambridge Fast Ring. Pandora offers a sophisticated videophone and video email system, videoconferencing, and instant onscreen access to a variety of audiovisual inputs: broadcast television, video, audio CDs, radio and the like.

Currently, the graphical user interface used is X.Windows based. Despite the Archimedes's relatively low resolution, picture quality is satisfactory. It's possible to have several incoming streams at once, though unless it's coordinated - as a conference, for example - this is only really useful as a demonstration of Pandora's power.

Active Badges are simple devices designed to communicate with wallor workstation-mounted sensors, in turn networked to a central monitoring system. Active Badge information can tell the system where somebody is, how many people there are in a certain location, and even if they are close to a terminal. The story goes that research engineer Roy Want, who was working on the audio side of the Pandora project, wanted to be able to find his colleagues around the building. In consultation with Hopper, the Active Badge project was born. Once Want finished his work on Pandora, Active Badges became his full time occupation, which he has since continued in the US with Xerox in Palo Alto. It soon became clear that the badges would be ideal for the Pandora system. So the two started off as separate projects, but woven together they provide insights into the automated office of tomorrow.

The latest prototype Active Badges have a couple of programmable buttons, a red and a green LED - themselves programmable - a piezo speaker and an infrared transmitter/receiver. The infrared signal is transmitted in very short but "bright" bursts lasting about 0.1 seconds, so a signal can reliably be reflected off a wall and onto a sensor. There is also a light-dependent resistor built in to vary the transmission frequency about once every 15 seconds. Several badge wearers can be present in a room without signals' interfering with each other. The light sensor extends battery life by pausing infrared signal transmissions when it's totally dark - for example, if the badge is face down or concealed in a pocket or drawer. An on/off switch was rejected: they thought users wouldn't always remember to switch their badges on.

A short-range-radio field sensor is incorporated for closer proximity sensing of things like security doors. The badge works as a transponder -its identity can be challenged by a security system. Other ideas for using the field sensor include sensing when a badge-wearer is close to his or her

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workstation - the system could be alerted to switch on that workstation remotely and make it resume from where the user had previously left off.

Badges can be used as pagers. A favourite story at ORL is that while staff were celebrating a colleague's birthday, "Happy Birthday" started to sound. It came from his Active Badge, via the paging function.

For some, these systems conjure up Orwellian visions. The reality at ORL is different. You can disappear from the system by hiding the badge's infrared transmitter from the local sensor. But everybody in the building has an Active Badge - even visitors are issued with temporary badges. This is not so unusual; more and more hi-tech office buildings require passcards to be used by its occupants for security reasons. The difference is that Active badges don't just open security doors: they let Pandora and its users know who is where - at least, most of the time.

ORL's receptionist is able to detect at a glance whether somebody specific is "available" by checking a badge status list. The list of badgewearers and their location status is available to everyone on the network. Pressing a button on the badge signals the system immediately. Status depends on how regularly a signal is detected at a specific location. Pandora can access Active Badge status information to redirect electronic mail (video or otherwise) to the badge-wearer's nearest Pandora terminal. Therefore, Pandora won't interrupt a meeting.

The Pandora project is now over three years old. King, one of its chief engineers, was quick to point out that in many ways the processing power behind Pandora is now rather outdated. The latest models contain six 5mips Inmos T45 transputers, which sounds very impressive. But really, the transputers were chosen just over three years ago as powerful individual embedded processors rather than as a clearly defined parallel processing system.

King envisages Pandora's successor as a mainly software-based application exploiting the power of tomorrow's super-workstations. It's an interesting example of a reverse trend to make the main processor do more work as its evolution unleashes more and more power. Previously the popular aim has been to relieve the main processor as much as possible.

Opening up the contemporary Pandora's box, usually hidden away under a desk or table, will first of all reveal one T45 transputer which handles input from the local video camera. The image rate is 12.5 frames per second - a bit flickery, but just about fast enough to be acceptable. A second T45 serves as a video mixer to combine (in analogue form) workstation graphics with the video input. In effect, the monitor display doesn't come out of the workstation itself, but the Pandora box. A third T45 handles audio, which is sampled and transmitted at 8 kHz - about telephone quality. Another T45 acts as a stream switcher and finally a

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pair of T45s handle the Cambridge Fast Ring interface. The CFR is a fast 50 Mbit/s transfer rate heavily time-sliced ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) network. A simple analogy to describe an ATM network would be a loop of train carriages circling around at high speed with data being loaded and unloaded as required. Two-way response times, vital for Pandora's real-time video and audio synchronisation, are quick because data is packeted in relatively small chunks - what's called "fine granularity" in ORL jargon.

Some advanced networks, like FDDI for example, offer a potential 100 Mbit/s transfer rate, but this apparently doubled speed advantage isn't necessarily advantageous to Pandora as the data chunks might be too large. In some ways this poses a question over the viability of a future Pandora product.

The Cambridge Ring networking protocol is not an established worldwide standard. But neither Ethernet (10 Mbit/s) nor the much slower ISDN digital phone lines will be anywhere near fast enough for Pandora's fancier functions. So an even faster A TM -style network is being developed at ORL. Called the Cambridge Backbone, it's already shunting data at 500 Mbit/s in the ORL labs and promises 2 Gbitls transfer rates. More speed could see the introduction of colour and higher resolution graphics. As multimedia grows in significance and the expected demand in Pandora-like, real-time, networked multimedia applications increases, ORL believes ATM networks will eventually become popular internationally adopted standards.

Pandora works in several modes, all currently under X.Windows on a 640 x 480 monochrome VGA screen. Each mode ascends in complexity and resource appetite. The simplest mode displays only the local camera's view. Virtually any decent PC has the power to do something like that. Of course you get a reversed mirror effect.

According to Hopper: "First-time users get used to the system quite quickly. It's not a mirror, so you can't use it to help you tie a tie or comb your hair. But you can show something to somebody else and the writing will be the right way around." There is an option to "mirror" the display.

Next you can record audio and video. Pandora has to work harder to file the data across the network and preserve the audio-video synchronisation. Audio and video "tracks" are filed separately. Video recordings can be integrated into conventional (text) email messages as dynamic annotations. A sliding cursor on the playback window lets you "scroll" through the video file or jump from one section to another. There is a full set of editing facilities.

There is work afoot to provide speech-to-text translation and dynamic searching via Pandora. This would require intensive processing of a soundtrack file, probably done overnight; the result would be a rough but

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useful textual representation. Coupled with Active Badge data, search parameters could be wide-ranging. Not only could you search for a target string, but also you could set time limits, and in the case of videoconferences, limit your search to one participant. Pandora's versatility will be greatly enhanced if ORL can crack this one.

Next, you can go into look-mode, which allows you to peer into a Pandora-equipped room if it's switched on. There are currently 20 Pandora boxes distributed around ORL and the Cambridge Computer Lab with just about enough bandwidth to look at 18 or 19 Pandoras at once, though inevitably the frame rate slows down. Audio integrity takes priority over video quality.

Unlike most science-fictional representations of a videophone, in oneto-one video mode Pandora puts views of both sides of the conversation onscreen at the same time. After all, most people would like to know how they look to the other party - if only to centre themselves in the field of view. Pandora's videophone function is used a lot at both the Cambridge Computer Lab and ORL, though not everybody is drawn to it.

Conferencing mode offers up to four simultaneous calls. I only had a brief demonstration of this but it seemed a touch confusing. All the sound comes from a single speaker in the Pandora box, usually situated under a desk. You need to work hard to know who is saying what if everybody tries to speak at once - stereo sound could offer a big perceptual improvement here.

Pandora boxes aren't on sale to the general public, but ORL offers them to selected research and educational establishments, at a price. Closer to general sale is a Windows-based mini-Pandora system. Its simplest form will let you play back Pandora video mail on reasonably fast PCs. A videocapture PC card has been developed, and there are plans to offer network bridges to give ordinary PCs a level of compatibility with a Pandoraendowed network - if only at the video mail level.

Hopper reckons that sending and receiving video mail from desktop computers will be commonplace by the year 2000. I don't doubt him.

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The Cambridge Connection

Writer: Wendy M. Grossman


Photograph by Neville Taylor

Is there any hope that Britain will regain the lead it once had in computing, as recounted here by Hermann Hauser, David Potter, Clive Sinclair and Peter Horne? The country is still strong in certain technology areas: games writing, for example, and virtual reality. If there is to be a rebirth, Cambridge, with its extensive scientific and research community, is most likely to be the centre. In this piece, a number of local researchers and business people assess the chances.

Hermann Hauser has a startling prediction: in the next ten years Cambridge will produce a billion-dollar technology company. In 1985, when everyone was writing about the Cambridge Phenomenon, that suggestion would have been unsurprising; now, Hauser thinks it's more likely even while some of the rest of the world has concluded Cambridge is dead.

"The problem," says Hauser, "was that in the early 1980s it got overhyped, and then people were disappointed. But there's been ten years since of constant growth and, interestingly, quite a bit of development of entrepreneurial, managerial and marketing talent. Cambridge has always had tremendous technical talent." He names Harlequin as an example: "It's an unusual success, where Jo Marks is a very technical person who has risen to be an excellent marketing and sales manager, and a good


manager of the company itself." Harlequin, which he says is now the number one supplier of high-end PostScript solutions to the printing industry and which also produces LISPWorks, has sprouted offices in the other Cambridge (Massachusetts) and Manchester. He also names Ray Anderson, lXI's Managing Director, as an example of the new breed of good managers.

"He's done a spectacular job in being technically competent and selling technology to IBM and DEC and all the big markets, and winning a significant share of the UNIX desktop." Another current success Hauser points to is Tadpole, the company which designed the Sparcbook and has recently won a contract to design the Power PC portable.

Harlequin is one of what seems to be a continuously growing list of companies of which Hauser has been a founder. He figures it's probably a half-dozen by now (he's not quite sure): Acorn, lXI, Harlequin, QDOS and, most recently, ATM. In that list, QDOS, which stood for "Quick Design on Silicon" is the only failure: "It was technically brilliant, but the market wasn't there," he says.

Of these companies, Acorn is probably the best known. Its Managing Director, Sam Wauchope, says that although the company designs its own hardware and operating system, it relies on small specialist companies to write software for its systems - the video capabilities the company has developed, for example, are being handed to others to build on to create applications software.

"That's important," Wauchope says. "In and around Cambridge there's a willingness to accept that other people can contribute. That sort of networking works very well. There are bright people who you have to encourage and support and work with. What the Cambridge companies by and large didn't do is - it was perhaps a little insular. They worked very well with other Cambridge companies, but other international alliances never really latched on. So Acorn didn't see the need to strike up a deal with Microsoft or Intel or IBM. It didn't even enter the thinking that that was the sort of thing you needed to do."

Hauser himself would agree. "Cambridge," says Hauser now, "needs more links with large

companies." In the last couple of years, Acorn has itself spun off a company: ARM,

to exploit its low-power RISC chip designs. Acorn says it's benefited: "We had 12 people working on the ARM processor; now there are 40." Meanwhile, ARM, free to license its designs to more than one manufacturer, has benefited, too.

Says Mike Muller, ARM's Marketing Director, "There used to be one company making our chips; now there are four." ARM has licensed its designs to VLSI, Texas Instruments, GEC Plessey and Sharp; the chips are

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being used in a variety of projects and products, most famously the Apple Newton. But ARM is successfully competing internationally with the likes of Intel and holding its ground by targeting markets (like PDAs) other than the desktop market, which even ARM agrees is sewn up. But it's competing by licensing its designs, not by becoming a chip manufacturer.

"We want to grow to be a very successful large company," says Muller, "but we're doing that through partnerships with larger companies. We're not trying to say we'll rule the world." That in itself is a very different outlook from the one that makes billion-dollar computer companies -and if that attitude pervades Cambridge, Hauser's prediction is unlikely to be fulfilled.

Hauser himself admits, "The problem is not that companies don't start. It's that it's hard to grow them beyond 20 to 30 people. Some of it has to do with networking, which Silicon Valley companies are brilliant at. Cambridge isn't as well networked with respect to the corporate sector."

Still, Muller says, "It's typical of the Cambridge thing that a small group of people achieves a disproportionately large effect."

In Muller's view, the most common Cambridge pattern is the company that starts up, achieves a certain degree of success, and is then bought out by a larger company. Often the technology moves away from the area -he cites EO as an example, although Hauser disagrees - and the people who invented it stay and start up something else. This may be the near future for another well-known Cambridge company, lXI, a specialist in graphical interfaces for UNIX systems. IXI was recently bought by SCo.

EO, Hauser's most recent start-up and the maker of the notebook-sized Personal Communicators, has moved its research and development efforts to Mountain View, California, taking most of the people with it. Hauser explains that the US is where the market is; however, he envisions reopening research and development in Europe when the European market takes off. He expects major volume for the Personal Communicators in the US in 1994, especially in the vertical insurance and sales markets that are EO's target.

Charting Hauser's career - and those of others in Cambridge - is a lot like watching the movements of Irish musicians among folk bands: the same names keep popping up, but in different combinations. Martin Jackson, one of the founders of Tadpole, is now Vice-President at EO. Hauser, the most visible name connected with EO, left Acorn to become Director of Olivetti Research; Andy Hopper, his successor in that post, was involved in a start-up with Hauser some years ago.

Meanwhile Matt Lee, now ARM's external funded projects manager, has cycled through Cambridge to wind up in the first office he worked in 15 years ago for his original boss (though for a different company). He concludes, "I think my present philosophy is to go for a career change by

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sitting at the same desk in there and waiting for a different company to move into this building and I'll do the job that they require there."

The University's computer lab is part of this interweaving. Maurice Wilkes, Roger Needham's predecessor as department head, has an office next door to Hopper's at ORL. Hopper, ORL's director, is also a full-time academic - he's a reader in computer technology. Other academics are involved in start-up companies, although Needham isn't sure how many, and there are cooperative projects with SRI Cambridge and Xerox EuroPARC, both of which Needham says would not have come to Cambridge without the University's presence.

"One of the significant facts about the way the University runs is that provided a University officer does what he's paid to do, the University doesn't want to know what else he does." Needham sees this as a strength: "It's one of the things that has historically made Cambridge a very good cradle for new enterprises." The very close links with Olivetti are only one example, but probably the most obvious one: the two sites share a networking project that has involved deploying fibre optic cabling all round Cambridge.

As Dr Roger Needham, the lab's head, says, the lab is older than most people realise - it was established in 1937. "But dealing in computers in the modern sense," he says, "we've only been in business since 1946."

The history matters, he says, because the lab still shows the influence of its early days: "The way you did research on computers in the 1940s and 1950s was to make them. One of the things that sets us rather apart from most computer science departments is that we still make things."

The work the lab does now tends to fall into one of several areas. About a third is in communications and distributed networking. This includes some 20 years of research into the technology now called ATM, for Asynchronous Transfer Mode. A TM products are under development at a new start-up also called ATM.

"We don't set out to design products here," says Needham, "but sometimes they happen by accident."

The lab's interest in ATM is limited to LANs - among other things how workstations handle data and bus bandwidth. This work will have implications for multimedia as well.

A second and growing area is security, for example, authentication protocols to prevent the kind of fraud you hear about with cash machines.

A third area is graphics: a group at the computer lab is working on developing a 3D display. The version on show in October 1993 used a smallish screen that looked much like a convex lens. The 3D effect was striking: a coiled spring seems to jump out of the screen at you. This is created by using eight or 16 views of the object from slightly different

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angles; the brain creates a composite of the two images your eyes see, while the use of so many views gives a look-around illusion when you move your head. Work on a colour version is in progress.

Also in the graphics area is work on video compression. This has an immediate commercial interest for a Cambridge-based software company, Cambridge Animation, which is developing a system lip-synching for cartoon characters.

Other areas are natural language, in collaboration with SRI Cambridge, and the digital desk project, in collaboration with Xerox EuroPARC."

"Computer science research," Needham sums it up, "is an opportunistic business. We don't know what will be interesting in five years' time. It's a rapidly moving subject, and that gives a distinct flavour into the way research is done."

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JPL

~ .... '-,.'

Photographs courtesy of Jet Propulsion Labs

Pies in Space



If Watson and Olivetti engage in pure research, the scientists at Jet Propulsion Labs invent what they need when they need it in order to carry out their main mission: unmanned space flights. In this piece, researchers at JPL talk about the lab's expertise in image processing, the work that must be done on the pictures taken by unmanned cameras in deep space to make them understandable to the human eye. Under the terms of its charter, JPL is required to release to the public the data it collects at taxpayer expense, and its archive of pictures is readily available on CDROM, on slides and over the Internet.

Jet Propulsion Labs OPL) in Pasadena, California, is best known for sending out unmanned space missions - Mariner, Voyager, Magellan, Galileo - but its real business is images. Or, as Carl Kukkonen, Director of the Center for Space Microelectronics Technology at JPL, puts it: "We go far away on vacation to take pictures."


But JPL's pictures aren't the sort of images produced by an ordinary camera; they are taken in parts of the electromagnetic spectrum which the human eye can't see, and transmitted as bits to Earth.

"Our goal," says Kukkonen, "is to convert that information somehow into knowledge, and the way you do that is essentially through processing and computation." JPL is filled with computers, from PCs to DEC VAXes, to Solbourne clones of Sun workstations, whose shared memory architecture suits JPL's processing requirements, to a share in the massively parallel Touchstone Delta supercomputer at neighbouring Cal Tech. Still, less than 10 per cent of the data gathered in the space missions has ever been processed: the demands are just too great. There is, however, a project to keep the early data, stored on computer tapes, in readable and usable form.

JPL became part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958, when it was given a charter to explore the solar system -the moon and beyond. Imaging was considered important almost from the start.

Ray Bambery is the supervisor of the Image Processing Laboratory at JPL, which was set up in 1966, and the history ofJPL's pictures is one of his specialties. Some of this history is in the six years of calculations on the whiteboard behind his desk - he does a yearly "backup" by photographing it.

"Image processing," he says, "sort of came as a result of the fact that JPL had to launch the Ranger missions to the moon, and they first tried to use analogue TV -type cameras, and that presented all kinds of problems because the electronics were not very stable. So they decided to build a digital television, and so when Mariner IV was launched in 1964 it had a digital television inside it, and in July, 1965, it returned the first pictures of Mars at the time, using digital television."

What made this possible, Bambery explains, was the work of Bob Nathan, who came to JPL from working on X-ray crystallography at the labs of Linus Pauling. Even though Nathan's background seemed to have nothing to do with electronics, he knew and understood Fourier transforms - which use measures of contrast to re-establish the dynamic range of a picture without losing its detail - and was able to produce algorithms to program them on computers.

"While Nathan didn't invent this technique," says Bambery, "he was responsible for making it work in a practical environment."

The real work is done on the ground. "You take a picture," says Bambery, "digitise the scene somehow, and send little pixels back over the telemetry network. Those are received here on the ground, and reoriented. We know what the characteristics of the camera are, so we just take the pixels and put them back in order here on the ground." The

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pictures are then cleaned up using computer algorithms. The colour pictures we see in the media are in fact recombinations of three different pictures, taken at 45-second intervals, using red, blue and green - or green, blue and ultraviolet - filters. These are reapplied on the ground, to produce the familiar images.

The processing requirements are immense. Each picture that comes back from Voyager or Galileo takes up 640 kb. For full colour, you need three of those. To make the kind of animated videos that JPL wants, you're talking about 60 of those a second.

Then consider the volume: Voyager took 120 000 pictures on its flight. Galileo was supposed to take 75 000 to 100 000 frames when it gets to Jupiter - there are doubts about its eventual output because one of the ribs of the antenna hasn't opened properly.

And scientists are more demanding. Bambery says that where once they were happy with single images preiduced by flybys, now they want the spacecraft to stay at the planet for two or three years, producing the same sequences over and over so they can see the changes over time, like those movies that show flowers opening.

One of the big issues, therefore, is storage and retrieval. Because of the way grant money is disbursed, if you have a setup that requires someone to go down and unearth the pictures needed from some archive in an underground vault, the scientist's grant money is going to run out before you eventually get him a copy. JPL's answer is CD-ROM and software which allows PC or Mac users to flip through pictures.

This all makes it sound as though getting the pictures in the first place is easy: it's not. Aside from the issues of getting the spacecraft there, finding equipment that will operate in space is genuinely difficult. Bambery likes to tell stories about these problems. One of his favourites is the vidicon story.

These days, the heart of the cameras JPL uses to capture its images is a mass-produced CCD (charge-couple device). But in the early days before CCDs - which means all the missions through Voyager - JPL used a small, custom-made tube-like device called a vidicon.

JPL built the cameras, but put out a contract asking for bidders to build a vidicon system for the missions. The lab was hoping for large, television companies like General Electric (GE) or Motorola ... but instead got only one bid, from a guy in Texas whose business was building truck scales.

"He was very interested in the space program," says Bambery. "He loved it, and he said this was going to be his contribution. He was going to build a company that would make vidicons. But this guy was not for real, so they went out for another bid, and again nobody bid except this same guy." The television companies were in business to make thousands of standardised cameras, not small, specialised vidicons that would work

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with a high degree of reliability in the vacuum of space at very low temperatures and very high temperatures, and last for a year.

In those days, says Bambery, "JPL was a little bit more risky, and so they took this guy's bid, and he said he would build a company and build the vidicons, and he did. He built every vidicon that JPL ever flew." In 1972, the Voyager contract was let out, and again this lone guy was the only one to bid and was awarded the contract.

Came the day in 1974 when the vidicons were due to be delivered, however, they didn't arrive. No one answered telephone calls, so eventually the lab had to put someone on a plane (this was before answering machines) to find out what had happened. A sign on the door of his business read: "Closed by order of the sheriff;" when they went to the sheriffs office, there was the vidicon-maker, in jail.

"They went to padlock his business," Bambery explains, "and he had his shotgun. And being a typical Texan, he doesn't leave without a fight." Locked up inside the business were JPL's vidicons - priceless, since they were the only ones in existence.

"He owed his creditors $105,000," says Bambery, "so we had to write a check for $105,000 so he could go out there and we could get our vidicons."

But they flew, says Bambery, and they worked just fine. "In fact, they're still out there, and if they were turned on we could still take pictures with them, and this August they'll have been flying for 15 years."

Another of Bambery's favourites is the story of Voyager and the telescopic lenses in its cameras.

"Prior to 1972, we didn't know much about Jupiter," says Bambery. "We guessed there would be radiation fields around it; we had launched Pioneers to go towards Jupiter already. But they hadn't reached there, and in 1973 when the first spacecraft got there, they found out that the radiation fields were about ten times what they expected them to be."

The result: "All the glass inside the lenses turned the colour of beer bottles, sort of brown, and the transmission was reduced so that you couldn't see any pictures at all coming through the optical system."

JPL tried process after process after process, until it came across a 14th century Belgian glass process which eliminated the problem: the small bubbles that occur naturally in glass were trapping electrons from the radiation field, crosslinking polymers and rendering the glass opaque.

Moving back into the present, Magellan started its third radar mapping of Venus on January 15th, 1992 - the clouds of Venus are too thick to see through. Ultimately, if Congress continues to approve the project's $40 million a year funding there will be at least seven of these mappings, all different, compiled by mosaicking together orbital swaths as the spacecraft circles the planet. The first map, for example, is left-looking at

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a specific incidence angle, the second is right-looking, and the third is left-looking again, at an incidence angle 200 from the first.

Eric de Jong, head of the solar system visualisation project, explains the reason for having two maps from the same direction but at different angles. "You do that to get stereo pairs," he says, "so you can actually compute elevation information." The fourth map will be a gravity map, which is not de Jong's area. Later maps may include a more circular polar orbit, or studies at high resolution. For some limited areas, the mission may repeat incidence angles, to check on the accuracy of the navigation, and look for changes on the surface - Venusquakes or active volcanoes.

Part of the difficulty is that data gets lost: there may be rain clouds over the receiving station during playback; the star calibration may not be accurate enough; sometimes the sun occludes or interferes with the broadcasting. In addition, that close to the Sun it's so hot that the antenna has to be turned up some of the time to shade the spacecraft to keep it cool. So there are lots of dropouts - including one-orbit gaps when the spacecraft has to switch between tape recorders and rewind the tape.

The radar data is then processed into images like the famous ones of the Venusian volcanoes Sif and Gula Mons. These are not photographs, however much they may look as though they were; they are radar maps. The brightness and darkness of the radar return vary according to the composition of the surface and its slope.

The question is, how does JPL know that the pictures it's producing are accurate representations? To begin with, the methods of processing the data can be - and have been - tested on Earth. But that does not answer the question of how the orange colour was chosen.

First of all, the composition of Venus's atmosphere is known. It is 90 times as dense as the Earth's atmosphere; it is made up of carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide - de Jong describes it as a "very interesting smog layer" - and none of the surface is ever visible through it. Scientists can establish to some extent the effect that this atmosphere will have on colours at the surface level.

Colour is made up of hue, saturation and intensity. Intensity and saturation come, for the most part, from the radar maps. What JPL is changing is the hue, and the best evidence it has for its choice comes from the Russian spacecraft Venera 13 and 14, which landed on the surface and sent back colour images in the short time that they functioned until the heat and density of the atmosphere wiped them out. The colour is also balanced by comparison to a known colour wedge sent to the planet with the spacecraft.

Of course, there's still no guarantee. Says de Jong, "I'd be only to happy to have someone fund a mission to land there and get the colour right."

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Part of the Magellan team's goal - de Jong works with Jeff Hall and Myche McAuley on this project - is to produce animated videos, some of which have already been released. Partly, these animations allow scientists to discover new information about the planet - seeing pictures is much more direct than looking at a radar image and comparing it with a plot of what the heights should be. But partly, the animations help disseminate the information to the general public. Ultimately, JPL wants to be able to issue more than just short animations: it wants to be able to fly over the whole planet in computer simulation, and zoom in or out to look at the topography.

"It's not as good as being there," says de Jong, "but it's a close approximation."

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Steve Williams

Photograph by David Owen at ILM

Taking Effect


Appeared: March, 1993

Like the scientists at JPL, animators in Hollywood must invent the technology they need. Unlike JPL, these animators are constantly battling to stay ahead of their competition.

Steve Williams was the Computer Graphics Animation Supervisor on the 1991 film Terminator 2, the first film in the history of motion pictures to star an entirely computer generated character. Here Williams talks about the creation of the liquid-metal man, or the TIOOO.

Williams works at Industrial Light & Magic, the industry-leading shop set up by film director George Lucas to make models and special effects for such hit movies as the Indiana Jones and Star Wars series. When this interview was conducted, ILM was just finishing work on the 1993 movie Death Becomes Her, which, as Williams says, used the same technology to achieve much subtler effects. Also in progress was work that won ILM great acclaim: Jurassic Park (1994), for which it created those realisticlooking dinosaurs. At least some of Williams's predictions were fulfilled when the 1994 film Forrest Gump inserted Tom Hank's main character into news footage.

To listen to Steve Williams' talk at the London Film Festival in November was to relive all the wonder of a first visit to the movies. Williams is a chief animator at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), which has won many Academy Awards for the effects it's created.


The Abyss (1990) is the film that is credited with bringing computergenerated effects off the hard disk and into theatres. In it, an alien water creature moves through a ship, extending a pseudopod to meet the shipboard humans; in one shot, the pseudopod develops a face that mimics the faces of the humans watching it. There were, reportedly, contingency plans for building the water creature if the computer animation hadn't worked out - the creature only had one short sequence.

The entire basis of Terminator 2, however, was director and screenwriter James Cameron's idea of an invincible killing machine. Known as the nooo (American film critic Roger Ebert has surmised that it was named for its great-grandfather, a Toshiba laptop), this Terminator is the computer-generated liquid-metal man that metamorphoses on screen from one character to another, flows back together to heal wounds, rises from a vinyl tile floor, turns itself back to front, flows through iron bars, and recreates itself from frozen metal fragments. Terminator 2 needed about 50 animators in California and London to create its 49 computeranimated sequences.

When we think of computer animation we tend to think of techies working at computer screens. But that's wrong. Williams grew up with computers - his father worked for IBM, and Williams says they had a computer at home from the time he was two years old - but his real interest is animation. He realised this young: he was in eighth grade (about 14) when he caught himself noticing how people moved when they danced. That, he explained between clips of ILM's greatest effects, was thinking like an animator.

Like science fiction writers, who create fantasy out of a knowledge of science, animators create synthetic characters out of an understanding of how humans move. Look at the old Warner Brothers cartoons; many of Bugs Bunny's best sequences were rehearsed in live action by the team which created them. As in any other field penetrated by computers, in animation the humans are the artists, and the computers expand the possibilities and automate the work.

In making Terminator 2, it wasn't enough for the computer-generated nooo to move realistically. Its movement had to match that of Robert Patrick, the actor who played the killer robot when it was wearing its policeman disguise. This was important for scenes like the one early in the film where the Terminator walks out of the fire after the truck crash, metamorphosing into Patrick as it goes. In fact, work on that scene started with ILM's filming Patrick, clothed only in underpants and with a grid painted all over his body, from several angles while he walked.

The fire sequence was actually technically more difficult than some of the flashier shots that tend to stick in an audience's memory, like the

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scene where the nooo comes up from the vinyl floor, which Williams describes as "technically challenging" but "more simplistic."

"y ou don't have to worry about as many elements as we had to worry about in shots such as walking out of fire, or running. All the ones that had human motion - those are the difficult ones." In those cases, it's not just that the computer animation has to look right; it has to match the human actor's movements so the transition is seamless. In the case of Terminator 2, Williams says there was an advantage built into the script.

"The fortunate part about him and those transformations is that he was being directed to behave more like a computer robot. It made the job a little bit easier, to be truthful, because if he'd had a more dynamic motion it would have been technically more difficult to match a lot of those things."

Even more difficult was the sequence towards the end of the film where Patrick, mounted on a motorcycle, bursts out of the window of the computer company building and jumps onto a helicopter, where he smashes the window, flows into the cockpit, and tells the pilot to "Get out." To create that scene a number of elements all had to work together: first the live action stunt with the motorcycle, then the computerised character. To make the nooo speak, they scanned Patrick's head with lasers while he pronounced the words. The data from this was used to create key frames for the nooo's facial movements.

The most difficult, though, was the Terminator's death sequence at the end where, dropped into a vat of molten steel, it cycles through all the various forms it's had throughout the movie and finally turns inside out. This involved getting the live actors to flail about in a pool of water and mineral oil lit with orange lights, and then blending these images in and out of the computer-generated form.

All these things depend on small details to make them look realistic. If you look at the shot of the noaa walking out of the fire, for example, one of the details that make it work is the slight flattening and expansion of the foot that's bearing the noaa's weight.

Computer animation started with automating a lot of the drudgery, such as inbetweening (the work of creating the intermediate frames needed to link a movement's beginning and ending points to fill the necessary amount of time). In The Abyss and Terminator 2, however, we're seeing the first wave of effects that couldn't be created any other way.

Williams believes that Death Becomes Her - where the effects were led by the story instead of being the film's centrepiece - is the way of the future. Take the film's use of morphing, for example. Instead of flashy transformations of one thing into another - car into tiger, one person into another, pool of liquid metal into Robert Patrick in a police uniform

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- in Death Becomes Her it's used comparatively subtly for effects like transforming Meryl Streep's hands from old to young in the scene where she drinks the immortality potion. Morphing is also useful for smoothing transitions from live action to computer animation.

Streep's broken neck is an even better example of the future: computer animation blends invisibly with live action to create an effect that has no counterpart in the real world. Williams sees a future in which directors can mix and match actors' body parts at will. We could, he predicts, see footage of dead presidents giving speeches, films starring dead or retired actors, even wholly digital actors. The recent arguments over musicians who lip-synch to recordings during supposedly "live" concerts are likely to be repeated over such movie effects.

Williams doesn't confine his predictions to the effects on the film industry: "You're going to end up with tons of huge legal suits, and you're going to end up creating a separate industry in itself, with all the legal practice that's going to come out of it."

But using digital actors has some advantages - Williams cites the example of work in progress at ILM on a scene in which a baby crawls across a highway full of high-speed traffic.

"A digital baby," Williams emphasises. He makes jokes about actors who are too chicken to die for their art, but current tastes in action effects are dangerous, especially since each new movie tries to outdo its predecessors. In the scene where the liquid metal man walks out of the fire, for example, even though Patrick's bit was confined to a few seconds at the end, the back of his shirt was smoking by the end of the number of takes the director needed to get the shot right. Surely safer to use a digital stunt double and simply patch in the actor's head.

Other, less litigation-inspiring techniques, are useful in other ways. Take wire and grip removal. That's so well developed now that, ironically, directors and grips have become sloppier. But the same techniques can be used to remove scratches and other types of physical damage to the film itself. This has obvious applications in restoring old films as well as creating new ones. The technique sounds simple when it's described: you point out the line you want removed to the computer, and the system replaces it using the colours from neighbouring pixels.

One of the most useful areas for computers is digital compositing. With model work, you would film your background, and then your spaceships one at a time. The whole thing would be matted together using optical processes that involved photographing each new element in front of the composite film of all of the previous elements. The problem with this approach is the loss of image quality with each generation. With digital compositing, you scan in the elements, composite them in the computer, and then scan the whole image back

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out onto film: one generation, and a lot of cost savings as well. This is all practical. But if you get Williams started on talking about the

future, he goes past digital actors and into stuff that sounds out of this world entirely. Williams believes, for example, that present methods of projection will be superseded. He looks forward to the death of flat screens, to projection onto gases so that the images we see are holographs rather than flat pictures.

Virtual reality, however, he dismisses as "a zillion miles away."

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The Robots are Coming

Photograph courtesy of Nick Beard

- very slowly

Writer: Nick Beard


The liquid-metal man, JPL's images of the surface of Venus, and robots all have a quality in common: they seize the imagination.

Go back 40 years, and almost every science fiction novel (except Orwell's 1984) assumed there would be only a small number of very large computers - but that we would be overrun with robots cleaning our houses, running our factories and fighting our wars. People want them: Dan Hillis, a researcher at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave a talk in the mid-1960s in which he mentioned a vacuuming robot -and people still write to ask how the project is coming along.

It turns out that robots are harder than anyone thought. In this piece, Nick Beard surveys progress.


There seems little doubt that industrial robotics has been intimately linked with the vigorous success of the Japanese manufacturing sector in recent years, and the 24 industrial robots recently on display at London's Science Museum were impressive enough as a testament to that success. There was nevertheless a sense of disappointment.

It's not that the robots were not good at what they did. But somehow there was little that surprised or amazed. Many of the robots were production-line workers, with little capability outside the job they had been taught to do. Dr Neil Cossons, the museum's director, said, "Robotics is an important area of technological development with extraordinary implications for the future not only of industry but for the day-to-day lives of all of us."

This is true - but there was little on display here other than the mechanics of industrial systems. Few of these things could have a domestic role - unless you are prepared to order your home with the precision of a Japanese car manufacturing production line. (Also, oddly, the demonstrations were not continuous. Do state-of-the-art robots need IS-minute tea breaks? Have they found so militant a shop steward already?)

The flower arranging robot, for example, offered an impressive demonstration of the precision with which two powerful servo-controlled arms could be made to act in unison. They spun and waved with a perspex-stemmed flower between their fingers, each arm apparently "knowing" where the other was, barely bending the stem - barely, but enough to drop it and then carry on, unwittingly empty handed. This system had a firm "world model" beneath its movements - a model which accidentally came out of synchronisation with the real world - and no mechanism for correcting its world view.

One of the most appealing robots on display was the painter - the Panasonic Portrait Drawing Robot. This was adapted from a system designed for use in printed-circuit-board construction. It involved a video camera linked to a lump of image processing software, which converted a still grabbed from the camera into a string of instructions for the robot arm holding a paint brush. The result was an impressive artistic impression of my son.

The system takes coarse and fine definitions from the camera image, and converts these into a series of lines with which to construct the image. A bit of "intelligence" is applied to detect the eyes, which are painted with more accurate detail. The robot, with a variety of brush strokes, then paints the picture.

But how state-of-the-art is that? It is over a year, for example, since the French company Kreon demonstrated its 3D "automatic sculpture system" at the Applica 90 high-tech conference in Lille. This device used a combination of laser and prism to extract depth information from an

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image through a single video camera, which then controlled a machining tool - a simple robot this! - to cut away all those bits of wood that did not look like the object being sculpted.

Sanyo's cleaning robot - out of order on the day of my visit - had the makings of a more striking flexibility and independence. This device also had a world model, but one it had found for itself as it wandered around avoiding things with ultrasound and infrared sensors.

One of the features being shown was compliance, a crucial requirement for domestic systems. It means the ability to alter the way a limb moves according to the resistance it meets - just as we do when clearing tables or washing children. The compliant motion arm had been developed by the Mechanical Engineering Labs of the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology.

There was some evidence at the exhibition of the move towards greater robot autonomy, through the shift towards a different approach to conferring wit on the things. Most robots are programmed. Their every act and response is painstakingly prepared and stored as a set of instructions to be followed to the letter, however brainless this appears to an outside observer. The system just keeps on spray painting the car, even if the car has fallen off its platform.

These precise programs have enabled robots to be effectively exploited in a range of tasks, following their instructions reliably. Biological systems do not generally work like this, which is perhaps why industrial robots surpass people in some tasks. But domestic environments are usually less structured and predictable than industrial ones. A useful domestic robot would not need to be especially rapid, just robust. If it could be trusted to confine its attentions to empty coffee cups and drinks cans, not to get lost or stuck, and not to abuse the cat or eat unattended wristwatches, it could be left to wander round the house, as a slow, background process that kept the place clean.

Until recently, received wisdom was that such robots required a powerful reasoning system, a sophisticated visual capability, and sufficient computational resources to build thorough world models. This wisdom is being challenged. As an alternative to the rigid robot, dutifully and stupidly doing what it is told, come what may, many researchers are exploring other approaches based on techniques such as neural networks, genetic algorithms and artificial life models such as "swarm intelligence." One of the leading advocates of such "bottom-up" approaches to robot control is Rodney Brooks.

Brooks is enticing machines towards behavioural robotics. "Notions of world modelling are impractical and unnecessary," said Brooks. The key idea is that instead of breaking down a complex task into a fixed sequence of steps which take place in a carefully modelled world, the

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robot is equipped with a set of behaviours. This presents an interesting possibility - complex behaviour can stem from complex environments rather than complex programs. Each behaviour is a potted skill set, with its own views about when to act and when to stop, such as follow object, or avoid object.

The next problem is to give one robot lots of behaviours in a way which avoids conflicts. One approach was Brooks's subsumption architecture, which is built on competence layers. Each layer has sufficient (and no more) computational resource to add to the competence of the lower layers, and only one behaviour can be active at any time.

Two British companies working in the field of neurally controlled robots are The Technology Applications Group and Artificial Life Technologies. Martin Snaith and Owen Holland, of TAG and AL T respectively, discuss approaches to controlling tasks that can be active simultaneously. There are four outcomes: (1) the behaviours run happily together, using the same effectors - for example, whistling and breathing at the same time; (2) the behaviours run together, using different effectors - walking and chewing gum at the same time; or the behaviours do not work together - because (3) the same effectors cannot do two different things at the same time - eating and roaring at the enemy; or because (4) one action makes another impossible - such as flight and grazing. The main problem for controlling robots is to handle the last two conflicts. This remains an active research area.

TAG offers a series of robotics platforms, such as Frank (the tank). The Frank series includes various tracked (hence tank) robots, with a chassis supporting a range of sensors and control systems. A number of neural network boards are available, plus onboard digital cards including Z80, 68000 and 80286 processor systems. Frank is small, about half a metre in length, and has a built-in motor. Frank I has an analogue neural backplane and Frank III has an IEElOOO digital backplane. Frank II has both.

Many experimental systems include a rat's nest of wires and pipes, alongside a mess of wheels and pulleys. Complete systems often do too, though in our case they are hidden beneath a rather attractive skin and include clever self-maintenance mechanisms. Robots' wires are not selfmaintaining, and unlike nerves in developing organisms (that is, babies), cannot be relied upon to plug themselves into the right place. Lots of knotted copper seems inevitable - until you see Frank, which is a tidy chap by virtue of the organising scheme that is his back(plane).

A series of N -Euro boards - simple neural network cards - is available to plug in and control Frank's behaviour. Each card has 12 neurones, each of which takes the sum of its inputs and applies a transfer (output generating, such as a threshold) function which can be adjusted by a

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knob on the card (a bit like having a volume control attached to the side of your head - though in our case we would probably need about ten million million such knobs). TAG also offers Igor, a four-legged robot which is designed to support research into controlling walking, and Sterling, the simplest TAG device, built on a radio-controlled car chassis. This is ideal for "Braitenburg vehicle" experiments.

These are named after the work of Valentino Braitenburg, of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. He devised a series of "cars," each of which had remarkably simple control strategies wired into it, but which displayed behaviour highly reminiscent of purposeful creatures. For example, one of the simplest cars has two light sensors at the front, at the right and left corners. These are connected to the motors for the rear drive wheels, so that light hitting the right hand sensor makes the right wheel go faster. The result? A car which avoids lights. Cross over the wires, and the car chases light. These vehicles reiterate the point made above - complex behaviour does not always need complex software beneath it.

Neural networks and related strategies for robot control will not supplant the classical processes of robotics, but will supplement them, rather as neural networks and genetic algorithms are supplementing expert systems in other areas of artificial intelligence work. The result might yet be a domestic robot - but probably not for many years yet.

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Epilogue

And on that uncertain note ...

Anyone writing about robots in early 1996 would have included a mention of intelligent agents and 'bots', as automating bits of software are known on the net. It's unlikely that I will be able to buy - even if I could afford such a thing - a secretary robot to file papers and open the mail any time in the next decade. But it will be no surprise if within the next couple of years I find myself entrusting my email and scheduling to secretary software that knows I don't like to meet anyone early in the morning and will automatically request my removal from junk em ailing lists.

And that's just one of the many changes since these interviews variously took place. For anyone with a tinge of malice hovering on the fringes of the industry, part of the fun of looking back on what these industry experts had to say is how often they were wrong. And yet, that's the most interesting thing about these folks: even when they were wrong they were engaged in building and shaping the technology, some of it extremely successful, that for a short while changed our world.

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Remembering the Future: Interviews from Personal Computer World

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Transcript of Remembering the Future: Interviews from Personal Computer World