[Web Informant] 2 November 2009: 25 years of PC Week

[David Strom]

Web Informant 2 November 2009: 25 years of PC Week

The scene is a deserted office park in Los Angeles after hours. I am
driving around, trying to find the spot that my IT manager friend left
an envelope for me. Inside the envelope is a disc with a secret IBM
software program that is about to give me one heck of a scoop for PC
Week, c. 1987.

It has been a week of memories. Last week was the 40th anniversary of
the real beginning of the Internet, and this is the 25 year
anniversary that PC Week (regrettably now called eWeek) began
publishing its weekly commentary on our industry.

While I didn’t start writing for the publication until 1987, I
remember those times very well: back in the early 1980s I was working
for a private software developer and we were porting our programs from
the Apple to the new fangled IBM PC, and trying to make them work.
Given that we were charging several thousand dollars to electric
utilities for these products, it was my job to do the quality control
and make sure that the code was written properly.

I eventually went on to work in various end-user computing departments
for government and private industry before getting the job at PC Week
as a writer and analyst. I went on to work there for more than three
years when the PC industry was rapidly expanding and corporations were
buying truckloads of PCs. Back then we didn’t have networks other than
the ones that connected our PCs to our IBM mainframes, and I began to
specialize in networking and installed the first one in our company
before I became a tech journalist.

Wayne Rash called me last month to catch up and get some input on a
story that he has written for the publication about those early days.
It made me go back and actually find some of the articles that I wrote
and recall some fond memories.

For those of you that were born more recently and don’t remember a
world without computers, it is worth taking a moment to remind you
that we had 80386 computers that had barely more than a megabyte of
RAM and ran at 10 MHz clock speeds. Most of the machines back then had
character-mode displays (except for Macs, which were rare on corporate
desktops) and Windows and Linux hadn’t yet been invented. IBM and
Microsoft were working together on OS/2 and Novell’s Netware was the
most popular networking operating system because it could run on
80286s and use all of the entire memory of the machine. Hard disks
were rarely larger than 20 MB, and floppies had just increased to
store 1 MB of data. Mostly academic researchers were the only ones
using the Internet and few corporations had email, let alone email
connections to outsiders.

In a story that I wrote in May 1990, I talk about what corporate IT
folks need to think about when upgrading to the latest OS – which at
the time was Windows 3 or OS/2 1.2. Some of those issues are still
with us as we wrestle with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard.

Here are a few memories from that era. You can see scans of various
magazine covers and articles that I mentioned from that era here.
http://picasaweb.google.com/dstrom/Oldies#

My first story for PC Week (Jan 1987) was about a little-known company
in the PC-to-mainframe market called Attachmate and how they planned
on unseating the then-champion Digital Communications Associates,
makers of the popular Irma boards. Attachmate went on years later to
purchase DCA, and is still around in the terminal emulation space,
also having bought network analysis company NetIQ.

What really got the IBM PC started in corporate computing circles was
a spreadsheet called 1-2-3 from upstart Lotus Development Corporation.
For some people, it was the only application that they ran on their
desktops. Lotus 1-2-3 wasn’t the first spreadsheet and indeed, here is
a brief post on the original spreadsheet called Visicalc.
http://www.itworld.com/internet/81845/thirty-years-spreadsheets

Years before IBM ironically purchased Lotus, they started a skunk
works project to use spreadsheets as a front-end to their mainframe
databases, something that was very sophisticated at the time. The sole
programmer behind the project was Oleg Vishnepolsky who spent about 18
months writing the software simply called S2. The code was used for
internal purposes. I spoke to Vishnepolsky last week and rather than
be mad at me for blowing his cover he was reminded that when my
article ran his status as a lowly programmer was immediately elevated
and he got to talk to the big brass about his project. “I got to rub
shoulders with people at the top layers of management, and remember
this is when IBM had about ten or 12 managers between me and the CEO.”
Still, the S2 project was one of the best ones of his career and the
code was used by tens of thousands of IBMers.

At the time this was being developed – say 1987 or so – there were a
variety of people who were trying to clone 1-2-3 using the exact same
command syntax, most notably Adam Osborne. There were legal challenges
going back and forth about intellectual property and Osborne, being
the roué that he was, only brought more attention to the whole thing.

Somehow, I got a hold of a copy of S2 from one of IBM’s customers, the
setting for my cloak and dagger black ops mission at the top of this
essay. I wrote the story about S2 and saw Osborne coincidentally a few
weeks later at an industry event. Much as I wanted to give him a copy,
I didn’t. But you can see the screen caps of S2 that I found in my
archives.

Back then, IBM was very secretive about their new products and had all
sorts of established protocols for dealing with the press. One place
where they gave out advance information about their plans was at their
user group meetings, which were generally closed to the press. Since I
had come from IT, I knew how easy it was to attend these meetings
under somewhat false pretenses. I called up the IT manager for Ziff
Davis and found out that we indeed had an IBM mainframe squirreled
away in New Jersey. I asked the manager if he could give me their
customer number, which is pretty much all you needed to register for
the IBM user conference. When I reassured him that it wasn’t going to
come out of his budget (some things never change), I signed up and
brought home several scoops from the meeting, much to the dismay of my
fellow PC Week news hounds. But they were quick learners and when it
came time for the next meeting, several of us attended as “Ziff Davis
IT managers.” When we came back from the third meeting with even more
scoops, Infoworld – which at the time was our main competitor —
starting putting together the pieces and called up the president of
the user group and got us banned from further meetings. But it was fun
while it lasted.

Speaking of fun scoops, one of our younger and more eager reporters
was Gina Smith. Gina was out to dinner with her boyfriend (who later
married her) at a Cambridge, Mass. Restaurant. Sitting at the next
table were two Germans speaking quickly. Little did they know that
Smith was fluent in German and as she listened it turned out they were
from Lotus’ German office telling each other what the future product
plans were for the company. Lotus never knew how we got that story,
and Smith went on to write a few books and run a couple of companies
in Silicon Valley.

One of my early columns (July 1987) was about how hard it was to use a
laptop in a hotel room. Back then modems were the main remote access
devices, and they were running at 2400 bps, which was slow enough that
you could read the text as it was being transmitted. Most hotels had
hard-wired their phones so you couldn’t attach a modem easily, without
having to unscrew the wall plates and take out the two wires that you
needed to attach the modem to the phone system. How far have we come
now with universal wireless everywhere.

Another of my favorite columns (March 1988) was written as if I was
Judith Martin, answering questions of network etiquette. I considered
it a successful parody when I got a cease and desist letter from Miss
Manner’s law firm!

In October 1988, I was promoted to run a major portion of the PC Week.
That same week, I was visiting one of my friends, Cheryl Currid, who
ran the IT organization of Coke Foods (Minute Maid et al.) in Dallas.
One of Cheryl’s staffers had baked a cake in my honor, iced with a
simulated cover of PC Week’s front page with various “stories” in
icing. Currid went on to write many columns for me at various
publications, and is still consulting in the industry.

Yes, those were interesting and fun times. I hope you enjoyed some of
these memories too, and feel free to post your own on strominator.com.