Notes on Chapter 26

In Chapter 26, two big things happened:

Grant Comes Back

Grant Avery, a major character in Inventing the Future 9which ended with him going to Tokyo as a liaison to Fuji Xerox), and in only one chapter in The Big Bucks, is back for good. He got married to a Japanese woman, they had kids, and he became a very big deal in Fuji Xerox. The Xerox Star never caught on, as everyone knows, but the laser printers did, and he was the expert on those.

When I was working on the Star, we had four or five guys from Fuji on loan to work on J-Star. Nowadays typing Japanese or Chinese characters is routine, but back then, it required a major piece of equipment. After all, there are thousands of possible characters! J-Star let you build up the Kanji character on the screen of a normal computer (at least if you consider a $30,000 price tag “normal”). It was revolutionary and led to a number of scientific papers.

What people think about China now (they’re going to overtake us!) was what they thought about Japan then. The Japanese thought so, too. All through the 80’s, their economy soared and property prices rose insanely. Then it all crashed. Grant and his wife lived through all that. He always thought they’d be global citizens and live all over the world. Her attitude, though, was, “Maybe you’re a global citizen, but I’m Japanese.” They got divorced and he moved back to Silicon Valley, and then left Xerox, too.

I had Grant work for Taligent

because it illustrates how clueless the big companies were while the Internet was banging on the door. They thought,"That Internet — that’ll always just be for geeks and grad students. Normal people would never use it!” Taligent was going to be a new “object-oriented” operating system that Apple and IBM and whoever else they could inveigle would unite on. Grant was one of the inveiglers.

I actually worked in the old Taligent building in the early 2000’s, when I was with a startup company, Packeteer.

Grant is a corporate guy through and through. Taligent was all about big corporations, and he was in his element.

Len and Dan on TV

The public TV show that interviewed Len and Dan is broadcasting the show, and Janet and Walt host a watch party for all their friends. They discover that it’s not exactly what they thought it was going to be! The show has another guest, and Len and Dan’s segment is only half the show. They don’t emphasize that the “embezzling ring” Len and Dan busted up was just a couple of elderly ladies who used the money to play bingo.

Still, they took up the bait of “investing in the Internet,” so it was a success. Len got to talk about the little “mutual fund” he runs.

You actually can do a Private Placement Memorandum like Len did. I checked on that. It’s limited to 50 “sophisticated” investors, and you can’t advertise it. Still, you really can start your own little mutual fund.

At the end, the group talks a little about Mosaic. That was the precursor of the Netscape browser and company, whose IPO is considered to have kicked off the Internet Age. Len and Janet are very interested in that, although, as I said, most “experts” back then missed it.

The expectation at the time was that Microsoft would just embrace, extend, and extinguish the Internet just like they’d done to everything else. We will see more of all this in the rest of the book.