This New Internet Thing, Chapter 16

Where’s the Money, Honey?

I wrote a book. The publication date is May 29, 2024 (if you’d rather not deal with Amazon, your bookstore can also order it from the distributor Ingram Spark, or print-on-demand if they have the equipment). You can read it for free here, although it’ll be in serial form. My fond hope is that you’ll find it so compelling that you just buy the book instead of waiting 8 months to see what happens. There will be a chapter each week, 33 in all.

In Chapter 15, Janet gets deep into the weeds of engineering, doing that browser thing with the Mosaic code. Meantime, her husband Walt gets tired of being a computer widower, and goes up to visit Len, her dad, at their second home in the mountains. Len is not placidly fishing and enjoying himself! He’s deep into online investing, and running his own little private “mutual fund.”

In this chapter, we catch up with all the other characters. Cassie loves it at Palm, even though their first product, the Zoomer, is struggling. Matt and Miriam are fighting over Matt’s failure to make them rich with GO Corp.

Reading in serial form has a long and honorable history. My cover artist sent me this “Read Like a Victorian” website. Enjoy.

================== Where’s the Money, Honey? ===================

After Walt left on Sunday night, Len felt terrible that he’d turned him into a Computer Widower. He was the one who asked Janet about this “Mosaic” thing, and now she was spending all her time on it. Poor Walt had to come up to the mountains to have someone to talk to.

He was also wondering how Cassie was faring in her efforts to become a single mother. It still seemed nuts to him, but she did ask him to be the godfather, so he had a legitimate reason to call her. And she was the one who told him about Mosaic, too. So he called.

“Hi, Mr. Saunders! How nice to hear from you.” Len gave up on getting her to call him by his first name. She was from the generation that respected its elders; you had to give her that.

“Hello, young lady, I was just wondering when I’m going to be a godfather! I have to line up some murders and so forth, so I need some lead time.”

She laughed out loud. “Oh, no need to go to any extra trouble for me, Mr. Saunders. Unless, you know, you wanted to kill them anyway.”

He waited.

“Yeah, I did go to some meetings at the adoption agency, but I’m at a new job now, and it’s just crazy. I have no time. We’re launching our product in June and the hardware partners are insane about bugs. People are practically sleeping at the office.”

“Wow. The overtime bills must be off the scale for that.”

“Overtime?” She laughed ironically. Len was from a different world, where you couldn’t make people stay after quitting time without paying them time-and-a-half.

“You know, ‘overtime.’ Where you actually pay people extra for keeping them late.”

“This is Silicon Valley, Mr. Saunders. Maybe Janet told you?”

“OK, OK, I think I heard about that. Anyhow, I wanted to thank you for asking me about this ‘Mosaic’ thing. Now Janet’s spending all her time on it, and her poor husband just spent the weekend with me to get away!”

Cassie had to think back to when she’d mentioned that to him. 

“Oh, yeah, Mosaic. Why, what’s Janet doing? I haven’t talked to her in a while.”

Len told her about Janet getting back into coding, and how he was feeling bad that he was the cause of it.

“Janet’s writing code? That’s fantastic! I have to call her. I guess you don’t know what she’s doing?”

He didn’t, of course. They exchanged pleasantries and hung up.

Cassie was home only because it was Sunday night. Everyone at Palm was exhausted and catching a few Z’s before another week of grinding. The Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago was coming up and the old truism “trade shows are the cause of all technological progress” was manifesting itself yet again. You can tell your boss the software’s late and they grumble but accept it. But a trade show happens whether or not you’re ready. You have to be ready.

They were showing their handheld organizer, the Zoomer, with hardware partners Tandy and Casio. Casio sold tons of small electronic devices and this was just one more doohickey for them, whereas it was Palm’s entire life. Casio expected bug-free software, and for a simple thing like a calculator, that was doable. They weren’t used to large software systems where there are always bugs, and if you tried to fix them all, you’d never ship anything.

The software was “burned” into read-only memory (ROM) on their little devices, so replacing the ROM after the device was in the field was really expensive. Thus, every single bug was a Red Alert for Casio, which meant it was a Red Alert for Cassie, too. Sigh. At work the next day, she called Janet for a lark and offered her a job coding at Palm. Janet laughed ruefully.

“So I’d be working for you? No, thanks! I heard your management training was pretty subpar.”

Cassie said she’d talked to Janet’s father and heard Janet was spending all her time working on Mosaic. Janet didn’t know about the godfather thing. It was a good laugh for both of them. Cassie remembered that Janet had worked for Apple, and asked her if she knew any of the Newton people, “Newton” being their handheld device that did handwriting recognition. Janet wasn’t sure anymore who worked at Apple.

Cassie’s phone rang as soon as she hung up, with yet another frantic call from Casio. Back at it again. The Palm team was working maniacally despite knowing that Apple would be at the show too, with Newton. Apple’s marketing machine had been hyping this thing forever, and of course their demo would have a hundred times more glitz than Palm’s. On the minus side, the press had been hearing their hype for a long time, so it was “put up or shut up” time now. The tech industry had been talking about handheld computers for years now as the Next Big Thing, but no one had a decent one yet. The reporters weren’t going to roll over and reprint their press releases anymore.

On top of that, there was the ever-present threat from General Magic, the highly-overhyped company with Sony, Motorola, Matsushita, Philips and AT&T as its partners. It had Andy Herzfeld and Bill Atkinson, heroes of the Macintosh, and for a while they thought they had Apple’s backing, too. After all, they’d come from Apple! Didn’t that count for something?

“Not where CEOs’ egos are concerned”, they realized, when John Sculley stabbed them in the back by announcing Apple’s own device, the Newton.

The Zoomer was pretty slow. They were all discouraged by that, but they realized that no one else had anything faster. One of the team even took to sleeping in the motel across El Camino, rather than driving home to San Francisco late at night only to drive right back in the morning. It was an insane time for all of them.

One night, Cassie went to Draeger’s, the extremely upscale supermarket in Los Altos, after work. On these crazy days it gave her at least some comfort to have a nice breakfast with good coffee before heading back to work. While she was looking over the fresh cherries, Dan Markunas spotted her.

“Cassie? Is that you?”

She turned around and was overjoyed. He hadn’t changed a bit! They hugged.

“Dan! So good to see you? What are you doing up here? Don’t you live down near Cupertino?”

“Oh, some days I come home from Oracle along Woodside Road and then 280. How about you? How’s Palm?”

Her haggard look answered for her. “Busy. We have CES coming up in a week. I shouldn’t even be here.”

“I guess that’s a big deal, huh? I’m not even following that. Where is it this year?”

“Chicago. McCormick Place. Aren’t you from there?”

“I’ll say. Janet and I were there with Xerox to introduce the Star, way back when!”

“How the time does fly. Hey, I just talked to her, and she’s thinking of going back into programming!”

“Yeah, I’ve been helping her, but I didn’t know how serious she was! Janet’s giving up being a mucky-muck?”

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

Dan remembered back to when the two of them worked on a feature for the Star together.

“Well, she used to be good at it, as I recall. Good for her!”

“How about you? How’s Oracle?”

“Oh, it’s pretty good. You knew Matt was there now, didn’t you?”

“Matt Feingold? Oh wait, I guess I did know that. He gave up on this handheld thing at the right time, I’m starting to think.”

Dan remembered how GO was going, no pun intended. Was Palm yet another victim of the handheld hype?

“Well, someone’s going to get it right someday. Might as well be you guys. I’m pulling for you.”

She looked at her watch. “Well, thanks, Dan, and say Hi to Matt for me. I gotta run.”

Dan and Matt were at Oracle, a nice, sane, big company whose stock was rising steadily. Janet was at a boring company that was going nowhere, but at least she got home at a reasonable hour. Here Cassie was, working seven days a week in a teensy little company that might go out of business any time now. 

But at least here, the people in charge, Dubinsky and Hawkins, had their heads on straight and she believed in them. Everyone was pulling in the same direction, and they needed her contribution and everyone else’s. Unlike other places where Marketing was the enemy, in a startup you just looked at them as, “they’re working for me!” Every time some visitor in a suit came to visit, it was comforting to think they were really working for you. If they got what they were after, your stock might be worth something.

Whether it would ever lead to any serious money — who the hell knew? But it was an experience you could tell your grandchildren about. Then she remembered, “Wait, I have to have a kid first to have grandkids! Or else get married.”

That adoption plan was on hold for now. How could she possibly deal with caring for a child when she had a life like this?

The next day at Oracle, Dan told Matt about seeing Cassie.

“Oh, yeah, I think I did hear that. Palm, huh? Yet another attempt to do the impossible.”

Dan sighed. “I didn’t get much chance to talk to her. Apparently they’re presenting at the Consumer Electronics Show, so everything’s insane right now.”

“Oh, God. Did she talk about the Newton?” Everyone had read the hype about Apple’s new handheld. Dan shook his head.

“Well, good luck to them. And here we are, worrying about DNS config files.”

Dan’s and Matt’s project involved using an Oracle database to configure computers for the Internet. That was traditionally a matter of editing text files, which was prone to error, so having a database and input forms was a Good Thing. Dan suddenly remembered a bug he had to fix, excused himself, and went back to his office.

That night, Matt made the mistake of telling Miriam about Cassie and Palm and the Consumer Electronics Show. Afterwards, he wondered why he did that, since she didn’t even know Cassie. Conversation had gotten strained between them since he left GO, so maybe he was just reaching for something to talk about. Or maybe he subconsciously wanted to provoke her.

“Palm? What’s that?”

“Oh, it’s yet another handheld thingie that recognizes your handwriting. I don’t know much about it.”

Miriam’s face darkened. “So are they going to succeed? What are they doing that GO didn’t do?”

“I told you, I don’t know too much about it. I didn’t even realize I knew anyone there until today.”

Miriam was a clinical psychologist, so she was trained in not revealing her feelings when hearing something upsetting. It was hard to do in your personal life, though. Matt could tell there was still something on her mind.

“So why aren’t you there?” she finally asked.

“It’s a small company, Miriam. No one asked me.”

“Yeah, but… that was what you said about GO, too.”

GO was a mistake that he was glad he was out of. The last thing he wanted was yet another startup with big competitors.

“I should have stuck with that answer. GO sucked. I’m glad I’m out of there.”

“Oh, great. So when they go public, we’re not getting anything!”

“They’re not going public, Miriam. They’ll get run into the ground by Microsoft. Or get smothered by AT&T. Or just run out of cash.”

He added, “Anyway, I am partially vested, at least.”

Now she was really irritated. 

“How the fuck would you know what’s going to happen with them? Were you in all those big meetings?”

Matt got up and went to the refrigerator, got a soda, and sat back down.

“Miriam, this isn’t General Motors where you’re off at a car plant in Topeka and don’t know what’s going on. We were right in the middle of it there. We knew those guys.”

She sat down next to him and lowered her voice an octave.

“So, honey, how are we ever going to get out of this rat race, if you stick with these shitty big companies?”

“Shitty? We’re up almost $50,000 already on my Oracle stock. That’s more than I made on stock in five years at 3Com.”

“Fifty thousand isn’t a downpayment on a downpayment in Portola Valley, Matt.”

There it was again. They’d had this conversation before.

“Fuck Portola Valley, Miriam. Seriously, fuck Portola Valley. What’s wrong with here?”

“Here?” she said, her voice back up in pitch. “Around all these shitty houses from the 1950’s? Where we have to get in the car to go anywhere? Don’t you want any more out of life than this?”

“I don’t know, do I? Look, it beats the hell out of Minneapolis. Or Queens.”

“Yeah, well, at least we were in the high end of Queens.”

The boy from the wrong side of the tracks. She’d never let him forget it. “Before you married me, you mean.”

“Come on, you know that’s not what I meant.”

He was not mollified. She thought for a while. Then:

“How can you stand to work for Larry Ellison? That guy’s such a creep.”

Matt laughed. “Yeah, so, what’s your point?”

He had her there. She changed the subject.

“That time I visited you there, and people were pressing the Close Door button on the elevator instead of holding it for us. Yuck.”

“It’s capitalism inside and out, Miriam. No fake politeness. It’s kind of refreshing, actually, after all that passive aggression at 3Com.”

While she was figuring out what to say next, he added,

“Or at your clinic.” Matt had visited her once at her psychological clinic, and thought they were just a bunch of neurotic phonies. He was on a roll now and didn’t let her interrupt.

“Or that fundraiser that your boss Abigail and her hoity-toity husband hosted that time. My god, those people made me puke. It figures 3Com’s marketing VP Patrick was there. Brown-nosing his way to the top!”

“Oh, so I’m passive-aggressive now? And Patrick Logan was a real gentleman!”

“Come on, I didn’t say that.”

She was about to say, “As if you even know what that means!” but thought better of it. Instead, just “I’m going to bed now.” He thought sleeping on the couch might be a good idea tonight. Bernie was confused but stayed on the floor in the living room with him.

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There! That wasn’t so bad, was it? There’s a companion “Notes” doc where I detail what really happened back then, who helped me with it, and answer any other questions you might have.

Yes, there’s no free lunch: you can read this for free, but going deeper into the history will cost you a modest $5 a month. The Paid section will also include all the chapters, whereas they age out of the Free section after a few months. If you like what you read, buy the book.

There will usually be a Notes post on each chapter, where you read the real story if there is one.