This New Internet Thing, Chapter 25

There’s Reality, and Then There’s TV

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 24 (notes), Len decides to go on TV, and Dan primes the producer with some half-truths and exaggerations, media-savvy guy that he is. Len also recalls how he made it in New York as a 17-year old with no money, to figure out what happened to his brother Jack. In this chapter, they tape the show. The Internet is hot! What will they say on TV?

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

============== There’s Reality, and Then There’s TV ==================

Len racked his brain: what should he say on Computers This Week that would make someone hire him? He was doing OK with his little “mutual fund” and bookkeeping work, not to mention the pension and Social Security, but it wasn’t Silicon Valley-scale money.

Preferably, someone with big bucks would hire him! He’d heard all about “vulture capitalists” from Janet and her friends, and those people had to have a lot of money to throw around. So did mutual funds and other investment services. But why would they want him?

“Probably to keep from getting ripped off!” he thought. But those guys all thought they already knew how to read a business plan, so they didn’t need his help for that. He did have a background in corporate finance, so that had to be worth something. His fund was doing great, but it was private and he couldn’t advertise it legally. His angle had to be the Internet!

He watched Computers This Week to get some idea what it was about. It opened with the host, Jerry Althouse, in front of a room full of computers, lights flashing and electronic music playing. Jerry introduced this week’s topic and his guests, with some kind of cute video. He was very good at asking the basic questions the audience would want an answer to. So what would he ask him and Dan? But more to the point: what did they want to get asked? If Jerry asked him the wrong question, Len and Dan would have to just ignore it and answer the one they wanted, like politicians do. The question Len really wanted was, “Why should a mutual fund specializing in Internet stocks hire you?” But they’d probably ask “how will law enforcement use computers and the Internet to solve crimes?” He had to figure out how to segue from that into the question he wanted.

Janet was really into this Mosaic thing. He tried it when he was at her house, and he had to admit, it was impressive. Computers This Week had already done a show about that, though. They’d done several shows on the Internet already.

The taping was next Tuesday, so he made arrangements to stay with Janet and Walt the night before.

* * *

Cassie and everyone at Palm had had a low-level depression since the failure of the Zoomer. But then in May, everything changed! They were going to build the hardware themselves, not depend on a half-hearted effort from some gadget company. Good grief, they were really going for broke here.

They all felt like they were at the top of the roller coaster and heading down to the really big thrills. Jeff Hawkins had made a balsa wood model of the Touchdown (as they were calling it), with a whittled-down chopstick serving as a “stylus” and he carried it everywhere. He could keep it in his shirt pocket, which you certainly couldn’t do with the Apple Newton. They looked at this hunk of wood as if it were real, and thought, “OK, this probably IS what the world really wants in a handheld.”

She felt a thrill like she’d never had at work, like she was part of the moon mission team or something.  Even when her job didn’t require her to be at design meetings, she found she wanted to be, and once in a while she had some ideas to contribute.

Product meetings at 3Com had usually been numbingly boring endurance fests where the product manager came in with a list of features that he’d copied out of the technical press, and they were ranked from 1 to 4, where 1 was “gotta have”, 2 was “should have”, 3 was “could do without” and 4 was “don’t need.” People would argue interminably about the ratings, always trying to raise the priority of their favorite feature. Then the Engineering group would try to design the product, they’d leave out some features as not feasible, and everyone would argue about that. “Release 2.0” would be the usual resolution, meaning, “maybe we’ll do that someday.” Just saying “No” was generally seen as hurting people’s feelings and not being a team player. If a manager said No to your feature, you’d appeal to higher authority and try to gather allies. It was depressing.

Every startup trying to make a handheld up to then had succumbed to what engineers called “feature-itis.” Someone insists on a feature, so it’s in. It has to have wireless communication? OK, that’s in. It has to have an email program? OK, that’s in. It has to recognize cursive handwriting? That one, in particular, seemed to be the death of Momenta, Newton, and GO. She thought back to what Matt had said about GO and their friend Mike about Momenta: they just assumed no one would use the product unless it recognized their handwriting, but then they couldn’t get that to work.

For the Touchdown, it felt so exhilarating to discard all that crap. It had to sell for $299, it had to fit in your shirt pocket, it had to be fast, it had to have decent battery life, and that was it! If someone walked in with a pet feature idea, Jeff would apply those tests, and usually he’d shoot down that feature. Jeff was the person that the other startups all lacked: a person who could say No and make it stick. Everyone got good at killing features after a while, but Jeff’s insistence on his guidelines did get a little wearisome.

It was industry wisdom that users wouldn’t learn a new system of gestures if they couldn’t type. “You have to recognize their handwriting!” the conventional wisdom said. But no, the Touchdown was going to use Grafiti, a system of simple one-stroke gestures. The “manual” fit on a little sticker on the back of the device. Would users accept that? No one was sure.

Lastly, industry wisdom had been that you had to have wireless communication. The Touchdown wasn’t going to have that, either! It would just have a little cradle you could attach to your PC, so you could synchronize your data.

They were discarding all the industry gospel! Palm was really shooting the moon.

Cassie thought about the child adoption idea all the time. Realistically, she couldn’t be a part of this effort with a young child at home. To her mom, it was no contest — of course family came first! She wondered, “What will I think when the kid is successfully raised and in college? Will I wish I’d stayed at Palm, if it’s a runaway success?”

She knew the Hollywood answer: “children are the greatest gift.” But if there’s no biological clock ticking, i.e. she wasn’t going to get pregnant, then she could wait. This was way fun. And maybe she’d make some money and have an easier time with a kid.

* * *

Len didn’t want to rehearse for the TV interview. He thought it would just make him nervous, and who knew what questions they’d ask, anyway? Janet and Walt didn’t know how to broach the topic, so they just avoided it. He went to Dan’s house and they drove up to San Mateo together. On the way, Dan told him what the producers had told him: they were, indeed, going to ask about law enforcement and the Internet.

Great minds think alike. They both realized that they could just say, “we can’t talk about an ongoing criminal case” and switch to related topics. Dan said he’d already told them that, more or less, so he was ready with that diversion.

Jerry had an assistant, Molly, who met them and took them to Makeup, which they both got a kick out of. The makeup artist explained that she was just applying a little bit of foundation so their faces wouldn’t be shiny under the lights. Then Jerry came in and shook hands with them, and said that he didn’t like to spend too much time with his guests beforehand, since it ruined the spontaneity. He also told them that they didn’t usually do retakes, unless something really bad happened, like spilling a drink or dropping something. Gulp! One take and that’s it. Here we go.

Molly led them into the “studio” which they recognized from TV. Naturally, it was mostly facade, and there were lights and other studio equipment behind the computers. Molly explained that in the actual show there would be introductions, commercials (except they didn’t call them ‘commercials’), and other stuff, but for the taping they were going to skip right to the interview part. Dan got his computer ready, and Len got his ready with the investing software he used. They signaled “ready” to Molly, Jerry stood across the table from them, and they were rolling.

Jerry led off with, “I have with me Len Saunders and Dan Markunas, who were in the news lately for an altercation with an embezzler that they caught, using computers and the Internet. Do you want to tell us what you can about that, either of you?”

Len said, “That’s right, Jerry. I live up in the Sierras and Dan here is my daughter Janet’s friend from way back.”

“I’m going to interrupt you here for a second, Len. Janet is an engineer working on the Internet at 3Com, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right, Jerry, sorry. Janet and her husband Walt own this cabin in the mountains and they let me retire there. But she wasn’t involved in this case at all.”

“OK, sorry, continue.”

“Anyhow, I’ve been doing some bookkeeping work up there, as well as running my ‘mutual fund’” he made the air-quotes around those words, “and a charity asked me to look into some funds that they thought might be getting stolen.”

“So you got on your computer and figured it all out via the Internet?” Jerry prompted with a smile.

“If only it were that easy! Maybe someday it will be, as Dan’s going to show you. Anyhow, it was a lot of hard work, and since it’s an ongoing criminal case, we can’t give too many real details about it.”

“Understood,” said Jerry. “Dan?”

“Hi, I’m Dan Markunas, and I work at Oracle now. I’ve been leading a group in the Internet Engineering Task Force on a new Internet standard for databases. Len’s daughter Janet and I worked together on the Xerox Star and then again at 3Com.”

“So you and networking go way back, is that what you’re saying?”

Dan just smiled and nodded. Jerry continued, “We’d love to hear more about this new standard, but maybe another show. For now, what can you tell us about your embezzling case, if that’s the right term?”

Dan said, “Well, as Len said, we can’t step on the prosecution’s case here. But anyhow, Len didn’t have anything to go on at all! The head of the charity didn’t even know how much money was missing, or when it disappeared!”

“Wow, so what did you do, Len?”

“Well, Jerry, way back at the beginning of my career, I used to work for Arthur Anderson and do what they called ‘fraud audits,’ or auditing a company where fraud was suspected.”

“I’ll bet it was a lot different back then, huh?”

Len smiled. “The work is on computers instead of pencil and paper now, but it’s not all that much easier. It’s still a hard slog. The bad guys like to pay money to fake companies that they control, so first you have to be sure all the invoices are legit.”

“That sounds hard.”

“Yeah, that part isn't really any different. It turns out the Reverend…”

Jerry interrupted, “That’s the guy who runs the charity?”

“Right, sorry. Reverend Collins does a lot of his work in cash. If someone’s really down on his luck, he might slip him a twenty or two. That made it much harder.”

“Now I’m getting intrigued!” said Jerry. “So what did you do, and where does the Internet come in?”

Dan said, “Len got a list of all their bank account’s cash withdrawals and bank transfers, and emailed them to me!”

“OK, you used Internet email. Len, you’re on the Internet? That’s pretty impressive all by itself!”

Len ignored the assumption that old people can’t use the Internet. “Oh, I’ve been active online for several years now.”

Dan continued, “I massaged the data in some ways I probably shouldn’t talk about, and I found, let’s say, some suspicious activity!”

Jerry laughed. “I guess we’ll have to wait for the trial to find out what those were!”

Len said, “If there is a trial. I don’t think the DA wants to put Mr. Redding in jail!”

Dan went on, “We got the bank to help us find out who was using their account.”

Jerry said, “I’m going to interrupt you here for a break. When we come back, we’ll find out the exciting conclusion!” He signaled “out” to Molly. Then he said to Len and Dan,

“This is going great! How do you feel about it?”

Molly signaled “ready.” Jerry said, “We’re back. Len, I understand you run a mutual fund! Are you using the Internet to manage it?”

“I sure am, Jerry. See here on the screen is the ‘MetaStock’ program, which is one of the things I use. You can see here I can analyze the performance of Dell Computers, using data that I downloaded from the Net.”

The camera zoomed in on the screen, and Jerry and Len went over the various aspects of MetaStock. Jerry said,

“We’re looking at Dell here, which doesn’t seem to be in the network sector. Does your fund have anything to do with the Internet?”

“It sure does. It’s a private placement fund, just for sophisticated investors, that specializes in technology stocks. We think there are already ways to play the Internet, even though so far there aren’t any stocks that are pure plays, as we like to call them.”

He turned to Dan.

Dan said, “What we’re looking at here is Mosaic, which I think you’ve featured on this show before. In one window here I have an interface to a database of Internet email addresses, and ways to search it. This isn’t exactly what I did, but Mosaic is easy enough to use that you can imagine a person who doesn’t know much about computers using it to follow a criminal’s tracks!”

“So there will be no place to hide on the Internet!”

Dan laughed. “That’s right, Jerry. Anyone can find you!”

“We’ve had Mosaic on the show before. Do you think this is going to revolutionize the Internet, like some people are predicting?”

Len said, “Absolutely, Jerry. Dan and my daughter Janet worked on the first graphical user interface, fifteen years ago, and I think this is going to be bigger than that!” 

“And you have a mutual fund! How did that come about”

“Well, I’m pretty active in the online investing forums, and a few people trusted me to invest their money for them.”

“And you said you were already investing in the Internet? How is that even possible?”

“We’re looking for companies that are going to benefit from the Internet, rather than being put out of business by it. Also, being private, we can buy some things that the general public can’t.”

“Wow. This isn’t ‘Wall Street Week’ so I won’t ask you to name them! But I guess you’ve found a few?”

“More than a few!”

Jerry turned to Dan.

“And you’ve met a few people who want to put pornography on the Internet, I understand! I guess there’s no avoiding it, is there?”

Dan and Len both laughed. Dan said, “They’re working on it. I think they might actually be the first people to make money off the Internet!”

Molly signaled Jerry again.

“That’s about all we have time for this week. I want to thank Len Saunders and Dan Markunas for some fascinating thoughts on investing in the Web!”

Molly came out. “That was great, guys! I’ll let you know when the show is going to air.” They shook hands with Molly and Jerry.

In the car back to Dan’s house, they were in a daze. It all went by so fast.

Len said, “You did great, skipping over all the sneaky things you did!”

“What do you mean, the things I did? You’re the one who thought of it all!”

Len put his finger to his lips, in the “ssshh!” gesture.

“Anyhow, I got to plug my mutual fund! We’ll see if that turns up anything.”

“Your mutual fund! We got Peter Lynch here.”

He dropped off Dan and went to Janet and Walt’s house.

Len was watching the nightly TV news when Janet got home.

“So how did it go? The big TV star!”

“Pretty good. They didn’t ask about any of the sneaky things we did, and I got to plug my mutual fund.”

“Your ‘mutual fund’! Is that what you’re calling it?”

“Hey. I have two million dollars under management now!”

“And those dangerous bingo players hitting you with their canes?”

“Somehow they didn’t mention that, either. Let that be a lesson to you next time you see something on TV that you don’t have personal knowledge of.”