.KEYWORD ppeditorial0599
.FLYINGHEAD FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
.TITLE Back to the future, software style
.DEPT
.SUMMARY Part history lesson, part blast from the past, this month’s editorial from Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz uses products from the past to inspire greatness in the future. This month, you’ll get a great retrospective on software technology, learn a little about what worked really well in the early days of personal computers, and see how to apply the best of that time to software that runs on Palm devices. Whether you’re a Palm Computing Platform software developer or an enthusiastic user, you’ll gain some valuable perspective reading this article.
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
How many of you remember the early Borland International? Today, it’s known as Inprise Corporation. Inprise is now in the enterprise integration business, although the company still uses the Borland name with some of its development tools.
But back in the early 80’s, Borland sold programming tools and utilities primarily to hobbiest users. Even if you weren’t an active PC user back in 1984 (and some of you were probably just about 10 years old), you might have heard of the signature Borland products Turbo Pascal and Sidekick. Back then, Turbo Pascal was a very cool development tool. It cost about fifty bucks, ran kinda slowly compared to "real" compiled code, but made it possible to build some real software and was fun to use at the same time.
Sidekick was an organizer. It was one of the first TSR programs. TSR means Terminate and Stay Resident, back-then geek-speak for a pop-up application. The program would patch DOS, waiting for a particular key sequence. When the patch saw that key sequence, it would run the Sidekick code. If my memory holds, Sidekick had a calendar, a note pad, a to-do list and other typical organizer goodies.
You gotta remember than when we’re talking about the early 80’s, we’re talking about DOS. Pure, unadulterated, A-prompt-using, not-a-bitmap-in-sight DOS. To those of you used to pull-down menus and Start buttons, the idea of remembering commands and typing them in may seem arcane and archaic. But the reality was that computers were pretty usable back then even without graphical user interfaces. The early DOS machines used up to 640K RAM — not megabytes (millions of bytes), but kilobytes (thousands of bytes). In fact, the total RAM of those early DOS machines was considerably less than what’s on one of the early Palm devices and yet, you could use a fully functional word processor or C compiler in that space. Amazingly, even prior to the DOS era, you could use fine word processors in 64K on old 8-bit CP/M machines. The fundamental value formula doesn’t change, but the user interface is considerably more involved.
Programming tools on the PC back then were usable, but not fun. You’d use a text editor to edit your code, and a command line, UNIX-like interface to compile it. Turbo Pascal eliminated much of that by combining editing, debugging, and testing into one screen-based (but not graphical!) user interface.
As a marketing-oriented person, there’s one thing about the early Borland I remember most: value. Almost every product they sold was priced at around fifty dollars (including lots of Turbo add-ons). Almost everything they sold was pretty meaty and useful. In 1984, I was a few years out of college, gainfully employed, but certainly far from flush. Even so, because Borland’s products were all so cool (and so inexpensive), I’d pretty much decided that I’d collect their software. Whenever they released a new product, I’d buy it. I figured I’d always have some use for it in my library of software goodies.
While the Borland of that time wasn’t just Philipe Kahn, the gregarious former Frenchman turned entrepreneur, it was still a small company. And more relevant to this discussion, its products weren’t monolithic monsters, like we see so often today. Instead, they were small, slick, sleek products that accomplished just what they set out to — and not a bit more.
Unfortunately for me as a consumer, Borland’s value formula only lasted a few years. After a few years, their products moved into the hundreds of dollars and collecting was no longer feasible or fun.
In today’s world of huge products like Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Office, and Lotus Notes, it’s often difficult to see how smaller, single-purpose products like Turbo Pascal could survive. But it was much, much worse no earlier than five years ago. In the years before the Web, if you wanted to get your product out to people, you had to have distribution in actual, brick-and-mortar stores or you had to do direct mail with real paper mailers. Very few people in the 80’s and early 90’s were on the Internet. Some folks were on services like AOL and CompuServe, but there wasn’t a concentration of marketing potential.
If you wanted to sell software, you had to spend serious money physically reaching customers. Even if you wanted to provide upgrades, you had to send out floppies. Today, it’s hard to imagine not providing a simple bug-fix upgrade, downloadable for free. But in 1990, if you wanted to send five thousand users a free upgrade, you need to budget tens of thousands of dollars to make it happen.
Let’s zoom back to today. If you could combine the charm, low-cost, innovation, and value of small, tight products like Turbo Pascal with the incredible distribution advantages of the Internet, you’d be able to see some wonderful little products.
Ah, but you can. Especially if you’re building for the Palm Computing Platform.
The Palm device is ideal for special-purpose, sleek products. We’ve seen a great number of these for this platform. The characteristics of these small applications are pretty simple. They’re easy to use. They do one thing well. They’re small. They’re inexpensive. And they’re well worth their cost.
The thing is, that with a 4MB RAM footprint on machines like the Palm IIIx, it’s possible to make "big-ass" applications for the Palm device as well as the sleek wonders. From time to time, there’s a good reason to use a larger, more cumbersome application (especially for special-purpose corporate applications). The challenge is to avoid the temptation of wallowing in the RAM whenever possible. If you’re a programmer, I strongly advise you to design tight, design fast, design sleek. Users will love you and we’ll write rave reviews.
If you’re a Palm device user and you really love a certain, absolutely wonderfully designed application, let me know. You can send the details to me at a special email address: ilovemypalmorganizer@palmpower.com.
In future months, we’ll run reviews of some of the best and maybe I’ll even mention them in my editorials.
Oh, and for those of you curious about how that old Borland evolved, it eventually gobbled up Ashton-Tate, the original big database developer (anyone remember dBASE?). Unfortunately, after eating Ashton-Tate a bit too quickly, the company got indigestion. Eventually Borland changed its name to Inprise and Philipe left to start a new company called Starfish.
But the story doesn’t end there. Starfish introduced a modern Sidekick, called Sidekick 99. Starfish also did the synchronization software for the little credit card-sized Franklin Rex. Trivia note: back in the early 1980s, Franklin did an Apple II clone. In any case, back in June, Motorola acquired Philipe Kahn’s Starfish for what Motorola president and chief operating officer Bob Growney says is a cash-and-stock deal valued at several hundred million dollars.
There’s motivation for you. Build great software.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
Inprise is located at http://www.inprise.com. Their Borland division is at http://www.borland.com.
You can visit Starfish at http://www.starfish.com.
Learn more about the Franklin Rex Pro at http://www.franklin.com.
Send your nominations for very cool products to ilovemypalmorganizer@palmpower.com.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.ee6cf7f
