Cottage Computer Programming
COTTAGE
COMPUTER
PROGRAMMING
by Paul Lutus
Paul Lutus dropped out of the NASA<br>rat race to live on a mountaintop for $40 a month.<br>Then he wrote the most popular word<br>processing program for personal computers...
Paul Lutus is the author of Apple<br>Writer, one of the best-selling word processing programs of all time.
You may have heard<br>about me. In the computer business I'm known as the Oregon Hermit.<br>According to rumor, I write personal computer programs in solitude,<br>shunning food and sleep in endless fugues of work. I hang up on<br>important callers in order to keep the next few programming ideas from<br>evaporating, and I live on the end of a dirt road in the wilderness.<br>I'm here to tell you these vicious rumors are true.
Now that I've confessed, I'll explain how I met my<br>first personal computer. It was 1976, and I was designing some<br>electronic devices for the NASA space shuttle. I was a college dropout<br>whose employability rested solely on the fact that I could build things<br>that worked (the lights on the present shuttle fleet are powered by my<br>electronics). But I was about to drop out even further. That spring I<br>moved to one of the wilder corners of Oregon and built a<br>twelve-by-sixteen-foot cabin atop a four-hundred-foot hill. Since I<br>didn't want a road, I carried the lumber on my back. I planted a<br>vegetable garden. I wrote poetry and played mathematical games in<br>notebooks. And I chose to do without electricity.
One night when I was reading Scientific American in<br>the yellow glow of kerosene, I saw an advertisement for the Apple II.<br>Wow, I thought, a personal computer! With a computer you could draw a<br>world in three dimensions out of colored lines. Write stories. Play<br>music. Locate Neptune to point your telescope. Store fantastic amounts<br>of trivial information . . . The very next day I rode my bicycle to the<br>nearest telephone and placed my order.
During the next few weeks I filled notebooks with<br>ideas for programs I was going to write, in some cases setting them<br>down in code. I also strung the oaks and madrones with twelve hundred<br>feet of electrical cord to power the machine.
By the time my Apple arrived, I had become a basket<br>case with my notebooks and pencil. When the machine was hooked up, I<br>was ready to play all night. I followed the instructions to the letter, but I couldn't get into<br>BASIC. I kept getting stuck where the instructions said "Type CONTROL B<br>and press RETURN." I must have typed CONTROL B a hundred times, but<br>nothing happened. Finally I abandoned the instructions and began<br>experimenting.
It was then that I noticed the key marked CTRL.<br>Remember, I had never used a real computer before. I had only imagined<br>it. Instructions that come with computers should be written for people<br>who can only imagine them. What they should have said was, "Press down<br>the key marked CTRL. While holding it down, press the B key. Now<br>release these keys and press the key marked RETURN."
Without intending to, I had gathered all the<br>necessities for what would now be called an "electronic cottage." Far<br>from the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley, I began writing programs<br>for the fun of it-programs that drew pretty pictures on the display,<br>played music or did something elegant and mathematical. I mailed some<br>of them to Apple Computer, which promptly offered to buy them and<br>encouraged me to write more. Then as now, there were many more<br>computers than programs.
I had bought the computer as a plaything, but within<br>weeks I had been paid more than the cost of the machine. I began to<br>think about a more ambitious project, a word processing program to<br>"obsolete" my typewriter. Since I write a fair amount, I knew I would<br>be able to test my program properly, which turned out to be very<br>important.
This brings me to the day Mother Nature tested Apple<br>Writer. I had finished my program and was using it to write the<br>instruction manual. It was raining, so I thought it a perfect day to<br>stay inside and work with the computer. Because I was off in a digital<br>twilight zone, I paid no attention to the fact that I was perched on a<br>four-hundred-foot ridge in a rain storm. I was (rather proudly) in the<br>midst of explaining how my program would save the data in memory if the<br>user accidentally pressed the RESET key, when suddenlybam!-lightning<br>struck a tree just outside the window. Sparks flew around the cabin and<br>my poor Apple went bananas.
At first I thought it had been completely zapped,<br>but there were some signs of life and I restarted my program. Lo and<br>behold, the program reconstructed the data in memory! In a moment the<br>display appeared, with the cursor sitting beside the last word I had<br>typed in. This despite the fact that half the diskettes lying on the<br>table had been erased by static discharges.
I mailed off the first version of Apple Writer in a<br>big manila envelope, and after some negotiating (and a few revisions)<br>Apple agreed to pay $7,500 for the program. It didn't occur to me to<br>ask for a...