TCS

In the days leading up to Christmas in 1972 President Nixon sent one hundred twenty-nine B-52s to lay waste to Hanoi,  Haiphong, and various points in between, including air fields, warehouses, rail yards, and (in one unfortunate misfire from a damaged bomb- er) even a hospital. Eleven of the big bombers were shot  down and ninety airmen were either killed in the crashes or captured alive.

There was a thirty-six hour pause in the bombing for Christmas, and then it resumed. The North Vietnamese government said  the American president had gone insane.

The Air Force continued to assail Hanoi around the clock, losing four additional  bombers. By January 1 the  North  Vietnamese couldn't take any more and returned to the negotiating table. A month later  a cease-fire was announced, and  the  Vietnam  war shuddered to a halt.

Dory told Lilith the North Vietnamese had basically just put the reunification of  their country on pause long  enough  for  the Americans to claim victory and leave. But that sent the  wrong signals to Nixon. In the fall when the Israelis and Arabs became embroiled in another war, Nixon, if not  otherwise  distracted, would fall back on the bad instincts reinforced by Vietnam  and escalate the conflict to the brink of a limited nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.

But Nixon would be otherwise distracted, thanks to the handiwork of Jana in a stairwell of the Watergate hotel in Washington, DC.

John Dean was enlisted to pay hush money and lawyer's fees  for the Watergate burglars after their arrest. The head of the FBI was told by Nixon's chief of staff that it was just another Cen- tral Intelligence Agency FLAILEX, so Three Day Gray buried  the evidence and  squashed the investigation.

All these measures seemed to work. Watergate stories were rele- gated to page A9 even at the WaPo. Nixon won reelection with the biggest plurality in American history.

At the time Lilith didn't want to doubt Dory's precognition, but their late  night prank at the Watergate had seemed  to  wobble into a dead end.

A few days after the cease fire in Vietnam the judge in the case of the Watergate burglars, 'Maximum John' Sirica,  handed  down ridiculously stiff sentences with the idea of making one of the defendants break  and testify against their  unknown  handlers. When that hit the papers Dory told Lilith what was coming next.

DORY: 

Lilith decided to take a wait-and-see approach because  so  far Dory seemed to be batting zero.

Then there  was  Dory's suggestion they try to get  in  on  the ground floor of a opportunity that promised to transform society like nothing since the harnessing of steam power. But bad hiring decisions required Lilith to intervene personally. That was nev- er good.

A man  likely to be a much more suitable candidate  for  Dory's project was identified and agreed to be interviewed. Simultane- ously Eugene Cernan, now a Navy captain, sent a message request- ing to meet with the staff of the B'nei Hannebim Historical In- stitute. Apparently the  dossier given to  him  by  Dory  had reached the appropriate eyes.

Lilith knew it would make for a busy day but she decided to at- tend to  both of these visitors at the  company's  workshop  in Washington  State. Dory would be present as well, hopefully  so she could say, 'See, I told you so!' when things played out  the way she promised Lilith they would.

The place where the Enumclaw-Black Diamond Highway crossed  the Kent-Kangley Road was called Four Corners, but there wasn't much there except a lumber yard, a grocery store, a gas station, and one modest  strip  mall with a dentist and  a  cafe.

Astrodyne leased the vacant office between Dr. Tsugawa's  prac- tice and Nancy's Noodle Nook. Sometimes locals wandered in  by accident, thinking it was one or the other. Vinyl lettering went up on the glass that formed the front wall, denoting the  place as 'Epoch Electronics'. After that locals still sometimes came in thinking the place sold hi-fi equipment, but there was  only an unfurnished space where visitors were greeted by Dory, and if they weren't expected, they were quickly turned around. The door out back opened only from the inside.

One cold  wet  day in February 1973 Gary  Kildall  visited  the place, but  he was expected. The receptionist,  Gary  guessed, looked to be of American Indian descent. Certainly she was wear- ing what appeared to be native garb to keep warm  whenever  the door opened. Dory knew who the man was before he even gave his name.

He heard a solid sound of steel moving within steel.

DORY: 

The door to the left of her cubicle slowly began to pivot  open without human intervention. It seemed deceptively massive in the way it gradually slowed to a nearly imperceptible stop before it could crash through the adjacent wall.

DORY: 

So Gary went through the door down a short passageway  and  en- tered the unpartitioned space that Dory called the shop.

A Teletype was clacking along in the middle of a print job. To Gary's delight he saw it was a model 33 ASR. That model, as Gary well knew,  was ubiquitous in the United States  Navy. It was turning a  stack of blank perforated-edge  paper  into  another stack of finished printout.

A large spool of paper tape with holes punched in six-bit binary code was providing the data to be printed. A short-haired woman in a blue shop smock was manually reeling up the spent tape af- ter it  fed through the reader. Her smock wasn't buttoned  up. Gary could see that she wore a black concert tee and blue jeans. He thought  one of the guitarists silk screened  on  the  shirt looked just like Dory.

The woman spooling up the data looked a bit little like a foot- ball player. In fact she really had been one back at the B'nei Hannebim High School in Headwater.

SOPHIA: 

She said this with a broad smile, and offered a further explana- tion.

SOPHIA: 

Hunky. Dory. He recognized the woman now. She was a drummer and Gary had been a fan since he was five. That in itself puz- zled him because she looked no older than he was.

Gary saw where the data had originated. There was a blue green cabinet six feet high, six feet deep, and two feet wide. Shit. His prospective employers had a minicomputer, a PDP-1,  one  of only about fifty ever made.

Another woman wearing a buttoned up smock stood over there. Gary couldn't tell what she was wearing under the light-blue  cotton lab coat  but  he guessed from her bare calves that  it  was  a dress. Her hair was dark brown like that of the  first  woman, with hints  of red, but much longer.

Robyn thought  the well-dressed and bearded visitor  very  much resembled her adoptive father Erik Zinter when he  was  roughly the same age. She imagined if there was a Collier's encyclopedia entry for  'Dad' then his photo would be featured as  the  very quintessence of all dads.

Gary saw  there was one other woman in the shop,  one  who  was nearly as dark as Dory. She looked like a female biker and was wearing what had to be the most expensive leather boots he  had ever seen. They were black, went up over her knees, and  were articulated at  every joint. Her thighs weren't bare, but  her thigh muscles were still evident, and he could tell she  was  a runner. In fact, it was entirely possible she ran miles in those same boots. They looked that functional.

The skin  on her face was darker than her two  friends  in  the shop. Everything that wasn't tucked into the boots except  her hands and face was covered in deep red leather with zippers ev- erywhere for pockets and for basic access to the garment. It was was glossy and richly red, like fresh blood. Her forearms were covered with more black leather.

ROBYN: 

ROBYN: 

LILITH: 

Gary smiled at that and wondered about her accent. The underly- ing mode sounded British, but there was a strangely otherworldly overlay, as though she had spent much time in a country  nobody had ever heard of. He glanced at the computer next to Robyn.

GARY: 

Sophia and Robyn chuckled at that remark, but Lilith, being in- deed British, Israeli, and otherworldly, was mystified  to  si- lence by the reference to an American sitcom. Into this awkward little moment of silence he dropped his own name.

GARY: 

LILITH: 

GARY: 

LILITH: 

GARY: 

LILITH: <Oh, that's just something we put on the window so peo- ple didn't think this was a vacant space and try to  break  in, perhaps to have a -- what do you call it Sophia? A kegger? Some have still  tried. Not that they got anywhere  breaking  that glass. That's not local stuff! The name of my little company is actually  Astrodynamics. Sometimes we shorten that up to Astro- dyne. You may be thinking you came here for a job interview, Mr. Kildall, but  it's really the other way around. We've already decided you're the man for the job and we just need to convince you. But I am curious, sir, why you're in the job market. Just curious, you understand>

Gary: <I crapped out in the draft lottery but I've been working it off by teaching at a Navy college down in Monterey. They cut me loose to finish my doctorate at UDub. To my great misfortune I find myself with a slight cash-flow problem lately. When I was down in California I was moonlighting as a consultant at Intel, you see. But I'm from up here in Seattle originally. I flew back in my own plane and that's a pretty expensive hobby. My buddy- pals said you had deep pockets and the work was right up my al- ley>

He fell silent, but the Teletype 33 was still running. To avoid letting the pause grow too awkward Lilith nodded at the machine and offered an invitation.

LILITH: 

He took  a moment reading the printout.

GARY: 

L

Lilith tilted her head with a dubious look.

LILITH: <That was a very good try, Mr. Kildall, but please look at it again. This has nothing to do with signals intelligence>

His face  turned  a little red and he looked  at  the  printout again, for a bit longer this time.

GARY: <No, belay my last. These elements aren't Earth-centric, they're sun-centric. And the names: 1866 Sisyphus. 1620 Geogra- phos. You're interested in asteroids>

LILITH: <Not just any asteroids, Mr. Kildall. Please take anoth- er look. The third time's the charm>

He returned to the busy Teletype to look once more. This time he searched for patterns in the data. He found what he thought was a common thread.

GARY: <You're worried about Earth-crossers, asteroids which draw nearer to  the  sun  than we do and might  smack  into  us  one day>

ROBYN: <We should all worry about those asteroids,  We've  only found a fraction of what must be out there>

SOPHIA: <Now, now, Robyn. We're not really worried about being smacked by asteroids. Mr. Kildall might as well know we're look- ing for another one to grab and bring back here>

LILITH: <True enough>

GARY: <Another one?>

LILITH: <Mr. Kildall, color me impressed. Now I shall I tell you what it is exactly we'd like you to do. We have the best logis- tics in the business, and that is no idle boast. When you watch it in operation you are simply not going to believe it. Anything you tell  Dory out there to order, no matter how  expensive  or rare it is, absolutely will be here overnight, beg steal or bor- row. It is only necessary that your item actually exists. Ro- byn's kid Jana is especially good at doing that. You could tell Dory to get you the Hope Diamond, and the next morning you would have it. We want you to use our supply chain to turn that  big box there, our so-called minicomputer that's really as  big  as three coffins stacked on top of each other, into a box the  size of a piece of luggage. Then we will have the world's first mi- crocomputer! Will you do it, Mr. Kildall?>

GARY: <Take something that costs as much as a lakefront home on the Eastside and turn it into something that costs as much as  a used car, so anybody can have one? Yes, I can do it, and I will do it, Dr. Margolies, but remember, when I do do it, there goes the whole neighborhood."

LILITH: <Dory is something of a visionary. She saw it in a day- dream once. She says this will change everything. We asked some of your friends to help us, but two of them they used our parts and some girls we hired as assemblers to build these stupid box- es that make free calls and cheat the phone company.'

GARY: <Let me guess: Steve Wozniak>

LILITH: <And his mate Steve Jobs. I heard they sold a hundred of their boxes for one hundred fifty dollars apiece. I do hope they managed to save most of it. They might just be able to pay their lawyers enough  to avoid conviction for embezzlement. After I fired  them there was another fellow working here  who  actually did earn his keep. He wrote a program to simulate an 8008 micro processor on our mini. Show him that tape, Hunky>

Kildall watched the drummer dig around in a wheeled Vidmar, find a tape, and hand it off to Lilith.

LILITH: <Unfortunately this isn't a  one-size-fits-all  simula- tion, it's actually set up to compile statistics  on  vehicular flow so cities can adjust the timing on their  traffic  lights. Your friend used our supply system to order everything he needed to build a portable version of this. We built that traffic ana- lyzer for him but the whole time we thought it was our microcom- puter. And all the while he was working on that hardware, anoth- er bloke used our PDP-1 to host BASIC on an 8008 chip,  but  we don't have that tape. I don't much fancy playing the victim, Mr. Kildall. I fired both of them>

GARY: <Now you must be talking about the Gates and  Allen show>

Lilith nodded.

LILITH: <I heard they went into business for themselves,  some- thing called Traf-O-Data, but it's not going anywhere. I sent their tape to Olympia, where they have big iron and some clever fellows. It's going to be be tough selling their new box  when every city from here to Spokane sends their data to Olympia  to crunch. Robyn already told them what I'll tell you: people think about money when they don't have it, but we have it, so we don't think about  it. Essentially, we have infinite money. But we don't  have a deep knowledge of technology. That puts you in  a very good negotiating position, Mr. Kildall. Your friends clear- ly did not believe we were sincere in our attitude about  money and about what we are trying to do here>

Gary wondered, aloud, if she might cast him aside after he  de- livered the goods.

LILITH: <I'll retain the patents for the hardware, just to keep my skin in the game, you understand? But software patents  are still a gray area legally. You will be a full partner when  it comes  to the licenses. We will be equal co-owners of anything you write on my time. But if you sublet to a third party I will not block the transaction or try to undermine you in price. You can have all this in writing, if you wish, but really, Mr. Kil- dall, it will not be necessary, because I'm totally sincere when I tell you this is not about the money>

GARY: <I  do  have a couple of  unavoidable  obstacles  though. First, I have another year on my teaching gig down in California and there's no way out of it. It's an obligation I have to Uncle Sam. So the fall of this year and winter and spring of '74 are basically a wash>

LILITH: <That's not a problem at all. We can lease office space down there and have a little shop just like this one up and run- ning in no time at all. Instead of going back to Intel you just stay with us>

GARY: <Okay, but then there's my whole excuse for going on hia- tus to come up here. Like I said before, Dr. Margolies, they cut me loose  to finish my own academic work at the  University  of Washington>

LILITH: <I fully understand where you're coming from, Mr.  Kil- dall, I  really do. I have a Master of Arts degree myself,  in linguistics, from Hebrew University, and a PhD in Assyriology at B-Han  HI, so I know all about dealing with supervisory  commit- tees. But I also know you're a very clever fellow, Mr. Kildall. I'm sure you will find a way to mesh your work for us here  and your work in academia so you don't get horribly sidetracked  on either one. And when you're all done Astrodyne will have a chief engineer who has a doctorate in computer science>

She fell silent, and Gary thought about it for a while.

LILITH: <What do you think, Hunky?>

SOPHIA: <I  think playtime is over, Doctor J. No  more  Romper Room. The grownup is in the building>

LILITH: <And  you, Robyn? Do you get the feeling this  day  is shaping up to be a good one?>

ROBYN: <This  was a big deal. Gordon Moore is one of  the  big shots at  Intel. He said something important about ICs  a  few years ago. He predicted the number of transistors that can  be crammed  onto one piece of silicon would double yearly. I think that was  a little too optimistic, and it should be  every  two years, but still, with a compound rate like that, a computer the size of luggage is only the start. We're getting in just as the curve is about to take off>

At that moment the paper data tape spooled out and the Teletype stopped chattering. Sophia went over to look at the printout.

SOPHIA: <We have a winner, Lilith. Naturally it's a no-namer>

Lilith smiled, then turned back to Kildall.

LILITH: <Robyn  is talking about a computer you can wear  as  a watch>

ROBYN: <No, I'm talking about a computer that floats on the cor- nea of your eye. Moore's observation will stay true year after year, smaller and smaller, until we butt up against the quantum granularity of matter itself and even then some smart kids will keep the show going somehow. So the meat of what I'm saying, Mr. Kildall, is that this day is going to become legendary, one for the history books, and it's only half over>

LILITH: <That's right. Dory says your Captain Cernan arrived a little early. He's waiting next door at Nancy's>

That last bit puzzled Gary. He hadn't heard Dory say  anything since he stepped into the shop.

LILITH: <So are you in, Mr. Kildall?>

GARY: <Just call me Gary, please. And yes, I'm in. How did I get so lucky?>

<Good fortune  all the way around, Gary. I'll leave it to  the Zinter twins here to negotiate your salary and other  such  de- tails, and to step you through the paperwork. But I'm going to go meet Dory's famous astronaut. She told Nancy to cook our usu- al>

Captain Gene Cernan, so recently the commander of the Apollo 17 moon shot, sat in a booth devouring a Chicago-style Italian beef sandwich, cut  up with a knife and fork to avoid  staining  his dress blue uniform, but the wetter the better, he said, and  it was  so good it made him homesick.

Judith Margolies  sat  across him over a plate  of  fried  cod, chips, and string beans, which was what she called her "usual".

Dory sat next to her having already eaten her own usual: cheese frenchees and fries, and she was just starting in on her raisin pie.

DORY: <I'm glad we could meet again, Gene without the time con- straints we had last time, up there. That was real, by the way, in case you were wondering>

Gene smiled at that last comment.

GENE: <I  want to retire from NASA. But where could I go  from here? There's no way I'll ever get another flight. Still, I agreed to do this last job and meet with you. Do any of you know FBI Associate Director Mark Felt?>

DORY: <Judith does not, but I remember him fondly from a case he had in Headwater a while back. A long while back. He's not ex- actly an ally, but at least he is a voice of reason in the Unit- ed States government>

GENE: <You gave us a set of numbers that corresponded  with  an object  in orbit around the Earth. We illuminated it with radar and found the return to be much brighter than it looks optical- ly. What my people want to know is whether it is artificial?>

LILITH: <It is a...combination of artificial and  natural. Did anyone find it interesting?>

Gene nodded his head.

GENE: <They found it interesting enough that Apollo 17 will  no longer be the last flight. We have a certain amount of hardware that is already built. My friend Joe Engle was bumped off my own flight but he will be on the next one. What I came to ask  you was, will Joe and the rest of the crew be safe when they arrive at this...interesting object?>

LILITH: <I can't give my assurances if they do something stupid, but we  ourselves will not put them in any  danger  whatsoever. They will even find, when they arrive, that they are as welcome as you are here, today, at Nancy's>

GENE: <But it's in the Van Allen radiation belt. They can't stay long>

LILITH: <Actually, Captain, this interesting object  orbits  in the  so-called  Safe Gap between the inner and outer  belt. The crew need spend no more time crossing the inner belt  than  you did when  you went on your flight to Taurus-Littrow,  and  they need not cross the outer belt at all>

GENE: <We propose to link the ascent stages of two Lunar Modules together>

He pulled a document out of his briefcase.

GENE: <Here is a print with the dimensions>

Lilith looked at it and saw how the main engine of each LM  had been replaced by a tunnel to connect the two and permit access. It would maneuver entirely by external thrusters.

LILITH: <That will be snug but we can accommodate them>

GENE: <What about docking? Will they need a compatible intercon- nection?>

LILITH: <There will be no need for that. They will see why, when they get  there. But your design team will need to modify  the thrusters to  use compressed air only. I don't want my  people breathing what the notes on this drawing says you're using  for propellant>

GENE: <They want to keep the flight under wraps. It's all Dee Oh Dee funding now. It won't have the publicity that mine did. The communications will  be...ah...secure>

Lilith raised an eyebrow, took out a pen and marked '283 MHZ' on the drawing Gene had provided.

LILITH: <That's VHF, ship-to-ship, in the clear. Whatever ar- rangements you made between the flight crew and ground  control in terms of comms, that is how you'll talk to us. And here's the call sign>

She wrote Midway Control on the sheet and passed it back to him.

GENE: <Why do you call it Midway?>

LILITH: <In terms of velocity change is is halfway between  low Earth orbit and the Moon>

GENE: <I see. And why must your Astrodyne be so mysterious?>

LILITH: <Meet us halfway, Captain, and we'll go on to the  next thing. If not, there are other sturgeon in the Black Sea, if you catch my meaning>

When Gary Kildall was putting the final touches on the Micro it lacked  a best seller that would really put it on the map. The program he came up with was a cross between a double-entry  ac- counting worksheet  and  the 'Battleship'  game. Columns were marked A through Z, rows were from 1 to 256, and where the col- umns and rows intersected, they formed cells designated A1, B9, C117, and so forth. The customer could enter data or  formulas into any one of these cells, and each cell could reference data anywhere else on the worksheet. If the customer changed data in one cell, all the dependent cells would be quickly recalculated.

Gary called this program 'Matrix'.

If a businessman wanted to find the answer to the question 'what will my long-term profits look like if I buy a second sheet met- al cutting machine today?' he didn't have to hire a  programmer to write a special program just to find out. He could just pur- chase a Micro. With a Micro running Matrix the fellow could sit in his office and fiddle with the numbers himself.

So when the Micro hit the market in the summer of 1973 it  came bundled with punch tapes containing Matrix and an assortment of other  applications such as a simple text editor. There was  an 8008 assembler to allow savvy customers to create their own pro- grams for the Micro, but in the main, everyone from small busi- ness owners to the CFOs of large corporations went  to  dealers and plonked  down  five  C  notes  for  'one  of  those  Matrix machines.'

Every time they did, one of those five Benjamins was pure profit for Astrodyne. Three thousand units sold right away, and  Gary Kildall realized  Lilith wasn't fucking around when  she  hired him.

By the end of the summer Bill Gates developed a BASIC  language interpreter for the Micro but it was too slow and had very  few takers.

Intel offered their next 8-bit microprocessor just in time to be incorporated into Astrodyne's Christmas release of  the  Micro. The 40-pin 8080 could address 64KB of memory all at once and it had four times the clock speed of the earlier chip. The new mod- el of the Micro switched to magnetic cassette tapes for program storage and shipped with 16 KB of RAM. An external floppy drive was sold by a third party and the Basic Operating System  Soft- ware, or BOSS, was written by Kildall to allow this new  Micro, named the  73B,  to manage this device as well  as  manage  any printers or other peripherals.

Soon after the Micro 73B actually hit the street a four kilobyte 8080 interpreted  BASIC was written by Bill Gates for  the  new hardware. It sold for $500 on floppy disks. Most potential cus- tomers considered that price to be outrageous. The first 'tap- pers' made their name by breaking the weak copy  protection  on Gates'  floppies, much to his dismay. He whined about it in the letters to the editor of this and that magazine.

The Micro 74A was the first to have a modem, sold separately. It crawled at only 300 baud but users were able to dial out to As- trodyne for support and downloads. The host was the minicomputer in the Maple Valley business park where Kildall was hired. A 24 hour news  aggregator called Interworld was started  with  free access for anyone owning a Micro. Dory ran the whole operation from her receptionist position out front.

For the marquee application on this version, Kildall and his sta- ble of five programmers created WordBoss, the first word proces- sor with  automatic hyphenation  and  paragraph  justification, leaving the user free to just type. Dot-matrix printer support for all  the  major models was also added. The Micro  became thirty percent smaller in size, yet the price-point remained, as always, at  $499. Twenty thousand Micros 74Bs sold, mostly  to business  and hobbyists, but the public at large was  still  not yet aware of the growing world of micro-computing.

A 4 inch floppy disk drive with 128KB of space was incorporated inside the Micro 75A. The cassette tape deck was dropped, but it was still available as an external device for legacy  software. BOSS was changed to load from floppy, permitting fresh upgrades to the operating system. The 8080 chip was replaced by the Zilog Z80, an  improved aftermarket clone. Astrodyne populated  the motherboard with 32 Kb of RAM and it still came in at $499. An optional GUI called GUIDE (Graphical User Interface with Desktop Elements) ran on top of BOSS, in black and white.

The first truly 'What You See Is What You Get'  (WYSIWYG)  word processor, WordGuide, was the big star of the Micro-75B show. A spooler program  converted documents for output on  dot  matrix printers exactly as they appeared on the screen, allowing for an endless variety of fonts. With a 1200 baud modem built right in, Micro 75Bs were able to communicate with each  other  point-to- point rather than just back to Astrodyne's mainframe, so email, data, and software could be copied directly between any two ma- chines.

That raised certain legal issues. After Gates filed a complaint the US government ordered Astrodyne to  disable  point-to-point file transfers  to prevent piracy, but Astrodyne won  in  court using the argument that it was like trying to sue General Motors because the  getaway  car in a bank robbery happened  to  be  a Chevy.

A quarter  of a million Micro 75B units  were  sold. Astrodyne bought out the whole southwest corner of SR-169 and  SR-516  in Washington State, and replaced their minicomputer with big iron. Meanwhile the US blocked Micros for export lest the  technology aid the  Soviet Union.

Astrodyne was flattered, but all this really did was result  in many  Micros  being manufactured off-shore  rather  than  purely home-grown.

Bill Gates tried to incorporate his own company as 'Micro-Soft' but he was sued by Astrodyne due to the similarity of names with their hardware and forced Gates to change the name of his compa- ny to Winspire. Nevertheless he kept going around saying he was 'W-I-N-N-I-N-G' and he did make a little money selling his BASIC interpreter. It made the Micro easier to program and was attrac- tive to  schools, but it was still too slow for  serious  work.

Professional programmers compiled binaries which were  directly executable by BOSS.

The Micro  76A came with a 4800 baud modem that was  just  fast enough to  listen to Dory's spoken word  news  commentary. The GUIDE interface used four bit color for the first time. A paint program was  included to create images, but 16 colors  was  not quite good enough for photographs. A five megabyte external hard drive was also available for another $499.

The 'killer application' for the Micro-76A was a new markup lan- guage that could turn simple text files into eye-pleasing docu- ments featuring portions of text highlighted in green  with  an underline. If the user placed a trackball cursor over this green text and clicked, they were taken to a new document that  could be stored locally, or on the Astrodyne server, or even on anoth- er Micro that was currently online.

Meanwhile Winspire reverse-engineered the Micro's operating sys- tem and offered IBM something they called DOSS with  only  cos- metic changes to BOSS. Gates dared Astrodyne to sue him.

Soon after  that, IBM offered a competing  'Personal  Computer' using stock components and Winspire BASIC in ROM for all  soft- ware and disk operations. There was nothing like GUIDE yet, but IBM blew that off by claiming a GUI was just for people too stu- pid to  remember a measly set of two hundred  articulated  DOSS shell commands  and all their switch  options. IBM considered GUIDE a toy for consumers and not for serious computing.

The federal government deliberately purchased only IBM PCs  de- spite the inferior quality and $1,500 per unit price, but  they were very nearly the sole customer.

For his next trick Gates offered a ripoff of Matrix called Elec- tronic Paper.

Lilith had failed to get a software patent, and refused to do so on principle, saying it was like getting a patent on the  quad- ratic formula. Gates, however, did get a patent for Electronic Paper, then turned around and sued Astrodyne for  infringement. The government  testified as a 'friend of the court',  but  the suit got tossed out by what Gates termed an 'activist judge' who was doing what Gates called 'legislating from the  bench'  when Astrodyne showed prior art.

Meanwhile the Micro 76A moved over four million units. The Micro had been transformed from a mere toy for hobbyists, or a  busi- ness tool, into a genuine appliance for consumers.

A five megabyte hard drive was built right into the hardware of the  Micro 76B for permanent storage, and BOSS now  booted  from this hard drive. Graphics used 15 bit color, five bits each for red, green, and blue, for a total 32,768 possible  colors. The internal modem frequently attained 19,200 baud. Software, photos (mostly pornography) and electronic books were stored in  small pieces across many computers in what soon came to be called the Swarm.

Winspire's BASIC, which still shipped coded inside the  Micro's system  ROM, was now being cloned to RAM with a third-party  tap called Ghostrider  before being ran, which made  BASIC  run  at least  ten times faster and made it, therefore,  almost  usable.

Bill Gates, CEO of Winspire, complained to the federal  govern- ment that  these transient RAM images represented  a  copyright violation, and the government responded by trying to shut  down Ghostrider.

The government soon found it was impossible to track down every copy of Ghostrider in the Swarm. Instead they just seized  the Astrodyne mainframe computer at Maple Valley used to index files in the Swarm for search.

Locked out from their own office, Astrodyne relocated to  down- town Seattle. In reaction to the federal seizure of the  main- frame, independent tappers created automated scripts to  cruise and index the Swarm. Now, instead of a single vulnerable search node, the search nodes themselves become widely distributed.

Astrodyne news and support services resumed after a short inter- ruption, with the company itself becoming a normal user in  the Swarm rather than a central node.

Early in 1977 Astrodyne rolled out a Micro with 32  bit  color, giving over 24 million colors and finally reaching  full  photo quality. Onboard storage reached 64 megabytes and the modem at- tained 57,600 baud, the best that could be obtained by dial-up. Millions of users worldwide were now 'buzzing the Swarm' to com- municate with each other. Suddenly there was a global library of information available to anyone with a Micro and a telephone line.

Meanwhile Winspire offered IBM a nearly identical clone of GUIDE called Windows. Coincidentally, IBM stopped calling  graphical interfaces mere toys. The IBM-PC was slashed in price to $1,200, hoping to jump start annual sales, which were still numbered in the  hundreds. And even those paltry sales were mostly for gov- ernment computers that were not even used, prompting some  Win- spire employees to call it Windows for Warehouses when they were out of earshot of Gates.

The government tried a carrot- and-stick approach and offered a $750 subsidy to school districts if they purchased the  IBM/Win- spire boxes. They cut existing subsidies to school districts if they  insisted on going with Astrodyne's Micros. Sales of IBM's machine jumped to ten thousand units. But Astrodyne sold a thou- sand $499 Micros for every one unit sold by IBM.

Gary Kildall decided to finally call Bill Gates on his bullshit and filed a lawsuit against Winspire for copyright infringement. Surprisingly, the case seemed to be placed on a fast track. Kil- dall found himself in front of Judge Samuel Watanabe in only  a few  months, not years.

If there ever was an open-and-shut case, this was it. GUIDE and Windows both consisted of exactly 51 files, and each  file  was exactly the same size, but with slightly different names. TASK- SWAP.BIN in GUIDE became SWAPTASK.BIN in Windows. All Gates did was change the name of the file called out by the GUIDE  kernel when it needed to scoot itself out of memory, which anyone could do with a simple editor without access to the  original  source code or recompiling.

In the courtroom Kildall displayed the disassembled code of both operating systems to show they were absolutely identical except for when they called out one of the other fifty files.

But the  clincher was the Easter egg buried in the  program  by Gary Kildall for just this contingency.

With Bill Gates' Windows product running with a projection moni- tor so everyone in the courtroom could see what he  was  doing, Gary put  the trackball cursor in the upper left  corner,  then typed 'GOTCHA'. Suddenly a slideshow began to display  cartoon versions of the GUIDE developers and in bold letters  the  text 'GUIDE Copyright 1975 Astrodynamics Corporation All Rights  Re- served'.

Gary Kildall sat down, fully expecting the judge to ream Gates' ass and hand Winspire a multi-million dollar penalty.

Nothing like that happened. To be sure, Judge Watanabe acknowl- edged that  copyright infringement had taken  place. 'Mistakes were made,' he said, pussyfooting around. The judge could hardly dismiss the case without being slapped down himself in the inev- itable appeal. But Winspire was fined a dollar. One dollar.

Judge Sam explained that brisk competition was commonly held to be a public good, and so Winspire, simply by offering an  alter- native to GUIDE and breaking the unfair monopoly  in  operating systems that Astrodyne currently enjoyed, had mitigated any dam- age to society they might 'theoretically' have done  to  Astro- dyne's intellectual property rights.

After the debacle in the courtroom Astrodyne  took  retaliatory measures that would begin to bite the following year.

For the Micro 77B the modem, hard drive and floppy drives  were completely removed, replaced by a little black box that was sim- ply a locator for Binah or Bat-El to place one end of a wormline linking back to something called the 'Mother Node' deep  inside their stellar body. Files were transferred and stored  totally encrypted by the elohim themselves. Even the latest BOSS operat- ing system and GUIDE windowing environment were downloaded from the Mother Node at each boot, with on-the-fly decryption unpack- ing files during run time and absolutely goring Winspire's cash cow of reverse engineering.

Customers could now carry just the keyboard unit (with  a  bat- tery)  and a headset and use their Micro as a telephone with  no long-distance  charges. Or they could use it as a music player. Storage and bandwidth was effectively infinite and it  was  not even limited by the speed of light. This fact was soon exploited by stock Market traders until federal regulators caught on  and implemented a sixty second delay for every trade.

Movies as well as music began to be shared freely. Over a hun- dred million Micro 77Bs were sold. Thousands of songs and films became available  in the Swarm for free,  which  soon  impacted sales. The music and film industry realized it had  a  problem with a business model which depended on an artificial  scarcity of content. Money sloshed around from lobbyists and soon Presi- dent Jackson's Attorney General ordered Astrodyne to suspend all operations until  they could be cleared of being  accessory  to Intellectual Property theft.

Astrodyne complied with this order without filing for a stay in court or even a word of complaint.

The company suspended the manufacture of all new Micros in  the United States, but continued to make and sell the units interna- tionally, totally unabated.

The value  of unsold Micros already on retail  shelves  in  the United States doubled overnight and would only go up from there. A thriving Micro smuggling trade appeared along the Canadian and Mexican borders. Machines that fell into disrepair were canni- balized for their black boxes to be retrofitted into older  Mi- cros or repurposed into local servers tied back into the Mother Node with older Micros networked to it. Micros were manufactured in Mexico,  smuggled across the border, and arrived by  ad  hoc package delivery methods that could not be traced back  to  the source.

With encryption firmly in place, Astrodyne then rolled out  the concept of Microbux, electronic money which could be transformed to and from hard currency using local couriers for a nominal fee that included a small kickback to Astrodyne.

Tappers tried their luck stealing Microbux, but Astrodyne  gua- ranteed customers against any loss. They could certainly afford to do so, since Micros, as always, remained priced at $499  and the profit margin was huge. No tapper ever broke the encryption in any event.

After this leap in technology the evolution of Astrodyne's hard- ware levelled off. Micros continued to grew incrementally small- er year-over-year, but the essentials remained the same. A clas- sic Micro 77B would continue to work with the Swarm in the 1990s and far beyond.

Meanwhile the  United States government continued  to  put  all their eggs in the Winspire basket. Redmond's systems never ap- proached the technology of even the Micro 75A and they remained more expensive by a factor of at least three. More crucially, none of them could access the Swarm.

The Twenty-first Century arrived a generation early to citizens of even the poorest nations, who communicated with one  another using video phones while the citizens of the United States  re- mained mired in the 1970s as a deliberate policy of the Jackson Administration.