3/11/97

The man who put the 'P' in 'PC'

    If Harry's wife hadn't been pregnant, who knows what would be on your desk today.
    It was one of those quirky, fateful blips of history that helped steer human development on its present course. Harry Fox was a New York watch importer, bored to tears and looking for a change.
    That day, in July 1981, his life did change, and yours and mine too: Harry discovered the computer. He would go on to reinvent it. Revolutionize it. Idiot-proof it. Mass-popularize it.
    The computer as we know it was a fantasy conceived by a portly, energetic, chuckle-a-minute Orthodox Jew, who at the age of 44 has already achieved his two lifelong ambitions: to get out of the watch business, and to make aliya. (Home is now Gilo, Jerusalem.)
    We'd better slow down a bit, though: Harry's got this humility thing. (He says he shies from publicity, for reasons of jealousy and ayin hara, the evil eye. "Self-satisfaction is enough," he says.) He would want me to point out that Bill Gates also had some influence on the industry, and Steve Wozniak, and Steve Jobs, and IBM. But Humble Harry is the one who put the "P" in "PC."

HIS WIFE was about to give birth, which wrecked his vacation plans; he was stuck at home, mulling his career, when that day, 16 years ago, he tripped over a large box in his basement.
    He'd forgotten about that box.
    What the hell, he figured, there's nothing else to do.
    It was a computer. His partner, on a whim, bought it for $5,000 with company funds, and had it delivered to Harry. Back then, computers were strictly paraphernalia for big businesses, requiring trained operators. It was the last thing Harry needed, or wanted.
    Harry opened the box, and the two others that arrived with it.
    "I shlep them upstairs. And I take all the pieces apart. I look inside and I see all these chips. I know chips. And I know I've spent $5,000 on this, but I'm looking at maybe a couple hundred dollars of components. Aha, I say. This is the business I'm going into. Even before I plugged the thing in.
    "Then I take out the operating manual, and it's this thin. And I start to read it, and I'm not a total moron, y'know. But the first words are: 'Boot the computer.'"
    Still rankled 16 years later, Harry glowers bugeyed. " 'Boot the computer,' it said." He pauses for sarcastic effect. " 'Boot ... the computer.' I read the manual 10 times, and still had no idea how to put this thing together. So after two hours my pride broke down and I called my partner's son. And I said, 'Mendy, do me a favor. First, before you answer the question, I don't want any snide remarks. I just want you to tell me: How do I start this computer?!' 
    "In 90 seconds I had my answer: he said to take this disk, this floppy disk that says 'operating system,' and put it in the number one drive, close it, and turn the power on.
    "All the manual would tell me was 'boot the computer.' Where? What?
    "Now I really knew what I'm going to do: I said, my mission is to make computers idiot-proof.
    "Here's an industry that clearly is made up of misfits, people who make up languages to make things more complicated so that normal people will feel like idiots. Waddaya mean 'computer illiterate?!' Am I refrigerator illiterate? Would you buy a refrigerator if you couldn't figure out where the door is?! An entire industry of geeks has gone out and made the rest of the world feel like incompetents! What idiot wrote this manual?!"
    Harry, as you can see, feels pretty strongly about this.
    Once he got the computer cranked up, his wife might have given birth and he wouldn't have known. "During the next 10 days, I totally immersed myself in the computer, day and night. I blew it up at least four times -- because I followed the instructions. And back then the warranty on computers was either 90 seconds or 90 feet. Everything that could go wrong, did. But at the end of 10 days, I knew how to program an Apple computer inside out.
    "At that time, 1981, you had a choice: you either bought a business productivity product -- processing, spreadsheet, disk operating sytem, but no graphics, text only -- or you could have this really neat Apple or Commodore or Atari that you could put graphics around the screen, but very, very light on business applications. I thought there was a tremendous opportunity to merge them."
     Sure. You and I might think such a thing, but Harry did something about it. He married text, graphics and sound into one beautiful chip, and invented the multi-media computer. (In 1990, Gates himself publicly gave Harry credit.)
    "I came up with a new computer design that combined the best of all worlds. I used the chip from these high-powered business computers, the Z80, but I had a separate chip from Texas Instruments that did these incredible graphics, that gave tremendous game capability. Then I added a third element: a Texas Instruments chip from professional arcade machines, which gave great music. So I put these three chips together, designed and laid out a motherboard concept.
    "Then, I figured, here was my opportunity to go computer-friendly. I wrote a specification for a computer language that would do exactly as you want. In English, not computerese.
    "The only company that had the capability of developing this kind of a language for me was a new company called Microsoft."
    Microsoft gave him the brushoff -- until they saw what he was up to: a multi-media, 8-bit machine, for $199.
    "I got a call. Harry can you be here right away? This is kick-ass, they said, this is unbelievable, we've been dreaming about a machine like this, come let's talk.
    "Why was this so amazing? People weren't thinking of the consumer. If there was a basic crime committed by the computer industry, it's that the consumer is the last person thought of: the consumer has to adapt, instead of vice versa. And that's the antithesis of consumerism.
    "So I go to Seattle, and we're sitting around in this room, and over there in the corner was this guy who looked 12, 13 years old, rocking back and forth. Bill Gates. He was really interested in this, and after an hour he says, 'This is the future, you got it right, and we're going to do this, this is the hardware solution we've been looking for.’
    "That's what later on became GW Basic. Many of the features and functions were based on the spec I wrote.
    "And by the way, you know what GW stands for? Bill Gates was watching all the specs and said 'Gee Whiz!' I was there for that."
    For almost three years, Harry was in the Gates inner circle of innovative superbrains; eventually he spun out, and went on to work as a consultant.
    Nowadays, Harry is content to be a big fish in the Israeli pond. He heads Net Results, an amalgam of a handful of computer companies in Jerusalem. He employs 120 staffers in a dynamic, resourceful American-style environment.
    He forged the principles of user-friendliness. Launched the multi-media industry. His credits include rescuing the CD-ROM from extinction, inventing Quick Shot, the first ergonomic joystick (80 million sold), and even, before all that, creating the talking watch (the first one played 'Hava Nagila').
    "I've been around the block a few times," he says.
    His parents had, too, but a different sort of block: Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, Bergen-Belsen. He grew up, he says, not on fairy tales, but on Holocaust recollections, the horrors of experimentation -- "my bedtime stories."
    Now, a million years later, Harry Fox has a different sort of personal experience to tell his own children.