Triggered by the unfortunate recent passing of computer publishing pioneer David Bunnell, who was my friend and onetime business partner, I thought I’d share a few stories about our adventures together in the late ’70s and early ’80s. This is the fourth installment. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5)
Part 4— PC Magazine
When David Bunnell worked in Albuquerque at MITS, the producer of the pioneering Altair personal computer, he had a co-worker named Eddie Currie. Currie later moved to New York City to work for Lifeboat Associates, a mail-order distributor of software for the then-dominant CP/M personal computer operating system. Lifeboat was owned by Tony Gold.
Gold had an idea for a sort of hybrid magazine/catalog (these days known as a “magalog”) that would both merchandise Lifeboat’s software offerings and surround the product listings with helpful editorial content. Currie, who knew of David’s background with Personal Computing magazine and his publication activities while at MITS, suggested David to Gold as a person who could lead this project.
So, while David was doing his acquisitions editor thing at Osborne/McGraw-Hill, and still doing some writing on Micro with me, he was also having discussions with Tony Gold about the magalog project, which was to be patterned after TV Guide and had the working title Software Guide. I had conversations with David about the project, but didn’t think it was particularly exciting and expressed no interest in being involved. (Shows what I knew! Approximately the same idea was executed that year by entrepreneur Ted Leonsis as LIST Magazine, which didn’t last very long but did sell for $40 million two years after its launch.)
Then, on August 12 of 1981, IBM announced its Personal Computer. The next day, David and I got together at my apartment, theoretically to figure out what next things to tackle for our book, but actually shooting the breeze about how this new IBM development was going to affect the industry.
Somewhere in that conversation I recall blurting out to David, “You know, instead of that software guide magazine, what about doing a ‘machine-specific’ magazine for the new IBM personal computer. If you want to do that, I’ll do it with you.” There were already machine-specific publications focused on Radio Shack TRS-80 computers and on Apple ][ computers, so there were indications this was a viable idea.
David immediately latched onto the idea, and told me he would try to convince Tony Gold to change course to this new direction. We ended our talk that day agreeing that, if Gold signed on to the change, I would take the role of editor and David be publisher, and we would extend our 50–50 partnership to this new venture. Also, in a moment of incredible naïveté, we decided, “we’ll work on the magazine in the morning and on the book in the afternoons.” (From that day forward, we never touched the book manuscript again.)
I don’t know how hard a time David had convincing Tony Gold to change his plan, but he did agree, and our project was on.
In David’s publisher’s column for the first issue of PC Magazine, he pegs the official start of our efforts as Oct. 1, 1981, which was his first day off the payroll at Osborne/McGraw-Hill. But we actually began ramping up as soon as we had the green light.
After considering titles such as “The IBM Personal Computer Magazine” and the more concise “IBM PC,” we finally decided to be even more concise and go with PC as the title, with “The Independent Guide to IBM Personal Computers” as a subtitle.
A designer named Rick van Genderen, who worked out of a home studio in the Tenderloin, was recommended to us for creating a logo. After a few late night visits to his studio, we walked away with what became the magazine’s iconic logotype. Part of Rick’s inspiration was the paper, commonly used in computer printers of the time, that had alternating horizontal bars of color.
Another referral we got was to James McCaffry, who became the magazine’s first designer/art director. His home studio became another frequent location of our evening visits, as he began to set the high-end visual tone that would set PC apart from other personal computer publications.
The other key member of the founding team was a colleague of David’s from Osborne/McGraw Hill, Cheryl Woodard, their director of marketing and sales. Smooth-talking David convinced her to give up her steady paycheck to take a flier on our magazine venture, heading marketing and sales. (See Cheryl’s account of the early PC days here.)
With a team coalescing, one of our first official acts was David and me going to a lumber yard to acquire boards, concrete blocks, hollow-core doors and some legs. We put these together to make shelves and desks. These went into a spare upstairs bedroom of the house where David had moved in with his girlfriend Jackie, making it into our first office. (Before long we would spread out operations into nearly every room in the house.)
Our first project was a 6-page “Preview Issue” to use as a marketing tool for soliciting advertisers and subscriptions. Our goal was to have it ready for the COMDEX show in Las Vegas in late November, where we planned to have an exhibit booth and do our public launch. Our concept for the cover was “taking the measure” of the new IBM PC. McCaffry came up with a visual of a team of artist’s posing mannequins, representing “inspectors,” crawling all over the computer using tiny measuring tools. Then he introduced us to photographer Jay Carlson, who he recommended to execute the shot. After a long day in Carlson’s South-of-Market studio, we had that shot. It would front both the preview issue and the actual first issue.
The six-week sprint to get the Preview Issue done and delivered to COMDEX was a bit of madness, but with hours to spare we got the air-freighted print run to Vegas and into our hastily set-up exhibit booth.
COMDEX was an exhilarating launch. Our booth was crowded the whole time. We got plenty of interest in subscriptions and advertising, and from the first day there were people asking us if we were seeking investors. We also found ourselves in the midst of a sea of potential advertisers.
Another thing we discovered was that we had a competitor, Personal Computer Age, which also launched at COMDEX. While we thought them a bit underwhelming compared to our planned magazine, we heard they were better funded than we were and thus a cause for concern.
One person who came by our COMDEX booth was a real estate developer from Columbus, Ohio, R. Bruce McLoughlin. He’d come to COMDEX to sniff around for business possibilities in what he saw as an alluring new field, and he decided the PC crew would be good guides for him. He asked if he could come out and visit us in San Francisco after the show. Demonstrating his entrepreneurial initiative, he also asked if we would accept a bound-in postcard advertisement for the first issue. While this wasn’t something we had either contemplated or priced, we told him we’d accommodate him if we could.
McLoughlin and his wife did come to see us after COMDEX. When his wife commented to us over dinner that she’d “never seen Bruce pick up a penny that didn’t turn into a dollar,” David and I decided that the business opportunity we would guide him to was us.
We believed that the word processing software that had come onto the market for the IBM PC was generally difficult to use. (The feature review in our launch issue, of IBM’s licensed EasyWriter software, was headlined “Not-so-easy Writer.”) We thought an IBM-adapted version of the Comp-U-Writer software we loved, and were still using to write the first issue of PC, would be an interesting opportunity. Our idea was to start a software division alongside the magazine, get McLoughlin to fund it, and make an IBM-adapted version Comp-U-Writer as its first product.
Meanwhile, the entrepreneurial McLoughlin had gone back to Ohio, where almost overnight he created a company named Software Laboratories, found a programmer to bundle up a bunch of 50 mostly public-domain BASIC-language programs onto a floppy disk, and rushed us this postcard ad to bind into the first issue of PC.
Meanwhile, back at Jackie’s house, things were getting pretty crazy for our little PC crew. In the wake of our blowout reception at COMDEX, we felt under great pressure to actually get out the magazine. And now, aware we had a competitor, we were determined to publish something so excellent it would leave them in the dust.
Our early business projections imagined that we might get 10 pages of advertising for our first issue, 20 pages for the second issue, and a hopeful 40 pages for the third. But in short order we had insertion orders for 40 pages of ads for Issue #1 — plus Bruce’s postcard. (Issue #2 more-than doubled that to 100 pages. Issue #3 doubled again to 200 pages.) So we were scrambling — bringing onboard whoever we could recruit to handle the ballooning workload, and taking over room after room in Jackie’s house for things like paste-up and to process the mailbags full of $10 checks that were arriving for subscriptions.
Finances were becoming an issue though. With ad and subscription numbers running way ahead of our modest projections, costs to print and mail the magazine were skyrocketing in parallel. Plus there were all those new helpers to pay. We would madly bundle together each new batch of $10 subscription checks that arrived, and rush them to the bank just in time to cover payroll. Meanwhile, David had to cajole Tony Gold, whom he had taken to calling le Grand Fromage, into FedEx-ing us checks to cover the piling-up expenses. Gold’s eventual investment in PC totaled about $140,000, but he doled it out to us in dribs and drabs of $10,000 and $15,000 at a time.
Once Issue #1 was out the door it was clear that our PC team needed to be out the door of David and Jackie’s house too, and into a “real” office. We decamped to a vacant apartment above a Japanese restaurant a few blocks away. (Before the end of a year, the staff had expanded to take over four more spaces along a multi-block stretch of Irving Street.)
After Issue #2 was put to bed, Tony Gold summoned David and me to a meeting in New York. There, over lunch in a deli, he voiced his surprising-to-us opinion that the magazine was “an artistic success but a financial failure.” By this he meant that the magazine’s hypergrowth, instead of starting to return a stream of profit to him, was demanding additional investment from him that he wasn’t comfortable (or perhaps even capable of) making. He hadn’t anticipated the rapid success scenario, which boded well for the future but in the short term created an intense hunger for working capital.
We discussed the nibbles PC had received since its launch about outside investment, but for some reason this possibility didn’t appeal to him. He departed the deli with a warning that the magazine might have to shut down, or be sold.
Blowups happen
One consequence of doubling and re-doubling our ad pages was that we very quickly had to ramp up the creation of editorial content to balance out the additional ads. David’s girlfriend Jackie quit her job at the State Bar to help with getting out the magazine, and she recruited a close friend, Linda Harrison, to be an additional designer and illustrator.
As co-founder and editor, I had strong opinions about the quality of design and writing I envisioned for the magazine. But this turned out not to mesh well with the frenetic push the hastily-enlarged team had to make to put together the next fat issue against a tight deadline.
In editorial meetings I voiced concerns, including about some work of our new designer, Linda. I have to admit my ability to do this diplomatically, and accept compromise, was poor at the time. (I was a bit of a mini-Steve Jobs, I think.) Nobody, of course, wanted to revisit any work in that high-pressure time. Linda, Jackie and others complained my input was unhelpful.
David was finding himself in the middle, with me on one side and his soon-to-be wife and her very close friend on the other, and not liking it. After one conflicted meeting, David walked up to me while I was getting a drink of water and moaned frustratedly, “I wish you weren’t here.”
I too was on edge from the pressure. “Is that what you want?” I snapped back. “Because if it is, I don’t have to be here.” Then I walked out of the office.
This was a true spur-of-the-moment reaction, but I also meant it as a dramatic move to catalyze a process of conflict resolution.
I went home and immediately called Tony Gold to let him know of this development. In this call I also revealed to him David’s and my agreement to be equal partners in the magazine. I had been badgering David for months to share this information with Gold, and to get some written affirmation from him of our equity interest in the magazine, but David kept telling me the time wasn’t right yet. Now Gold informed me that in his view we were both merely employees and did not have any equity interest.
Shortly afterward, David denied our verbal agreement to be equal partners. PC had become so valuable so fast (Gold’s concerns notwithstanding) that verbal agreements were just too tempting to walk away from. David found himself on both sides of that harsh reality.
With David’s repudiation of our partnership, I was no longer motivated to resolve our conflict and resume involvement in PC. David and I agreed I would continue writing my column for the magazine, but otherwise have no further involvement.
Where things went from there is the subject of the final installment of this reminiscence, Part 5. (Also: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
