Terminal Compromise

by by Winn Schwartau

  Max was a computer jock who worked for one of the Big Eight accounting firms in midtown Manhattan. A complex mixture of com- puter junkie, rock'n'roll aficionado and recreational drug user, Max maintained the integrity of large and small computer systems to pay the bills.

  "That means they pretend to pay me and I pretend to work. I don't really do anything productive."

  Max was an "ex-hippie who put on shoes to make a living" and a social anarchist at heart. At 27, Max had the rugged look that John Travolta popularized in the 70's but on a rock solid trim six foot five 240 pound frame. He dwarfed Pierre's mere five feet ten inches.

  Pierre's classic European good looks and tailored appearance, even in jeans and a T-shirt were a strong contrast to Max's ruddiness. Pierre's jet black hair was side parted and covered most of his ears as it gracefully tickled his shoulders.

  Piercing black eyes stared over a prominent Roman nose and thin cheeks which tapered in an almost feminine chin. There was never any confusion, though; no one in their right mind would ever view Pierre as anything but a confirmed and practiced heterosexual. His years of romantic achievements proved it. The remnants of his French rearing created an unidentifiable formal and educated accent; one which held incredible sex appeal to American women.

  Max and Pierre sipped at their beers while Max rambled on about how wonderful computers were. They were going to change the world.

  "In a few years every one on the planet will have his own comput- er and it will be connected to everyone else's computer. All information will be free and the planet will be a better place to live and so on . . ." Max's technical sermons bordered on reli- gious preaching. He had bought into the beliefs of Steven Jobs, the young charismatic founder and spiritual guiding force behind Apple Computer.

  Pierre had heard it before, especially after Max had had a few. His view of a future world with everyone sitting in front of a picture tube playing with numbers and more numbers . . .and then a thought hit him.

  "Max . . .Max . . ." Pierre was trying to break into another one of Max's Apple pitches.

  "Yeah . . .oh yeah, sorry Amigo. What's that you say?" Max sipped deeply on a long neck Long Star beer.

  "These computers you play with . . ."

  "Not play, work with. Work with!" He pointed emphatically at nothing in particular.

  "OK, work with. Can these computers play, er, work with music?"

  Max looked quizzically at Pierre. "Music, sure. You just program it in and out it comes. In fact, the Apple II is the ideal computer to play music. You can add a synthesizer chip and . . ."

  "What if I don't know anything about computers?"

  "Well, that makes it a little harder, but why doncha let me show you what I mean." Max smiled wide. This was what he loved, playing with computers and talking to people about them. The subject was still a mystery to the majority of people in 1980.

  Pierre winced. He realized that if he took up Max on his offer he would be subjected to endless hours of computer war stories and technical esoterica he couldn't care less about. That may be the price though, he thought. I can always stop.

  Over the following months they became fast friends as Pierre tutored under Max's guiding hand. Pierre found that the Apple had the ability to handle large amounts of data. With the new program called Visi-Calc, he made large charts of his music and their numbers and examined their relationships.

  As Pierre learned more about applying computers to his studies in musical theory, his questions of Max and demands of the Apple became increasingly complex. One night after several beers and a couple of joints Pierre asked Max what he thought was a simple question.

  "How can we program the Apple so that it knows what each piece of data means?" he inquired innocently.

  "You can't do that, man." Max snorted. "Computers, yes even Apples are stupid. They're just a tool. A shovel doesn't know what kind of dirt it's digging, just that it's digging." He laughed out loud at the thought of a smart shovel.

  Pierre found the analogy worth a prolonged fit of giggles through which he managed to ask, "but what if you told the computer what it meant and it learned from there. On its own. Can't a com- puter learn?"

  Max was seriously stoned. "Sure I guess so. Sure. In theory it could learn to do your job or mine. I remember a story I read by John Garth. It was called Giles Goat Boy. Yeah, Giles Goat Boy, what a title. Essentially it's about this Goat, musta been a real smart goat cause he talked and thunk and acted like a kid." They both roared at the double entendre of kid. That was worth another joint.

  "At any rate," Max tried to control his spasmodic chuckles. "At any rate, there were these two computers who competed for control of the world and this kid, I mean," laughing too hard to breath, "I mean this goat named Giles went on search of these computers to tell them they weren't doing a very good job."

  "So, what has that got to do with an Apple learning," Pierre said wiping the tears from his eyes.

  "Not a damn thing!" They entered another spasm of laughter. "No really. Most people either think, or like to think that a com- puter can think. But they can't, at least not like you and me. " Max had calmed down.

  "So?" Pierre thought there might still be a point to this conver- sation.

  "So, in theory, yeah, but probably not for a while. 10 years or so."

  "In theory, what?" Pierre asked. He was lost.

  "In theory a machine could think."

  "Oh." Pierre was disappointed.

  "But, you might be able to emulate thinking. H'mmmm." Max re- treated into mental oblivion as Abbey Road played in the back- ground. Anything from Apple records was required listening by Max.

  "Emulate. Emulate? What's that? Hey, Max. What's emulate? Hey Max, c'mon back to Earth. Emulate what?"

  Max jolted back to reality. "Oh, copy. You know, act like. Emulate. Don't they teach you emulation during sex education in France?" They both thought that that was the funniest thing ever said, in any language for all of written and pre-history.

  The substance of the evening's conversation went downhill from there.

  A few days later Max came by Pierre's loft. "I been thinking."

  "Scary thought. About what?" Pierre didn't look up from his Apple.

  "About emulating thought. You know what we were talking about the other night."

  "I can't remember this morning much less getting shit faced with you the other night."

  "You were going on and on about machines thinking. Remember?"

  "Yes," Pierre lied.

  "Well, I've been thinking about it." Max had a remarkable ability to recover from an evening of illicit recreation. He could actually grasp the germ of a stoned idea and let a straight mind deal with it the following day. "And, I maybe got a way to do what you want."

  "What do I want?" Pierre tried to remember.

  "You want to be able to label all of your music so that to all appearances each piece of music knows about every other piece of music. Right?"

  "Kinda, yeah, but you said that was impossible . . ." Pierre trailed off.

  "In the true sense, yes. Remember emulation though? Naw, you were too stoned. Here's the basic idea." Max ran over to the fridge, grabbed a beer and leapt into a bean bag chair. "We assign a value to every piece of music. For example, in music we might assign a value to each note. Like, what note it is, the length of the note, the attack and decay are the raw data. That's just a number. But the groupings of the notes are what's important. The groupings. Get it?"

  Pierre was intrigued. He nodded. Maybe Max did understand after all. Pierre leaned forward with anticipation and listened intent- ly, unlike in one ear out the other treatment he normally gave Max's sermons.

  "So what we do is program the Apple to recognize patterns of notes; groupings, in any size. We do it in pictures instead of words. Maybe a bar, maybe a scale, maybe even an entire symphony orchestra. All 80 pieces at once!" Max's enthusiasm was conta- gious. "As the data is put in the computer, you decide what you want to call each grou
ping. You name it anything you want. Then we could have the computer look for similar groupings and label them. They could all be put on a curve, some graphic of some kind, and then show how they differ and by how much. Over time, the computer could learn to recognize rock'n'roll from Opera from radio jingles to Elevator Music. It's all in the patterns. Isn't that what you want?" Max beamed while speaking excitedly. He knew he had something here.

  Max and Pierre worked together and decided to switch from the Apple II computer to the new IBM PC for technical reasons beyond Pierre's understanding. As they labored, Max realized that if he got his "engine" to run, then it would be useful for hundreds of other people who needed to relate data to each other but who didn't know much about computers.

  In late 1982 Max's engine came to life on its own. Pierre was programming in pictures and in pure English. He was getting back some incredible results. He was finding that many of the popu- lar rock guitarists were playing lead riffs that had a genealogy which sprang from Indian polyphonic sitar strains.

  He found curious relationships between American Indian rhythms and Baltic sea farer's music. All the while, as Pierre searched the reaches of the musical unknown, Max convinced himself that everyone else in the world would want his graphical engine, too.

  Through a series of contacts within his Big Eight company, Max was put in touch with Hambrecht Quist, the famed Venture Capital firm that assisted such high tech startups as Apple, Lotus and other shining stars in the early days of the computer industry. Max was looking for an investor to finance the marketing of his engine that would change the world. His didactic and circumlocu- tous preaching didn't get him far. While everyone was polite at his presentations, afterwards they had little idea of what he was talking about.

  "The Smart Engine permits anyone to cross-relate individual or matrices of data with an underlying attribute structure that is defined by the user. It's like creating a third dimension. Data is conventionally viewed in a two dimensional viewing field, yet is really a one dimension stream. In either source dimensional view, the addition of a three dimensional attribute structure yields interrelationships that are not inherently obvious. Thus we use graphical representations to simplify the entire process."

  After several weeks of pounding the high risk financial community of the San Francisco Bay area, Max was despondent. Damn it, he thought. Why don't they understand. I outline the entire theory and they don't get it. Jeez, it's so easy to use. So easy to use. Then the light bulb lit in his mind. Call Pierre. I need Pierre. Call Pierre in New York.

  "Pierre, it's Max." Max sounded quite excited.

  "How's the Coast."

  "Fine, Fine. You'll find out tomorrow. You're booked on American #435 tomorrow."

  "Max, I can't go to California. I have so much work to do."

  "Bullshit. You owe me. Or have I forgotten to bill you for the engine?" He was calling in a favor.

  "Hey, it was my idea. You didn't even understand what I was talking about until . . ."

  "That's the whole point, Pierre. I can't explain the engine to these Harvard MBA asswipes. It was your idea and you got me to understand. I just need you to get some of these investors to understand and then we can have a company and make some money selling engines." Max's persistence was annoying, but Pierre knew that he had to give in. He owed it to Max.

  The new presentations Max and Pierre put on went so well that they had three offers for start up financing within a week. And, it was all due to Pierre. His genial personality and ability to convey the subtleties of a complex piece of software using actual demonstrations from his music were the touchy-feely the investors wanted. It wasn't that he was technical; he really wasn't. But Pierre had an innate ability to recognize a problem, theoretical- ly, and reduce it to its most basic components. And the Engine was so easy to use. All you had to do was . . .

  It worked. The brainy unintelligible technical wizard and char- ismatic front man. And the device, whatever it was, it seemed to work.

  The investors installed their own marketing person to get sales going and Pierre was asked to be President. At first he said he didn't want to. He didn't know how to run a company. That doesn't matter, the investors said. You are a salable item. A person whom the press and future investors can relate to. We want you to be the image of the company. Elegance, suave, upper class. All that European crap packaged for the media. Steve Jobs all over again.

  Pierre relented, as long as he could continue his music.

  Max's engine was renamed dGraph by the marketing folks and the company was popularly known as DGI. Using Byte, Personal Comput- ing, Popular Computing and the myriad computer magazines of the early 1980's, dGraph was made famous and used by all serious computer users.

  DGraph could interface with the data from other programs, dBase II, 123, Wordstar and then relate it in ways never fathomed. Automatically. Users could assign their own language of, at that time, several hundred words, to describe the third dimension of data. Or, they could do it in pictures. While the data on the screen was being manipulated, the computer, unbeknownst to the operator, was constantly forming and updating relationships between the data. Ready to be called upon at any time.

  As the ads said, "dGraph for dData."

  As success reigned, the demand upon Pierre's time increased so that he had little time for his music. By 1986 he lived a virtu- al fantasy. He was on the road, speaking, meeting with writers, having press conferences every time a new use for dGraph was announced. He was adored by the media. He swam in the glory of the attention by the women who found his fame and image an irresistible adjunct to his now almost legendary French accent and captivating eyes.

  Pierre and Max were the hottest young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley; the darlings of the VC community. And the company spar- kled too. It was being run by professionals and Max headed up the engineering group. As new computers appeared on the market, like the IBM AT, additional power could be effectively put into the Engine and Voila! a new version of dGraph would hit the market to the resounding ring of an Instant Hit on Softsel's Top 40.

  Max, too, liked his position. He was making a great deal of money, ran his own show with the casualness of his former hippie days, yet could get on the road with Pierre any time he needed a break. Pierre got into the act hook, line and sinker and Max acted the role of genius behind 'The Man'. That gave Max the freedom to avoid the microscope of the press yet take a twirl in the fast lane whenever he felt the urge.

  The third round of funding for DGI came from an unexpected place. Normally when a company is as successful as DGI, the original investors go along for the ride. That's how the VC's who worked with Lotus, Compaq, Apple and other were getting filthy stinking rich. The first two rounds went as they had planned, the third didn't.

  "Mr. Troubleaux," Martin Fisk, Chairman of Underwood Investments said to Pierre in DGI's opulent offices. "Pierre, there is only one way to say this. Our organization will no longer be involved with DGI. We have sold our interest to a Japanese firm who has been trying to get into the American computer field."

  "What will that change? Anything?" Pierre was nonplused by the announcement.

  "Not as far as you're concerned. Oh, they will bring in a few of their own people, satisfy their egos and protect their invest- ment, that's entirely normal. But, they especially want you to continue on as President of DGI. No, no real changes."

  "What about Max?" Pierre had true concern for his friend.

  "He'll remain, in his present capacity. Essentially the finan- cial people will be reporting to new owners that's all."

  "Are we still going to go public? That's the only way I'm gonna make any real money."

  Martin was flabbergasted. Pierre wasn't in the least interested as to why the company changed hands. He only wanted to know about the money, how much money he would make and when. Pierre never bothered to ask, nor was it offered, that Underwood would profit over 400 percent on their original investment. The Japa- nese buyer was paying more than
the company was worth now. They had come in offering an amount of money way beyond what an open- ing offer should have been. Underwood did a search on the Japa- nese company and its American subsidiary, Data Tech. They were real, like $30 Billion real and did were expanding into the information processing field through acquisitions, primarily in the United States.

  Underwood sold it's 17% stake in DGI for $350 Million, more than twice its true value. They sold quickly and quietly. Even though Pierre and Max should have had some say in the transfer, Under- wood controlled the board of directors and technically didn't need the founder's consensus. Not that it overtly appeared to mattered to Pierre. Max gave the paper transfer a cursory exami- nation, at least asked the questions that were meaningless to the transformed Pierre, and gave the deal his irrelevant blessings.

  After the meeting with the emissaries from DGI's new owner, OSO Industries, Pierre and Max were confident that nothing would change for them. They would each continue in their respective roles. The day to day interference was expected to be minimal, but the planned public offering would be accelerated. That suited Pierre just fine; he would make out like a bandit.

  Several days before the date of issue, Pierre received a call from Tokyo.

  "Mr. Troubleaux?" The thick Japanese accent mangled his name so badly Pierre cringed.

  "Yes, this is Pierre Troubleaux," he said exaggerating his French accent. The Japanese spoke French as well as a hair-lipped stutterer could recite "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers."

  "I wish to inform you, sir, that the Chairman of OSO is to visit your city tomorrow and participate in your new successes. Would this be convenient?"

  Pierre had only one possible response to the command performance he was being 'invited' to. Since OSO had bought into DGI, Pierre was constantly mystified by the ritualism associated with Japanese business. They could say "Yes!" a hundred times in a meeting, yet everyone present understood that the speakers really meant "No Way, Jose!" There of course was the need for a quality gift for any visitor from Japan. Johnny Walker Black was the expected gift over which each recipient would feign total sur- prise. Pierre had received more pearl jewelry from the Japanese than he could use for ten wives. But the ritual was preserved.