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ANDREW FLUEGLEMAN: IN MEMORIAM
by Kevin Strehlo
The following is an excerpt from NEWSBYTES (dated 7/30/85), an electronic
publication available on The Source (tm).
(Editor's note: This is the full, unedited transcript of Kevin's last "PC
Tales" column for InfoWorld. Kevin resigned because the editors saw the last
few paragraphs unfit for publication. NEWSBYTES does not. So with Kevin's
permission, we post his eloquent and moving tribute to Andrew.)
The voice on the tape is elusive. Dennis Erokan and Mary Eisenhart
of "Microtimes" conducted the interview in the cafeteria at the last San
Francisco Mac Expo, and Andrew Fluegelman is barely audible over the din. Yet
the animation behind the voice comes through.
"I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge," the voice says, "which I
think is a power point -- I have more inspirations driving across the Golden
Gate Bridge [laughs] -- and as I was pulling into the toll plaza the word
"freeware" popped into my head, and this whole idea of user-supported
software: pass it around, don't make people pay for it, let them try it...."
Freeware: it sounds like a share-the-wealth concept left over from the
Sixties, sort of what you'd expect from a guy who had given up law practice to
work as an editor for "The Whole Earth Catalog" and who put together a book
called "The New Games" about sports in which everybody won.
But the voice reveals that his Freeware plan was the only real option
if he was to profit from PC Talk, the communications program he had written
for his book publishing business. Fleugelman was tired of the hassles of
publishing; this seemed a better way.
PC Talk's documentation describes Freeware as "an experiment in
economics more than altruism." Free distribution of software and voluntary
payment for its use eliminated marketing and advertising costs; the question
was, would it also eliminate the program author's income?
The voice on the tape says the arrival of the first check in the mail
was unbelievable, but now, with an estimated 100,000 copies of PC Talk in use,
it takes two full-time people to handle the checks mailed daily to Headlands
Press in Tiburon. It is obvious: the experiment is a success.
David Bunnell and Jim Edlin had no idea what seed they were about to
plant as they hauled their heavy box of iron, glass and silicon chips across
Jackson Square. The once rowdy area of San Francisco, from whence many an
unwary sailor was recruited for voyages to Shanghai with a swift bang on the
head, was now a chic location for business. The brick buildings that had
survived the great 1906 quake housed designer showrooms, architects and Andrew
Fluegelman's Headland's Press, but nary a personal computer.
Fluegelman was intrigued by the Sol 20 computer they plopped on his
desk. As they demonstrated Electric Pencil, he realized how useful it could
be in his business, which was to conceptualize and package the work of writers
and illustrators and sell it to major publishers in New York.
Edlin and Bunnell were there to propose a book that would take a broad,
philosophic look at the coming sociological impacts of personal computers.
Theory was fine, but Fluegelman wanted something more substantive and
participatory that would explain what people could do with the technology.
They couldn't agree; no deal was struck.
But Fluegelman had the bug; he ended up selling a book on computers for
writers and bought one of the first thousand IBM PCs shipped. The only
software available for the PC was BASIC and the Easywriter word processor; the
need to exchange chapters with his coauthor on the book lead Flugelman to
write PC Talk.
The connection with Edlin and Bunnell was renewed when they founded PC
magazine. Fluegelman, as one of the few business people actually using a PC,
was a perfect subject for a first issue profile. He was also a user of
Easywriter, the only application program then available for the PC, and they
asked him to write a review of it.
Fluegelman made a name for himself with that review. He thought it was
terrible and said so. PC ran it without changing a word, under Fluegelman's
headline: "Not so Easywriter." John Draper, the program's author, says
Fluegelman was right: the program was released before it was ready. Thus did
Fluegelman begin his long involvement with spreading the word, good and bad,
about personal computing.
Fluegelman was fond of saying the amount of code doing the work in PC
Talk was tiny compared to the amount that was just there to make life
pleasant. When it came to the program that dictated Fluegelman's life, the
work and pleasure segments seemed intertwined.
Fluegelman worked hard. He wrote PC Talk late at night -- "abandoning
all bodily functions for a month," says the voice on the tape -- while still
publishing books during the day. Later, when Bunnell founded PC World to
compete with PC, Fluegelman agreed to become the new magazine's editor and
worked for months on end, stopping only to eat and sleep.
On the tape, the voice talks about the intense pleasure and
rejuvenation Fleugelman got from his involvement with computers. "I have
never been as socially involved, as interconnected with as many different
kinds of people, as when I started getting involved with computers," it says.
Those people lucky enough to interconnect with Fluegelman are having a
hard time figuring out what happened. His friends talk about the strong
medication he was taking for Colitis, a drug that has been known to cause
depression and mental confusion. They try to connect the voice that haunts
them to the Fluegelman who was acting a bit strangely the last few days before
he disappeared.
Fluegelman had been missing for about a week when his car was found
parked near the toll plaza on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge,
the site of so many of his moments of inspiration. Friends say a suicide note
was found inside. His family held a memorial service in New York the
following Sunday.
Yet, as this is being written, no body has been found. Police still
list Fluegelman as a missing person. Friends hope against hope that he has
been shanghaied, that someday he will return.
The small voice on the tape talks about the future. "It's great to go
along for 40 years and still find your life changing and new things
happening," the essence of Fluegelman says. "It makes you look forward to
what's going to happen when you're 60, what's going to happen when you're 80."
With that, the tape ends.
--- End of NEWSBYTES article ---
______________________________________________________________________________
Users of the IBM PC and PC oriented bulletin boards owe much to Andrew
Fluegelman... The Freeware (tm) concept, making XModem a defacto file transfer
protocol and the quality found in the early PC World issues.
In the spring of 1982, I first added communications capabilities to my "still
wet behind the ears" IBM PC. I did what any PC user was forced to do... went
to Computerland, plunked down $220 for a Tecmar board with two serial ports
and a parallel port, $279 for a Hayes Smartmodem (300 baud), and $50 for
IBM's Asynchronous Communications Support software, and with a heavy limp
began to communicate with my company's mainframe.
Sometimes I even managed to transfer a text file to or from the system. Each
time I called, I had to set the communications parameters, and type the
dialing command and phone number to the SmartModem. Imagine my delight when
in the fall, a friend gave me a copy of PC-Talk II. He had seen it mentioned
in a magazine article, and had sent Andrew a blank formatted disk, and a
return mailer. No money. A donation of $25 was requested if you liked the
program.
Was it a slick program. No cumbersome menus to go through. Just type Alt-D
and up came a list of remote system phone numbers and their settings for
communications parameters. Type in a 1 or 2 digit number and get connected to
the remote system. It stripped out those funny characters the mainframe sent.
You could even send and receive text files, just type Alt-T to transmit, Alt-R
to receive.
That magazine article also mentioned something called an electronic bulletin
board. A fellow by the name of Wes Merchant was running a PC information
exchange on his Radio Shack computer for the Capitol PC Users Group. By mid-
winter we were calling his board, and boards run by Gene Plantz in Chicago,
and Rich Schinnell in Rockville, MD. We could receive COM & EXE program files
that had been converted to an ASCII format for transmission. Sometimes we
could convert them back to the original files and get the programs to run.
Some of the ASCII files we received were BASIC merge files to add new
capabilities to PC-Talk. The boards were really getting busy, and the patch
that added automatic redial was a welcome addition. Then there was this thing
called XModem. Gene Plantz had it working on his board. I think the HOSTCOMM
boards had also added it by then. We installed the patch, and could move COM
& EXE files without having to translate them to some other format, just
download and run.
In the process of modifying the program, I began to get a little insight into
how to program in BASIC. Andrew had used techniques and features of PC-BASIC
in the program that other programmers and magazine articles were just
beginning to recognize. In particular, his technique for trapping the PC's
extended keyboard set (Alt-D, Alt-R, et al) was leading the field.
By the spring of 1983 we had compiled PC-Talk II and some of the
modifications. By late spring we had received a copy of PC-Talk III. Andrew
had collected all of the modifications, resolved the conflicts between them,
and compiled the program. It ran circles around most of the commercial
competition. He had increased his requested contribution to $35.
Larry Jordan reviewed twelve communications packages in PC World, Volume 1,
Number 5 (published in the summer of 1983). Larry said, "PC-Talk has become
the benchmark that other PC communications packages are measured against." Of
the twelve packages reviewed, eight had the capability to transmit binary (COM
& EXE) files. Three of those used the XModem protocol, the others used
proprietary protocols. Apparently the vendors hoped to force the public to
use their packages at both ends to transmit binary files. A few folks didn't
think too much of that.
That copy of PC World was an excellent issue on communications. Andrew
Flugelman was the editor.
Larry, by then, had added XModem to RBBS-PC. It was being distributed by the
Capitol PC Users Group's Software SIG, and was available on Compuserve. A
friend of mine downloaded it, (using PC-Talk of course) and in July of 1983 I
began operating an electronic bulletin board.
Shortly after that, word leaked out that Andrew was actually making money off
of PC-Talk, and the Freeware concept became recognized as a reasonable
alternative to commercial software distribution methods.
Over the next year, most vendors came around and added XModem to their
packages. There were an awful lot of people with whom their customers hadn't
been able to exchange files.
In the spring of 1984, MacWorld premiered. Andrew Flugelman was the Editor-
in-Chief. For me, that was the explanation of why PC World's quality had
declined in the preceeding months. I had let my charter subscription expire.
PC-Talk has been patched and revised many times over. A few months back,
Andrew discontinued distribution via a blank floppy and return mailer. In the
fall of last year, John Friel III released a program called QModem. It
mimicked the PC-Talk structure, but took advantage of the features of Turbo
Pascal to offer more speed, and a cleaner user interface. I've been using it
since last November.
There are so many good communications products for the IBM PC on the market
today, it is hard to remember a time when we didn't have products to fill the
need. Andrew's PC-Talk was the best tool we had for a long time. If I had
had to do without it, I doubt that I would have been attracted to PC
communications to the point that I have been. I have an even more difficult
time imagining the PC without the Freeware alternative. Thank you, Andrew.
Bob Ketcham
Library Menu #9
<A>Trojan Horses
<B>New Atari Products
<C>Problems in the Making
<D>BBS Oper Standards
<E>Flugelman-In Memoriam