Fwd: [microsoft.private.mvp.coffeehouse] Bob Wallace, Software Pioneer, Die

[Rich <legalize@xmission.com>]

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   Date:  Tue, 01 Oct 2002 07:51:43 +0200
 Groups:  microsoft.private.mvp.coffeehouse
   From:  Hans-Georg Michna <hans-georgNoEmailPlease@michna.com>
    Org:  ACI Micro
Subject:  Bob Wallace, Software Pioneer, Dies at 53
     Id:  <3tdipu4rhh2adcu6qpq0lku2qml7bmt379@4ax.com>
========

September 26, 2002
Bob Wallace, Software Pioneer, Dies at 53
By JOHN MARKOFF

Bob Wallace, a pioneering programmer of the personal computer
era who helped invent "shareware" software marketing , died on
Friday at his home in San Rafael, Calif. He was 53.

The cause was not immediately known and the results of an
autopsy are not yet available, said his wife, Megan
Dana-Wallace.

When Mr. Wallace joined the Microsoft Corporation in 1978, he
became its ninth employee. At the time, the company was known as
Micro Soft and was based in Albuquerque. He developed an early
version of the Pascal programming language. He left the company
in 1983 to found Quicksoft, a software company that sold a word
processor called PC-Write using a marketing plan that Mr.
Wallace initially called commission shareware.

The term shareware had already been coined by Jay Lucas, writing
in the personal computer newspaper InfoWorld to describe the
software that was being distributed free or for a nominal
copying charge.

At the time, the personal computer business was in the throes of
a transition from a passionate hobby to an industry that would
eventually create several of the world's largest fortunes. Mr.
Wallace's personal style best represented the original hacker
spirit, which was emblematic of a group of programmers and
hardware designers who thought information should be shared
freely.

He copyrighted his PC-Write program and sold the diskette for
$10, at the same time giving users permission to share the
program. Customers who found value in the software were able to
register the program for $75 and obtain a printed copy of the
manual.

Initially, he was uncertain about whether his strategy would
work.

"If I make enough money to live on, I will continue the
experiment," he said in an interview in September 1983, when he
introduced the program. "If not, I will approach software
publishers to see if they are interested in marketing a PC-Write
II version of the program for me commercially."

Within several years, Quicksoft had 32 employees and annual
revenue of more than $2 million.

Mr. Wallace was also the first Microsoft employee to leave the
company with stock. At one point, his original 400 shares were
worth as much as $15 million, his wife said.

But Mr. Wallace, who was influenced by the counterculture of the
1960's and early 70's, was never comfortable with the industry
he helped create. He would later say in an interview, "My
philosophy is that I want to make a living, not a killing."

As a student at Brown University in the 1960's, he worked with a
group of researchers led by Andries van Dam and Ted Nelson on a
pioneering information age tool known as the file retrieval and
editing system, or Fress. Although it was designed on a
mainframe I.B.M. 360 computer, it would shape personal computing
in the next three decades.

"He was one of the key designers of Fress," said Dr. Van Dam,
who is now vice president for research at Brown. "We would have
these long arguments about what was good for the user. He had
this very gentle flower child demeanor and philosophy."

Many ideas that would become commonplace in personal computing
and that would later lead to the development of the World Wide
Web were invented by the Fress group at Brown and, separately,
by researchers led by Douglas Engelbart at Stanford Research
Institute, now SRI International, in Menlo Park, Calif.

The Fress group designed early text editing and word processing
systems. But its members also had a deeper vision of linked
documents that would permit a computer user to move through a
new kind of information space, dubbed hypertext by Mr. Nelson.

Both Bill Gates and Paul G. Allen, who founded Microsoft,
remembered Mr. Wallace fondly.

"I remember Bob as a gentle soul who was soft-spoken, but
creative, persistent and meticulous in his programming and
thinking," Mr. Allen said.

Before joining Microsoft, Mr. Wallace worked at the Retail
Computer Store in Seattle, where he learned about the tiny
software company after Mr. Gates put up a sign advertising for
programmers.

His first project at Microsoft was to connect a computer to an
I.B.M. Selectric typewriter so the company could print its
software manuals.

Mr. Wallace was involved in some legendary high jinks with Mr.
Gates in the late 1970's, including their breaking into a
construction site and driving bulldozers, at one point almost
running over Mr. Gates's Porsche.

Mr. Wallace had a long interest in psychedelic drugs, which he
thought were misunderstood in the United States. In 1996, he
started Mind Books, a source for books about psychedelics. In
1998, he founded the Promind Foundation to support scientific
research and public education about psychedelics.

In addition to his wife, who lives in Sebastopol, Calif., he is
survived by his mother, Luna, of Tucson; a brother, Douglas, of
Seattle; and a sister, Wendy, of Tucson.

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