In 1983, Personal Computers were quite the up and coming thing. You could buy your own for a few thousand dollars. Though they were mostly considered toys by many East Coast programmers (more expensive "workstations" were the rage), there had already been some interesting and promising applications developed for it.

I thought (along with a lot of other people) that these were definitely the thing of the future. I was considering a new job, so I decided to take a bit of a risk, and look for work writing Personal Computer Software.

I was able to get an interview at one of the top Personal Computer software development companies of the area. The company was called "Software Arts". It was the company of the creators of "VisiCalc", the original spreadsheet.

During the interview process, I actually met the creators of VisiCalc. People had scared me about one of them, Bob Frankston, as someone difficult to talk to, and quick to temper. But when I met him, I actually found a genuine pleasant programmer-type. His problem was that he didn't really internalize that he was one of the company bosses, and felt that he was just a super-cool programmer. As such, if he felt like yelling at you - it would be perfectly normal because, of course, if he was wrong - you would yell right back and tell him to stfu! The only problem was, as the company founder and chief programmer or something - nobody was actually going to yell back at him. But they would grumble a lot later on, thereby giving him a bad and undeserved reputation.