Capturing the World of Software

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

A czar of the counterculture turns on and plugs in

Warm bodies have been hired, hardware has been ordered, and both are moving in this month. The 15 or so computers, among them the Apple II, Epson QX-10 and IBM Personal Computer, will occupy two rooms above the ragtag waterfront of Sausalito, Calif. Already a big hand-scrawled chart pinned to one wall proclaims deadlines to meet and procedures to follow. Says Stewart Brand, leading a tour of his future headquarters: "This is the shell. The peas are still falling into place."

Brand, 44, is the innovative publisher and writer who devised The Whole Earth Catalog in 1968. That eccentric compendium of mail-order tools, books and philosophical musings sold 2.5 million copies in its several versions and encapsulated the antitechnological attitudes of the '60s counterculture. Now Brand believes he can capture the new computer culture between book covers, and Doubleday & Co. is betting a record sum that he is right. On the basis of a twelve-page outline, the New York City publishing house advanced Brand a whopping $1.3 million to produce an oversize paperback that will guide readers through the maze of personal-computer tools, including commercial software, free software and electronic library services. The book will be called The Whole Earth Software Catalog and reflects Brand's unique point of view.

"It's an impossible task, therefore interesting," says Brand, whose first exposure to computers occurred in the late 1960s, when he worked at the Stanford Research Institute. "Most of the Whole Earth audience has accepted computers, more than any other age group. They've been using technology to mess with their consciousness since they were teenagers. I don't see a tremendous difference between the technology of drugs and the technology of computers, except that drugs are self-limiting and computers appear not to be."

Brand's analysis may be skewed, but his timing is sound. Publishers are increasingly receptive to computer-related books, and they are paying especially high premiums for critiques of the programs that turn computers into word processors, financial analyzers, list managers, electronic communicators, music synthesizers and video-game machines. Harper & Row has advanced $600,000 to the editors of InfoWorld, a weekly computer magazine, for a six-volume series of software and hardware reviews, and Simon & Schuster paid the same amount for a ten-volume series by the staff of PC World, a monthly magazine devoted to the IBM Personal Computer. Now major investors from outside the computer industry are making their moves. Next week a semiannual software inventory called LIST will debut as a monthly, backed by more than $1 million from E.F. Hutton. In September Money magazine, a Time Inc. publication, will issue a special computer buying guide that will include selected software reports.

The swelling market for these volumes has been caused by the bewildering proliferation of programs and by the point-of-sales difference between the traditional book business and the software industry. Books, which seldom cost more than $25, can be thumbed through before purchase. Software, with prices ranging from $50 to $500, cannot be readily examined. There may be as many as 40,000 software items on the market, a figure that is expected to double in a year, and stores do not have sufficient space or staff to demonstrate all of the competing brands. Says Peter McWilliams, author of the bestselling The Personal Computer Book, who has been recruited as a contributor to Brand's new catalogue: "The trick is finding the right people to tell you what's good."

One of Brand's novel solutions is to go to the networks. These are the hundreds of systems, many of them formed by amateur enthusiasts, that hook computer users together via telephone lines, permitting their members to exchange information, engage in long-distance debates or just gossip. The networks are in effect electronic bulletin boards. "They are the 20th century equivalent of the coffeeshops of Samuel Johnson's day," Brand has said. "Back then, the intelligentsia got loaded on coffee and tried to impress themselves. We'll get loaded on technology and do the same thing."

There are big, formal, commercial networks that sell everything from financial news to legal data to their subscribers, but Brand plans to concentrate on the smaller systems, many of them patched together by computer fanatics. The most notable of these mininetworks, and a prime source of informed opinions about software, is an international collection of more than 1,200 users called EIES, for Electronic Information Exchange System. Operated by the New Jersey Institute of Technology, EIES has counted among its membership Author Alvin Toffler and former Federal Communications Commissioner Nicholas Johnson. Brand will tap the expertise of EIES and invite its entire community to recommend favorite pieces of software. Whole Earth staffers will then test the programs, weeding out items that are not first-rate. There will be few negative entries in the catalogue. Says Brand's editor at large, Art Kleiner: "Pans would have to be prime examples of some serious ill."

The finished book, some 200 pages with 600 recommendations, is scheduled to reach bookstores in late 1984. "There's been a lot of careless enthusiasm about software--it's such a fast-growing, hyped-up industry," says Kleiner. "We're hoping we can take the opposite approach." Stylistically the reviews will probably follow the patterns established by the original Whole Earth Catalog: short and pithy. Looking up from the Kaypro computer he uses for all of his writing, Brand gave an impromptu sample of the unadorned, telegraphic style that he favors: "Perfect Writer," he said, identifying the disc in his computer. "Soso. It came with the machine."

--By Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Reported by Robert Buderi/San Francisco

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