In the late summer of 1980 I had been an avid reader of Byte Magazine for almost as many years as it had been in publication. My first computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80 had little in common with the $5,000 Altairs and Imsai’s or even Apples of the day, as portrayed in that publication. If you imagine five grand as big bux today, picture how out of range it was 22 years ago.

An WWII veteran of the Navy Submarine Service, and lifelong Amateur Radio Operator by the name of Wayne Greene was the original founder of Byte. It was a sister publication to his 73 Magazine, for hams. The story goes that he tried to hide Byte from the IRS by giving it to his wife at the time and she dumped him shortly thereafter, keeping the publication, later selling it to McGraw Hill for $6 million.

Magazine politics were invisible to me in California, in 1980. All I saw was 80 Micro, a magazine for the computer on my own desk. It took the place of Byte. I read it from cover to cover - literally. On a sunny summer’s day, reading 80 Micro Magazine, in Corona, California, I discovered something that changed my life forever. Wayne Green needed a few good men to help with his brand new computer software empire (that’s actually how he phrased it).

All my experience in computers to that date could be summed up in one word, "greenhorn." I spoke conversational BASIC, had my own TRS-80 and was a published author, by the grace of Xerox machines and Dungeons and Dragons. At the time, I couldn’t even spell chutzpah, but nevertheless, I rang up Wayne from a phone booth with two rolls of quarters in my hand and sold myself to personal computing’s first publishing guru. The next morning, I pointed my 1978 Chevy van east toward the high desert and New England beyond.

The truth of this tale is that everything looks bright in retrospect. I look upon that adventure, in the springtime of my life, as one breathtaking roller coaster ride. The reality is very different. My knack for writing earned me a place in 80 Micro as a columnist, a "software super hero" called Captain Eighty, who evaluated new programs for the TRS-80 in much the same way that Adam West and Burt Ward played Batman and Robin. It was funny, and popular at the time, but cheesy as well, and doomed to cancellation once the novelty wore off.

Instant Software was the meat of my job. As a software evaluator for the first major TRS-80 publisher outside of Tandy, I processed submissions from authors and smaller vendors looking for a distribution outlet. Included among those was an unknown company called Microsoft, who had submitted a clunky program called "Air Flight Simulation."

I rejected it in favor of a little animated flight program called Air Mail Pilot, which showed imagination in story, a thing that has always pushed my buttons. Shortly after having done that, Instant Software fired me over an unrelated matter of office politics and I was cast adrift in the northeast US, without a job or a clue.

I was a good judge of commercial programs by then, having been trained by P.T. Wolfe, a near genius marketer of software. He told me, as I separated from Wayne Green’s company, that Bill Gates was looking for help at Microsoft. My response was, "Bill who?"

I stayed in New England, set up The Programmer’s Guild, my own software publishing house, and began selling TRS-80 programs around the country. Made a tidy living at it too, but riches eluded me. Published two books of programs, one for the "80 and one for the "C-64" but never earned more than I needed to survive with some small comfort.

Hindsight is 20/20. The friends I made in New England have been lifelong and true. Working for Portable 100 Magazine later on, same place, garnered me the skills needed to do GCC. I have always struggled and never been rich, though in retrospect this hardly seems a bad thing. I have often wondered what my life would have been like if I’d made the call and gone to Microsoft. My guess is, I’d be sitting today on a Seattle Off-ramp with a sign, "will wisecrack for food," for the truth is, wealth is not my karma in this life. Instead, I am doomed to have good friends, a modest life-style immersed in dreams of future and past.