This article is excerpted from Microchip An Idea, Its Genesis, and the Revolution It Created, copyright 2002 by Jeffrey Zygmont. Used by arrangement with Perseus Publishing, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
Common lore holds that computers became popular when techy nerds in California scaled them down to personal size. That's bunk. Computers grew popular because of Harold Koplow, who wasn't even a member of the tech set. Born in Boston in 1940, raised in Lynn, Koplow was a pharmacist, a physicist, and a junior high teacher before he stumbled into computing at Wang Laboratories in 1968. At Wang he rose quickly to the stature of hero but then sank even faster to the level of miscreant.
He was waiting for dismissal when, in 1975, he developed the product that made computers popularly accessible. Koplow's creation was a simple word processor, and simplicity was its revolutionizing feature. The machine was programmed specifically for secretaries; before that, nobody had tried to make a computer for ordinary people to use. The era's thinking machines were large and aloof, for use only by trained specialists. Even the young cultists fiddling with early, personal-sized computers weren't making accommodating machines for Everyman. They were cobbling together playthings for people who preferred circuit boards to, say, fraternity parties.
But wisecracking Harold Koplow shared more in common with ordinary folk than he did with the techno-scenti -- except for one thing his knack for high-order math, which lent him a natural facility in computer programming. At Wang he was also egged along by the company's ruling ethos Simplify technology to broaden its appeal. Wang had learned that it could make money by disguising computers, adapting them to perform specific tasks for specific professionals, like doctors, engineers, and salesmen.
With Koplow's word processor, Wang Labs became -- for a while -- one of the biggies of the computer trade, a company that epitomized the "Massachusetts Miracle" business resurgence of the 1980s. But when Koplow joined Wang in 1968, the company was a small and unknown electronics manufacturer. It had recently moved from Boston north to Tewksbury when its founder and chief executive, An Wang, sought room to expand. Koplow discovered Wang Labs serendipitously, with a shrug toward blind chance and circumstance. Koplow was impetuous. He was brash. He could be stubbornly insistent and even imperious, with a risible spirit that could flash with ire when provoked. But mostly he was mirthful, convivial, youthful.
Harold Koplow had rolled through life with a sense of amusement so detached he once laughed down a carload of robbers who followed him after he locked up the Boston pharmacy where he worked weekends. When the crooks cruised beside him to demand the small paper bag in his hand, the young druggist only laughed. The desperadoes waggled a gun barrel through the car's open window. He shrugged and gave up the loot. The outlaws squealed away with what Koplow describes as the "cold goods" popsicles he had planned to share with his wife.
Koplow went to pharmacy school because his father was a pharmacist and because he couldn't afford tuition at MIT. But when he went to work in 1962, at age 22, he discovered that he didn't like mixing medicines. So he detoured into brainwork, toiling part time at an Allston pharmacy while he took math and physics classes at Boston University. In 1964 he enrolled as a full-time graduate student at Tufts University, partly to preserve the draft deferment that kept him out of Vietnam. Tufts gave him a master's degree in physics in 1968, a year that science grads stood in unemployment lines.
Unable to find work, Koplow visited a principal he knew, and became a teacher, coaching adolescents in math and science at Cobbett Junior High in Lynn (a school he had once attended). He liked the job well enough to think he might settle into teaching as a permanent vocation. Yet he continued scanning the job classifieds, where he first encountered Wang. The company was advertising for math and physics grads and instructed applicants to "Apply Department NC."
Department NC stood for Department Ned Chang -- the laboratories' one-person programming team. Department Chang hired Koplow the day of his interview, in October 1968. Koplow was 28 years old. At last he'd found work that befit his mathematical agility. For his first assignment, Koplow had 12 months to write a batch of software instructions for the company's model 300 calculator -- really a small-scale computer, set up to run as a calculator. The programs equipped the calculators for professionals facing special math problems. Doctors in the late 1960s paid $1,700 for a model 300 that calculated critical chemotherapy doses. Car dealers used the same gawky tabletop box to work out loan payments. Although he had no prior experience in coding computers, Koplow completed the year's supply of programs in a few months. Then he rattled around the office, pushing for a new challenge.
In a short time, pharmacist-physicist-teacher-software engineer Harold Koplow grew nearly indispensable at Wang. It wasn't just that he could write computer programs quickly and in some kind of coherent order. Koplow's coherent orders were also shorter and more efficient than others. A computer following fewer, more orderly instructions finished its work more quickly. Faster computers sold better.
Koplow headed the team that developed Wang's next desktop calculator, the model 700, in 1969. After that, he began the company's foray into word processing. Wang didn't invent the concept. In the early 1970s, it was one of a few companies that sold awkward office helpers designed to turn keystrokes into finished documents. They were mostly just electric typewriters crossbred with computer printers. They could keep track of the words a secretary typed, but she couldn't see the words because the contraptions had no screens. To review a line, she had to wait for the typewriter-cum-printer to bang it back to her. To even find the line, she had to endure awkward and elaborate search procedures.
An Wang wanted to do better. The concept of word processing squared neatly with his aim to make machines for specific professions. In his 1986 autobiography, Lessons, Wang recounted how he "read a study noting that while the average factory worker is supported by about fifteen thousand dollars' worth of tools and machinery that improve his productivity, virtually the only equipment supporting an office worker is a four-hundred-dollar electric typewriter plus pencils and paper. Computers . . . were not a presence in the lives of ordinary office workers. This said to me that the office was untracked territory when it came to the question of using technology to improve productivity."
Meanwhile, Koplow's rise continued apace. Improbably, he became vice president of marketing in 1974. Before that, he had held only technical posts. But the company was trying desperate measures to reverse a sales slide caused by a general business recession. For training, Koplow crashed through a business-school textbook. He thought he was holding his own. Sales continued to slide, but he blamed the continuing recession for that. Therefore he felt stunned when An Wang demoted him early in 1975. Suddenly Koplow found himself exiled to long-range planning.
At Wang Laboratories, long-range planning was a minimum-security halfway house where detainees idled before leaving the company Workers banished to LRP were expected to take the hint and find a new job. "Dr. Wang just didn't like firing people," Koplow explains. "Anyone who had ever been LRPed before me had been gone in six months. I thought I was history."
The situation was almost surreal. Koplow shared his punishment with a friend and colleague named Dave Moros, who had been banished to long-range planning for transgressions of his own. Moros made a good cellmate for Koplow. He was just as outspoken, irascible, and independent.
Together in Department LRP, the pair could remain comfortably and irresponsibly idle. Sure, the boss had issued them an assignment. Wang had told them to design a new word machine. But that was only busywork. In a few months at most they'd be gone. What did they care what the doctor wanted? They didn't even believe he really wanted it. "I don't think Dr. Wang's real intention was for us to come up with a word processor design," Koplow reflects. "He was just giving us something to do while he straightened out his company."
The two men dismissed any idea of undertaking a full-fledged technical program. That would require more work than they cared to give the assignment. Instead, at the suggestion of Moros, they started writing a user's manual, a task that ordinarily came at the end of a product- development project, after engineers had tackled all the tough technical issues.
It was a lark. The approach was breezy. It flaunted the pair's rebellious irresponsibility deliciously. They worked on the guide only in the morning. Moros went home around noon. Koplow reserved the afternoons for job interviews. When he didn't have an interview, he wandered the halls at Wang, gabbing with people. He felt comfortably at ease. He had never set out to join the computer guild anyway. He had wanted to be a pharmacist. Or maybe a physicist. Or maybe a teacher. Koplow was accustomed to transitions.
But after each interview, Koplow returned more eagerly to his confinement at Wang He was unimpressed by IBM and Xerox, by computer and electronics companies of every stripe. "When I saw what everybody else was doing and what they wanted me to do, I thought, 'That's really hokey,' " he says. "I thought, 'The stuff I'm designing, this user's manual, is much better than anything that they have.' I got more interested in the machine. And so we finished the user's manual."
In the end, the user's manual described a computer so effortlessly accommodating that it would make the guidebook itself unnecessary. Give a woman from the typing pool less than an hour's instruction, they figured, and she should be able to find her own way on the keyboard. They stuck on a video screen that could display about half a typed page at a time. The screen gave the computer a means to talk to a typist. Koplow and Moros devised instructions and suggestions to flash onto the tube, sometimes when a secretary asked for help, sometimes automatically, when she pressed a wrong key.
They worked out essential page-handling operations in straightforward sequences that a person could follow by intuition alone. Forget about arcane computer commands. They knew as surely as they knew Wang's guiding principle -- make computers effortless for untrained people -- that secretaries wanted to simply glide more glibly through their day's load of letters, reports, and memos. As they approached the end of summer 1975, after surviving six months of exile and official neglect in LRP, both Moros and Koplow felt confident of their achievement. "We fully expected Dr. Wang to like it," says Koplow.
He did. He liked it so much that the effort rescued the exiles from LRP. Koplow got the job of converting the user's manual into an actual product. He made the computers personal by departing from conventional practice. In the 1970s, people shared computers that operated as a central hub, with gangs of workers sitting at separate terminals plugged in like the arms of an octopus. Koplow didn't like the approach. He had seen computer-sharing arrangements from other companies sputter as they tried awkwardly to manage too many fast-clacking typists. "You had to worry about someone else bogging down the machine, so that your program would take forever to execute," he explains.
"Why couldn't someone have their own, dedicated computer and not have to share it with other users?" Koplow reasoned. Well, one reason was that the microchips that powered small computers of the era just weren't powerful enough. "Printing, filing, capturing keystrokes, and displaying them on the screen was a lot of work for these little [chips]," he says. Therefore he devised a divide-and-conquer configuration, distributing chips among the separate tasks.
He placed a complete computer on each secretary's desk to handle her typing and hers alone. The all-in-one console wasn't much wider than an electric typewriter, with its keyboard built into the housing that also held the screen. For filing, Koplow provided a separate computer that stored notes, memos, letters, and other written documents. A bunch of workers shared one, the same way they shared the office file cabinet. A group of typists shared a printer, too, which had its own computer chip to control paper feed and character selection and so on. Offices built around this approach worked remarkably like offices today.
In less than a year, early in the summer of 1976, Wang Laboratories brought out its Word Processing System -- a title that seems prosaic only in hindsight. When it was first demonstrated at a New York office-equipment expo on June 21, 1976, "people saw text editing done on a screen, and they thought it was magic," wrote Dr. Wang in Lessons.
"The key to the Wang Word Processor," says Koplow, "was to make it easy for a mere mortal to run what in essence was a computer, but what to the user looked like nothing more than a typewriter with a new, intuitive interface."
Still, the device was so novel that people didn't know what to make of it. Some apologized to the screen when it corrected them. Others cut open the protective sleeves on their floppy disks, thinking the thin black plastic was only decorative packaging. One customer called Koplow about a particular page she couldn't get her system to set up. He told her to send him a copy so he could take a look. She mailed him a photocopy of her diskette.
As the first word processor worthy of the name, the Wang machine introduced people to the idea of personal computing. By 1978, Wang was shipping nearly 800 typing stations per month, a sales rate that brought in nearly $200 million that year, or twice what the company had made in 1976. Sales doubled again in 1980, and again in 1982.
That year the company made number 11 on the list of computer giants compiled by Datamation magazine, an industry trade journal. Before, Wang Labs hadn't even broken into the top 50. Koplow was a vice president again, directing the further development of word processing and expanding toward more capable office automation.
Then came personal computers. They were more versatile. With software to program them, PCs performed word processing plus loads of other tasks. But the early attempts at PCs -- like the 1975 Altair 8800 and the 1976 Apple I -- didn't feint toward popularity. They were still fit only for specialists and slavering enthusiasts. They wore the designation personal not because they were chummy companions, but simply because they were sized for one person instead of for dozens. Rather than begin computing's migration toward universal acceptance, they merely grew into the principle that Wang first firmly established The way to sell lots of computers was to make them suitable for lots of people.
Koplow left Wang Laboratories in 1982 over fallouts with An Wang's elder son, Fred Wang, whom the doctor was grooming to take over the company. The company ran on momentum for a while. At the height of its success in the middle of the 1980s, the labs sold close to $3 billion worth of its computers per year. Then Wang Labs sank with stunning swiftness. Koplow was gone. Moros was gone. Other key innovators were leaving just as the company was at its pinnacle. When personal computers began to eclipse Wang's premier office machines, the company had no new products to answer the challenge. The company vanished into obscurity soon after its founder died in 1990.
As for Koplow, he remains as itinerant as ever. Recently, on his own, he conceived a new computer design. He started doctoral studies to learn enough theoretical math to turn the idea into a product. But earlier this year he gave it up. He can't cajole colleagues to join a new business venture in Florida, where he and his wife are comfortably settled. Florida is tech-death central, he quips.
So after 40 years, Koplow will become a pharmacist again. After he passes the board exam, he'll mix drugs mostly just to get his family on a health insurance plan. On the side, he's figuring tax returns for neighbors, just to settle a vendetta against H&R Block. And he'll reserve ample moments for his 10-year-old grandson. The boy loves three of his favorite things, says Koplow math, bicycle riding, and bowling.
This story ran in the Boston Globe Magazine on 12/29/2002. Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.