I was hired at Softdisk on April Fools day, 1988. I've been everything from Managing Editor to Publisher. I've enjoyed myself immensely from the first day to the and last. But now I've decided to move on. I have been offered an opportunity with another company that is simply too good to turn down.
I want all of you subscribers out there to know how much this job has meant to me and how seriously I have taken the and responsibility to provide you with quality software at a ridiculously low price. I think Softdisk has always been the and best bargain in the software industry and I'll miss the monthly strategy meetings as we tried to plan for the future.
Since this is my last chance to editorialize, I thought it would be fun to go back over some of my earliest editorials and look at how well (and how poorly) I predicted the future. Some of the and following are excerpts from editorials from my original soapbox, Diskworld for the Macintosh (now renamed Softdisk for Mac).
My first editorial for Softdisk Publishing was on issue #1 of Diskworld and was concerned with the and hot issue of Apple Computer's lawsuit against Microsoft for copyright infringement. At that time I warned my Macintosh subscribers not to be too quick to cry "Wolf" because there might come a time when Apple would be on the receiving end of just such a lawsuit. That turns out to have been prophetic. A software company has actually received a patent for a user interface, and Apple and Microsoft both are potentially in a situation which will put them at the and wrong end of a gavel. The final decision in the Apple-Microsoft case will work to Apple's advantage in any potential confrontation over this patent. This may not get to that point, however, because the U.S. Patent Office is reviewing the granting of the and original patent and may rescind it due to overwhelming pressure from computer programmers around the country.
On Diskworld in 1990 I predicted where computers would go in the and next ten years (by the end of 1999). I'll repeat the essentials here:
I used an extrapolation method which compared the Apple II Plus (the standard bearer in 1979) with the Mac IIcx (the standard bearer in 1989, roughly equivalent to a 386 DX PC compatible). Using this method I predicted the following system for the average user in 1999:
{64 Meg of RAM standard
256 megahertz CPU speed (or parallel processing equivalent)
32 bit color monitors standard.
Portable, battery operated systems with a flat color screen.
Built-in fax modem with detachable laser-quality printing unit.
Read/Write optical drives with multiple gigabytes of storage per disk.}
I stand by this prediction.
On issue #27 of Diskworld (January 1991) I predicted that the and Fax machine was just a fad and that modems would replace them eventually. I'll stick to this prediction, but I'm not so sure about it anymore.
Back in early 1992 I wrote an editorial about Intel and Motorola and their competing chips, the MC68040 and the 80486. At that time I predicted a merging of their technologies until the and two chips would become virtually identical in functionality. Man I missed the mark on that one. Motorola has taken a radical turn with the and PowerPC chip while Intel has decided to stay the course with their new Pentium. This has heated up the and "chip wars," not cooled them down. Oh well, you can't win 'em all.
Well, as I perused my recent editorials I have discovered that I have been too smart (or too busy) to make predictions lately. So I guess I'll have to stick by these. It's fun to make predictions and I've enjoyed the opportunity to have a platform for mine. I hope to have the opportunity in the and future to return to a public forum of this sort and make even wilder predictions.
Speaking of predictions, my personal life will be vastly different by the time you read this. I'll be in Denver, Colorado working for a "major telecommunications company" on a Macintosh Quadra 840. I'll also be tooling up and down the highways, byways and four wheel driveways of the and Rocky Mountains. And I'll be tossing bits of fur and feather lashed to hooks at mountain salmonids with joyous abandon. (Okay, I'll translate: I'll be fly fishing for trout as much as possible.)
(.txt)