Chapter 48

January 9, 1979

It was a Tuesday and college was out for Christmas break for another week. This meant that Sandra, Cathy, and Benny were available all day. Tim and Benny had decided that it would be a good time for a business meeting. Everyone was getting antsy about the price of silver. It was oscillating around $6.00 and everyone, with the exception of Benny and Tim, was hoping that marked the beginning of the take off in silver. It was a dollar increase over the past year. Tim and Benny knew that when silver took off, it would really take off. This is just a little tremor before the earthquake.

Tim was working on the interior of another house. It was his sixth since September and he had just collected $10,000 for the fourth house. He still had another two weeks of work on this house before he could hand it over to the owner.

The fifth house wasn’t finished yet. It belonged to the Deputy Sheriff and he wanted everything first class. Tim had basically finished the interior of it. The carpet was laid and looked really sharp. The ceramic tile in the bathroom and kitchen had already been installed. The bathroom was done. At the moment, he was waiting for delivery of the custom made cabinets so that he could finish the kitchen. They were already two weeks behind the scheduled delivery date and he had just been informed that there had been another delay which was driving him crazy.

Tim walked from his car to the front of their office house, unable to believe how bitterly cold it was. At 3:00 in the afternoon it had finally climbed to 37 degrees. For most of the day, it had been below freezing. He was glad that he was working inside. He’d hate to be out pumping gas in this kind of weather.

Back when he was married to Joyce, he often had to take any job that he could find. Usually it was the job that no one else wanted. He was outside when it was frigidly cold or when it was burning hot. He was stuck indoors on some hot factory floor when the weather was nice outside. There were times when he wondered how he had survived those times.

He stepped into the house and closed the door behind him. The warm air hit him in the face which was a shock after being in the cold. He slowly took off his gloves, hat, and coat as if afraid that he’d get cold again. The office was nice and toasty. There were two people there whom he didn’t know, and Benny. He assumed that Cynthia had hired her sales associates.

“I’m not here about a house.”

They looked up at him and then turned back to whatever it was that they were working on.

After giving a dramatic shudder, he said, “It’s cold out there.”

Benny, seated in a chair next to Cathy’s desk said, “Yes. It is.”

“Hello, Cathy. Hello, Sandra.”

“Howdy stranger, long time no see.”

“Hello, Tim. How’s it going?” Sandra said brightly.

“Busy as usual.”

“Let’s go in your office and get to it.”

“Okay.”

They went into the old file room which had been converted into an office. It had one desk and one conference table with four chairs around it. Cathy went over to the desk and gathered some materials from it. She now kept everything about Two Guys Working separate from the realty stuff. She sat down at the head of the conference table.

She started off, “Since our last meeting in November I made an executive decision because I couldn’t find Benny.”

“I was around.”

“Not at the time I needed you.”

“Okay.”

“I hired a group to make diskettes with labels for your software.”

“I thought we were already doing that.”

“No. We were making them individually to order.”

“Where did you get the computer to do that?”

“I used the ones at school. I used to sit there for a couple of hours every other day, making diskettes to mail out.”

“That must of been horrible.”

“I studied while doing it, so it wasn’t a total waste of time.”

“I don’t blame you for hiring an outfit to make the diskettes.”

“I rushed everything on that last game you wrote, and got an ad into Byte magazine for the December issue.”

“Why did you rush it?”

“To try to get some of the Christmas market.”

“Okay.”

“We got it out in time to pick up some Christmas sales. We shipped 67 of the old game and 600 of the new game.”

“That’s great,” Benny said.

“We are charging two dollars for shipping and handling. That really just covers your costs. It’s being shipped TipWare, just like your last programs.”

“That’s fine.”

“So far we’ve gotten over $4,000 in tips on your newest game already.”

“What? How can that be? You said you shipped out 600 of them.”

“We’re not getting checks just from individuals. Just yesterday, we got a hundred and four dollar check from the members of the St. Louis Apple Users Group. They had ordered one copy and shared it among the members. Each member chipped in two dollars and they wrote the check out of their club’s fund.”

“I’m shocked.”

“It’s happening all over the country. We’re getting in checks ranging from $10 to $200.”

“That’s really nice of those people.”

“I’ve collected a list of the people who ordered the game on behalf of the user groups. If you write another game, I’ll just cut out waiting for orders and ship copies to them directly. I’ll still put in an ad in Byte, but I won’t rush it. You could end up with reviews of your game being published before we even get an ad in print.”

Tim asked, “Could you do another game?”

“I’ve been working on a scientific graphing package. We’ll need to charge for this one, because I expect to get mostly institutional and corporate sales on it. Institutions and corporations don’t do TipWare purchasing. I figure we could go to $29.95.”

Cathy asked, “Will that be enough?”

“I figure there are over a thousand universities and colleges with physics and math departments in them. There are probably about the same number of businesses that need a package like that. So I figure, three thousand sales, easily. That’s probably on the low side. I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t hit ten thousand.”

Sandra’s jaw dropped even as Cathy’s pen fell on the floor. He had just casually announced that he could have $300,000 in sales for one program. Sandra couldn’t imagine that. She remembered him saying once that the future investments would be in software companies. She now understood why he had said that. The money in computers was mind blowing.

Benny continued on, oblivious to the reactions of Cathy and Sandra. “We’ll need to write a new license for it. One copy on one machine type of license. I know we can’t enforce it, but a lot of organizations will read that and order multiple copies. It doesn’t cost us anything.”

Tim asked, “Is there any news or hints about the IBM PC yet?”

“No.”

“Damn.”

“I know that one of the first people to learn about the PC was Gates. I’ve heard nothing about Microsoft hunting for an operating system. There’s little been said about Microsoft except they’ve written the Fortran compiler I’m using. I guess Gates hasn’t convinced them to go full out with Basic, yet.

“I’ve written the graphics utility package in assembly for the Apple. I have it in Pascal so that I can transfer it over to the PC without too much difficulty. I’m stuck with Basic, Fortran, or Pascal for the moment. The graphing package is written in Fortran and Pascal. It runs on top of the graphics utilities package. I should be able to move quickly to the PC.”

“Are you going to buy a computer?”

“No. They’re expensive and the school has plenty of them. I’ll use the school’s machines.”

“They’ll come down in price.”

“I’ll wait until I can get a smart phone.”

Tim laughed. “I was going to wait until the 90s so that I could cruise the internet again and download porn.”

Benny nodded his head in agreement. “That’s the only reason to get one. So long as I can get others to pay for it, I won’t pay for one myself.”

“What this about porn?” Cathy asked.

Tim answered, “Pornography. We’re about to enter the age of adult entertainment on a scale you could never imagine. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to go down to a local video store and rent pornography for a couple dollars a night and watch it in the privacy of your own home.

“When computers finally are able to talk to each other at decent speeds, you’ll be able to get pornographic materials from other computers. You’ll be able to download movies, clips, and x-rated games. You’ll even be able to watch real couples have sex in real life over the computer. It’s going to be everywhere.

“Initially, it’ll be primarily heterosexual sex with some girl on girl scenes thrown in. Then the gay and lesbian markets will kick in. After that, just about every thing you can imagine will be available online.”

“Lesbian porn?” Sandra asked wide eyed.

Tim said, “You two may be lesbians, but you aren’t tied in to the lesbian community. There’s a lot more going on than you would believe.”

“How do you know so much about it?” Cathy asked.

Benny said, “Because by 2017, it had all come out in the open. I know that if you look around campus that you’ll find things that will point you to the community. It’s not out in the open, but there are little notices on bulletin boards about meetings and support groups. You two need to look for them.”

Sandra groused, “I don’t believe it. We’ve got two guys telling us how to be lesbians.”

Tim said, “You have no idea what’s coming in the future. We do.”

Cathy said, “Let’s get back on topic. Benny has a new software product he’s writing. Benny, when will it be ready?”

“Before school starts.”

“That early?”

“I have nothing else to do,” Benny said with a shrug.

“I guess I should work up an ad for Byte Magazine.”

“You’ll also want to see about advertising in Physical Review, Physics Letters, Journal of Mathematical Physics, the International Journal of Mathematics, Physics Today, and Scientific American.”

“That will cost a fortune.”

“Not really. I figure a couple of thousand dollars for a small ad.” Benny paused, frowned, and then said, “Now that I think about it, I’m not sure that Physical Review, Physics Letters and the International Journal of Mathematics will take advertisements like this. We just might want to go with Physics Today and Scientific American.”

Cathy updated her notes. She had never heard of any of those magazines. She glanced over at Tim to see what his reaction was, but he didn’t seem fazed by anything he was hearing. Tim noticed her covert glances in his direction.

“What?”

“What do you think about spending all of that money on advertising?”