s, Eric Rosenfeld, a graduate student at MIT, had a
problem. He was doing a thesis on an arcane form of financial
statistics, but could not wedge himself into the crowded queue for time
on MIT's mainframes. (One might note at this point that if Mr.
Rosenfeld had dishonestly broken into the MIT mainframes, Kapor himself
might have never invented Lotus 1-2-3 and the PC business might have
been set back for years!) Eric Rosenfeld did have an Apple II, however,
and he thought it might be possible to scale the problem down. Kapor,
as favor, wrote a program for him in BASIC that did the job.

It then occurred to the two of them, out of the blue, that it might be
possible to SELL this program. They marketed it themselves, in plastic
baggies, for about a hundred bucks a pop, mail order. "This was a
total cottage industry by a marginal consultant," Kapor says proudly.
"That's how I got started, honest to God."

Rosenfeld, who later became a very prominent figure on Wall Street,
urged Kapor to go to MIT's business school for an MBA. Kapor did seven
months there, but never got his MBA. He picked up some useful
tools--mainly a firm grasp of the principles of accounting--and, in his
own words, "learned to talk MBA." Then he dropped out and went to
Silicon Valley.

The inventors of VisiCalc, the Apple computer's premier business
program, had shown an interest in Mitch Kapor. Kapor worked diligently
for them for six months, got tired of California, and went back to
Boston where they had better bookstores. The VisiCalc group had made
the critical error of bringing in "professional management." "That
drove them into the ground," Kapor says.

"Yeah, you don't hear a lot about VisiCalc these days," I muse.

Kapor looks surprised. "Well, Lotus ... we BOUGHT it."

"Oh. You BOUGHT it?"

"Yeah."

"Sort of like the Bell System buying Western Union?"

Kapor grins. "Yep! Yep! Yeah, exactly!"

Mitch Kapor was not in full command of the destiny of himself or his
industry. The hottest software commodities of the early 1980s were
COMPUTER GAMES--the Atari seemed destined to enter every teenage home
in America. Kapor got into business software simply because he didn't
have any particular feeling for computer games. But he was supremely
fast on his feet, open to new ideas and inclined to trust his
instincts. And his instincts were good. He chose good people to deal
with--gifted programmer Jonathan Sachs (the co-author