Dr. Dobb's Journal November 1998
Doug Carlston was a computer hacker in college in the 1970s, and even when he started his law practice he continued to play with computers. When Radio Shack introduced its TRS-80, he bought one immediately and stayed glued to it all weekend.
So did others, including the author of this column, but something actually came of Doug Carlston's Trashed weekend. He wrote a game called Galactic Saga, and with his brothers Gary and Don started a company that became a leader in a half-billion dollar segment of the software industry -- Broderbund (Swedish for brotherhood).
It wasn't immediate. This was early 1980, before Windows, before DOS, before the IBM PC, and the brothers were down to $24 before Doug took to the road, selling copies of Galactic Saga out of his car to early computer stores. The big breakthrough, though, came when a Japanese entrepreneur sold Doug some microcomputer versions of popular video arcade games.
It's not clear that there wasn't some infringement of copyright, but the computer game industry was free and fast-moving in the early '80s, and nobody cared. Among Broderbund and Sierra On-Line and Sirius, the main game companies of the early '80s, there was much sharing of technology, much flouting of the usual rules of business, much spirit of brotherhood.
It has been called the hacker ethic. Broderbund was built on it, and did well. In recent years, its stars included Rand and Robyn Miller, with their intensely popular game Myst. Gradually, Broderbund added educational and productivity software titles, ultimately becoming an educational software company that also did games.
Recently, though, Broderbund has been losing money, and this summer it agreed to be acquired by The Learning Company. But it would be a mistake to connect Broderbund's fall with the hacker ethic it still, to some extent, embodies. Broderbund was the only one of the early game companies to survive into the late '90s, and it was the gentlest, most generous of those companies. As the other game companies ran into hard times, they got tougher, refusing to share ideas and technology with competitors, giving less credit to the actual game developers, negotiating stingier deals. But although Broderbund changed, too, it kept some of that spirit. And as the other companies failed, Broderbund prospered -- until quite recently.
If Broderbund has remained a different kind of company, it is probably because, like Microsoft, it has been led for nearly 20 years by one person. Early indications are that Doug Carlston will remain in charge of the operation and there won't be many jobs lost. And a consolidation that will give the combined companies 40 percent of the educational software market can't exactly be bad news for either company. That's all true, but it's also true that one of the pioneer software companies is no more. We should mark its passing.
Thanks to Steven Levy's book Hackers for refreshing my memory about Broderbund's early days.
-- M.S.