Chương 10: The Quick and Dirty Deal (10/15/1979)

DATE: Monday, October 15, 1979 LOCATION: Tukwila Industrial Park | Seattle, Washington LOCAL TIME: 11: 00 AM PST A thousand miles north of San Diego, the sky was the color of a wet sidewalk. Bob Yauney stepped out of his rental car—a sensible Ford Fairmont. He opened an umbrella against the freezing drizzle. He wasn't sweating. He was shivering. He adjusted his glasses and looked at the building. Seattle Computer Products. It wasn't a corporate headquarters.

It was a nondescript single-story brick building next to a carpet warehouse. Bob checked his reflection in the car window. Dark blue suit. White shirt. Red tie. He looked like a senior engineer forced to dress up for a board meeting. He didn't feel like a shark, and he didn't feel like a fraud. He felt like a man who had finally seen the blueprint to the future. He patted his chest pocket.

The cashier's check was there, funded by a frantic, highly leveraged reshuffling of his and John Battisti's assets over the last forty-eight hours.

"It's just code," Bob whispered to himself.

"Just logic and syntax." But he knew it was more than that. As a software designer, he had spent the last three months obsessively reviewing instruction sets and piecing together the rumors leaking out of Boca Raton and Armonk. IBM was quietly building a personal computer to crush Apple. And Bob had figured out their fatal flaw: they had the 16-bit hardware, but they didn't have a 16-bit operating system to run it. He was here to buy the tollbooth before the highway was even built. Bob closed the car door.

He walked toward the entrance. He didn't knock. He walked in with the quiet confidence of a man who knew exactly what the architecture was worth. LOCATION: Seattle Computer Products | The Workshop LOCAL TIME: 11: 20 AM PST The inside of SCP smelled of ozone, burnt flux, and stale coffee. Loose capacitors and 8086 chips were scattered on workbenches like metallic confetti. A young man with a beard and a flannel shirt looked up from a circuit board. Tim Paterson. Twenty-three years old.

"Can I help you?" Paterson asked, wiping his hands on a rag. Bob Yauney stood in the doorway. He offered a polite, professional nod. He looked at the cluttered room, his eyes lingering appreciatively on a disassembled 8086 kit.

"Mr. Paterson," Bob said, his voice steady.

"I'm Bob Yauney. I represent a private investment consortium based in San Diego. Fractal Systems." The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Okay," Paterson said, unimpressed.

"We sell memory boards. The kits are over there."

"I'm actually not here for the hardware," Bob said, stepping into the room. He set his briefcase gently on a clear spot on the workbench.

"I'm here for the software. 86-DOS." Paterson blinked, a little surprised.

"The OS? It's just a utility to run the boards. It's not really a product."

"I've read the documentation," Bob said smoothly.

"The way you adapted the FAT file system and mapped the API calls to the 8086... it's elegant, Tim. You've built an incredibly efficient bridge. But it's more than a utility. It's an architecture." Paterson scratched his beard, clearly disarmed by someone who actually understood the code.

"Well, thanks. I'm actually talking to a few guys about licensing it. Microsoft. You know them?" Bob didn't flinch. He knew exactly who they were. He knew he had to frame this perfectly.

"Microsoft writes great languages," Bob said with professional respect.

"BASIC, Fortran. But they write interpreters, Tim. They aren't operating system designers. We are." Bob clicked the briefcase open and pulled out a folder.

"We aren't looking to license it. We want to buy the asset. Lock, stock, and barrel."

"Buy it?" Paterson laughed nervously.

"Rod Brock—the owner—he'd have to sign off on that."

"I was hoping you could introduce us," Bob said calmly.

"I don't have a lot of time in town. I have a flight to Armonk tonight." He didn't say he was going to IBM. He just dropped the name of the town. To a hardware guy, it was a subtle, unmistakable signal of scale. Paterson's eyes widened slightly as the geography clicked in his head.

"Armonk?"

"If Rod has a few minutes," Bob said. LOCATION: Seattle Computer Products LOCAL TIME: 12: 15 PM PST Rod Brock, the owner of SCP, stared at the cashier's check. Seventy-five thousand dollars. Bob had nearly drained his own equity to get it. He had mapped out the strategy logically: treat Brock like a businessman, treat Paterson like a peer, and hit them with a valuation they couldn't justify refusing.

"That's a lot of money for a stop-gap OS," Brock said suspiciously.

"It's a fair valuation for the underlying IP," Bob corrected gently.

"We're betting we can port it and scale it for enterprise architectures. If our compiler teams can't make it work, you walk away with seventy-five grand for a few months of Tim's development time." Bob leaned forward, resting his forearms on the desk.

"But here's the structure of the deal, Rod. Exclusive rights. You don't sell to Microsoft. You don't license to anyone else. We own the codebase and the copyright."

"We still need to sell our computer kits," Brock argued.

"Of course you do," Bob agreed immediately.

"So we grant you a perpetual, royalty-free license to bundle it with your own hardware. You keep your core business intact. We just take the software distribution off your hands." Brock looked at Paterson. Paterson offered a slight nod. The guy knew his stuff, and $75, 000 funded the hardware division for an entire year.

"If I take this check," Brock said, his fingers hovering over the paper, "Bill Gates is going to be pissed. He called me yesterday."

"Bill is a brilliant language guy," Bob said calmly.

"But he's focusing on interpreters. The industry is moving to 16-bit processing, and we are moving with it." Bob tapped his briefcase.

"If you want to wait to see if Albuquerque can put together a counter-offer, I understand. But I have to be in Armonk tonight, and if I leave without a signature, my team is going to start writing our own kernel from scratch tomorrow." Brock looked at the check. He looked at Paterson, then back to the confident software designer sitting across from him. He swallowed hard.

"Where do I sign?" Bob watched Rod Brock slide the cashier's check across the desk toward himself like a man finally admitting defeat. His stomach unclenched for the first time in forty-eight hours. He exhaled slowly, keeping his face calm even though he wanted to laugh.

"Smart move, Rod," he said quietly, pulling the contract out of his briefcase.

"You just sold a utility. We're going to turn it into the standard." Rod looked up at him, pen hovering over the paper.

"You really think IBM's going to bite?" Bob gave him a small, knowing smile.

"They already have. They just don't know it yet."