ANTIC Interview 246 - Harry McCracken, Technology Journalist

This is the Antique Atari 8-Bit Podcast. Fact about the Atari 400 was that it had maybe the worst keyboard in the history of computing. Oddly enough, I don't remember having trouble with the keyboard, maybe because when you're programming It is generally speaking not about the speed at which you type.

This is Antic, the Atari 8-bit podcast. I'm Kevin Savetz. Harry McCracken is a technology journalist. He's technology editor at Fast Company magazine. He cut his teeth on the TRS-80 and Atari 400 computers, including writing for Creative Computing magazine and creating a game that he wanted to publish with Atari Program Exchange but didn't finish. This interview took place on September 27th, 2016. A video version of this interview is on YouTube. There's a link to that in the show notes at ataripodcast.com.

I work at Fast Company magazine where I am technology editor, and that is sort of the latest in a fairly long sequence of technology-related magazines I've worked at. I work— wrote about tech Technology for Time for a couple of years. I started my own website called Technologizer before that. And maybe most pertinent to this podcast, I was the editor-in-chief of PC World and worked for PC World for several years before that. And before that, I worked for a magazine called Computer Buying World. And way, way, way, way, way back when, I wrote for Creative Computing.

Looking at your old articles, there's, you know, how I wish I had an iPad in 1982 and happy birthday Pong, and you wrote something about the Atari cartridges in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and an interview with Nolan. So you like to sprinkle Atari into your work, clearly.

Yeah, I mean, it's always been interesting to me that just about the only thing that's as interesting to people as the future of technology is the past. And so I have a lot of fun writing about stuff from the past and interviewing people and doing some fairly ambitious stories on tech history. But the only reason I do it is because those things tend to be quite popular. And the Atari 400 was the first computer I bought with my own money. By the time I got that, I guess I had been using PCs for about 4 years, starting with my father's TRS-80.

All right, so let's go back to that. Your, your dad had a TRS-80 for— was it for work, or was it for, uh, uh, for For just personal projects or what?

He got that, he worked at Boston University and they were a very early user of Wang word processors, if anybody out there remembers Wang. And, you know, they used them to do stuff like speech writing, which my father did. And he sort of segued from that into getting a TRS-80, which he was able to keep at home, even though it was a work system. I think the idea was he could be even more productive he had a personal computer. And, um, the time he got it, I barely knew what a computer was, but the moment I saw that it could do graphics, I was smitten with it. And, uh, basically just about any moment he was not using it, I was using it.

What did you use it for? Were you programming, playing games? What are you doing?

A little bit of everything. I mean, he got it in 1978 when there was barely any software available, and generally speaking, if you wanted to entertain yourself with a TRS-80, you had to learn how to program. And so that's what I did. I was particularly interested in graphics, even though it was only a TRS-80. So I spent a lot of time learning how to do animation on it and so forth. And eventually I wrote some pretty ambitious games for it. And I used all the popular games that were out there from Scott Adams and folks like that.

Awesome. So, uh, eventually you bought an Atari 400 using your, your own hard-earned kid money, right?

So let's fast forward, I guess, about 4 years. I had just graduated from high school. I had almost no money. Um, the TRS-80— I mean, remarkably enough, I think the TRS-80 was still a pretty popular computer even in 1982, but it was really pretty much a dinosaur, especially if you're interested in graphics. And there was basically only one computer which had really good graphics and really good sound and was cheap. And that was the Atari 400, which I think even at that point, it had been out for a while and was not the least bit new. And I want to say I spent something like $270 for it. And I lived in Boston at the time and I got my father to drive us to New Hampshire where there was no sales tax. So I could save 5% on it. And that was the first computer I bought with my own money. And I think I basically spent almost every nickel I had to get it.

Wow, nice.

Tape drive or, uh, uh, tape drive, 16K. I actually, um, I had my own TV but it was black and white, so I did a pretty high percentage of my stuff on the Atari in black and white, and I would plug it into my parents' color TV if I really needed to see anything in color. Cool.

So what, uh, what were you using it for? Programming? Gaming?

Um, again, I think a little bit of everything. I mean, I I certainly remember playing Star Raiders. I particularly remember Pac-Man for some reason. I had a friend named Charles who had a TRS-80 Color Computer, and I was talking to him on the phone about my Atari 400, and I vividly remember holding up the phone so he could hear Pac-Man, and he was even impressed by how Pac-Man sounded on the Atari 400. I did a little bit of machine code in it on the TRS-80. I eventually taught myself Z80. Assembly code. And, you know, since the Atari had used a 6502, doing machine code on it more or less involved starting from scratch, so I didn't make all that much progress. And I think, I think I went back to BASIC primarily on the Atari. Cool.

Let's talk about some of your projects. You told me you started— you wrote a game that almost got accepted by Atari Program Exchange, right?

Yes, that's one of my greatest accomplishments as a programmer. And, um, I mean, flipping back to the TRS-80 for a second, um, I'm— I kept sort of flirting with writing commercial software for that. I did write one program which was published in a book called Captain 80's Book of TRS-80 Basic Adventures. It was basically a sort of an imitation Scott Adams adventure called Arctic Adventure. And then after I learned machine code for the TRS-80. I wrote a Space Invaders game, which I have to say was quite good. It was better than any other Space Invaders clone for the TRS-80. And the only issue was that by the time I finished it, nobody cared about Space Invaders anymore. What they really wanted was Galaxian. Uh, so I think I got like an advance from a publisher on that, but they, but they actually did not bother to publish it. Um, but when I got my Atari 400, I was still kind of gung-ho on the idea of writing commercial software. And the Atari Program Exchange was really exciting because it was quite slick and professional, but the whole idea was that it was actual normal regular people like me writing software. And I wrote a puzzle game, I think, and as far as I remember, I wrote it really expressly with the idea of entering it in the Atari Program Exchange. It had a built-in paint program, and the whole idea was you could design your own puzzles and then play them. And I remember my father, who was not particularly given to complimenting me except when I had earned it, being impressed by it. And I did in fact submit it to the Atari Program Exchange.

And what did they say?

Uh, so I got a letter back from them eventually basically saying, we like this, but we have a few suggestions. And the only suggestion I remember was my game involved, uh, puzzles where all the pieces were square. And they said, well, if you want to make it into a real jigsaw puzzle, the pieces should be of different shapes. And I found I was totally deflated by that, essentially because I was a pretty tight basic programmer. And I really, I think I had filled my 16K almost to the point where I, you know, I might've literally had like 50 bytes left I hadn't filled. It would have been a vastly more ambitious project. To do a puzzle with different shapes. And thinking back, I'm not even sure whether it would have been plausible to fit that and my little design-your-own-puzzle game into 16K. And I was so deflated I didn't try. I sort of wish I had attempted to do it, even if doing that would only have proved that it wasn't really plausible. But I was deflated and did not attempt to address their concerns. And for a little while after that, I have to say I was sort of haunted by the fact I came close to having a game published by Atari but did not quite make it.

Sorry. All right. But you did have some successes. You wrote a little bit for Creative Computing Magazine.

I did, yeah.

About the TRS-80. So were you at that point, were you trying to be a tech journalist or were you just having fun with computers at that early stage.

It was. I should mention that, that after I wrote my game and Atari sort of liked it, but had some suggestions, I didn't implement them. A little bit later, they published another puzzle game by a guy you interviewed, Paul Lewandowski. And I remember getting the Atari Program Exchange catalog and really being deflated by the fact they published something sort of similar, although I just downloaded the catalog with his game from the Internet Archive and saw it again for the first time in more than 30 years. And I saw he, uh, A, he also didn't have pieces in different shapes. Um, his game took up 32K, mine only required 16K. And, uh, his did have multiple levels of difficulty, which mine did not. So, uh, this actually looks really impressive, but he did not manage to implement the stuff that I wasn't able to. Um, but in answer to your question, yeah, at the same— I was a real computer magazine junkie. Uh, the first computer magazine I ever got was a copy of Byte, which our mailman accidentally delivered to our house. It was actually for a neighbor, but I kept it and loved that. And then I eventually started buying Creative Computing and Compute and all of those publications. And, um, at roughly— actually, probably almost exactly the same time I was writing my puzzle game. I reviewed some TRS-80 games and just mailed them into Creative Computing over the transom unsolicited, and they liked those and published them, and they published another piece I did and then published one of my articles in one of their TRS-80 books. And that did not immediately lead to a career in tech journalism. It was actually, I guess, about another 8 or 9 years before I did that full-time. But yeah, in the long run, that turned out to be more fruitful use of my talents.

Than being a programmer?

Yes, yeah. Yeah, I never again attempted to write commercial software, and even in 1982, it was sort of the start of the end of the era in which an individual with fairly good but not remarkable programming skills could aspire to write and sell a program by themself.

Right. You said you'd gone to an Atari office near Harvard Square?

Yes. And again, a lot of this is sort of— the reason we're talking now is because I saw you tweeting about the Atari Program Exchange, which I really barely thought about in decades. But you tweeting about that started me thinking about it again. I remembered a bunch of stuff that was still lodged in the back of my brain, such as the fact that they had an office in Harvard Square. And it wasn't an Atari office, it was just the Atari Program Exchange. Apparently it was the only one they had other than the one at headquarters, but it was quite large. It was in a building called the Galleria, which was a shopping mall just outside of Harvard Square. And I went in there, and I want to say maybe I went in there in order to put my program onto a floppy disk so I could submit it to the Atari Program Exchange, or, or maybe to test it on a floppy-based system.

Um, you like made an appointment sort of thing, or—

Yes, yeah, I must have contacted them and explained what I needed to do. And it— I'm pretty sure it has something to do with using my program on a floppy-based system. I don't even know whether the program exchange accepted submissions on cassette or not, because in '82 it was pretty embarrassing to be using a cassette-based system. Right.

Well, that's interesting. Yeah, before you mentioned that, I hadn't heard of APX having an office there. So I'm trying to find more information about that.

Yeah, and I searched around on the, uh, on InfoWorld on Google Books and found an article which made reference to it. And it sounds like maybe it— that was the East Coast, um, presence for them.

So that was your only programming, uh, commercial programming, uh, venture, sounds like?

It was the last one. Yeah, like I say, I had some very small-time ones before that. And my next computer that I owned after the Atari 400 was an Amiga, which I loved. But by the time I had an Amiga, you know, you had really slick games from companies like Cinemaware, and I don't think it even occurred to me that I might be able to program my own game. By that point, I had segued into writing and being a freelance writer. Yeah.

All right, so, all right, you mentioned a few other things. I don't know what order we should take this or what context, but you mentioned you attended the first public demo of VisiCalc. In a school cafeteria? So what was the context of that? Why were you there? Was it—

well, uh, this would— I guess this was probably— this was 1979, um, a little bit after my father got the TRS-80. He and my mother decided that maybe I should go to a private high school, and, uh, we drove around to a number of them in the Boston area. And at one of them, which was called the Commonwealth School in downtown Boston, somehow the fact I was interested in computers came up, and that the person who was leading us in a tour said, oh, we We have a computer lab here, which at the time was not a given. And they took me to it. And I went in and there was this kid a little bit older than me sitting at a computer. And he said, my name is Jonathan Rotenberg. I started this thing called the Boston Computer Society. And he told me about it. And the notion of a club for people who use computers was tremendously exciting. So I went to his meetings, which at the time were held in the cafeteria of the Commonwealth School. And I think at either the first or second one I attended, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston demonstrated VisiCalc. And I have to say that I was, even as a high school student with no great interest in math, I was blown away by it and thought it was quite remarkable. And was not particularly surprised when it went on to become so important. Um, but being part of the Boston Computer Society was really a formative thing for me because it grew really rapidly. And before too long, many thousands of people were attending its meetings. And, you know, Steve Jobs, um, did the East Coast debut of the Mac at a BCS meeting, which I didn't attend, although a couple of years ago I wrote about it. And I saw the launch of the Lisa. Um, I must have seen some Atari stuff. I certainly saw things like the launch of the Commodore VIC. Eventually, they filled Symphony Hall in Boston, and Steve Jobs did his East Coast debut of the NeXT computer there, which I went to. Wow.

Nice. By then, you're going to these things for work?

No, actually, at this point, I'm still a college student. I'm lucky enough now to have a job where tech companies come to me and demo stuff. Eventually, I did go to things like Steve Jobs keynotes. For work. But belonging to the Boston Computer Society in the '80s was just about as good as being a tech journalist in terms of having access to the most important people in technology and having them show you what they had built themselves. It was a really important thing back then that if a product was important, the people who created it came to the BCS and showed it to the members.

I'm wondering if You seemed like there was certainly a sense of excitement and like you saw VisiCalc and you knew this was going to be an important thing. Do you, as a tech journalist today, do you get that now?

Do you ever get that feeling or do you just like, "It's just another PDA or whatever." Sometimes, I mean, actually speaking of PDAs, whenever I think about the things I saw and was blown away by, I always think about the original Palm Pilot, which we saw before it was announced. And actually before it was called the Palm Pilot, it was called the Taxi when we saw it. And a few of my colleagues and I got a demo of it. And we came out of that meeting and said, this thing is really going to be important because they've hit the right price point and the right size. And it's way more usable than a Newton. And, you know, occasionally you see stuff like that, but not all that often. It's quite rare. And I was, I was blown away by that. I was blown away by VisiCalc. Um, and, uh, every once in a while I'm impressed by something, but it's pretty unusual. And of course there are some things I've seen before they're announced that I'm not particularly impressed by and they go on to be successful sometimes. And occasionally I guess I've seen stuff that I'm blown away by and it goes nowhere. But, um, I think it really was a sign of how impressive and innovative VisiCalc was because It's not very often in technology you see something which is pretty much without precedent. I mean, even something like the iPhone was just a really, really, really good smartphone. It was not an entirely new category of device.

Right. Can you give an example of something modern that you've been blown away by, whether or not it went anywhere, but something that gave you that feeling of—

I'm trying to think of this. I'm trying to think of anything. I mean, and I would not even bother to like consider stuff like Apple products because Apple products today, I mean, everybody is going over them obsessively. I'm trying to think if there's anything I saw that was from a low-profile company in recent years and, you know, remarkably enough, I mean, nothing is leaping to mind that went on to be transformative. It really is quite rare. Yeah.

All right. Uh, you met Scott Adams. Was that part of one of these Boston meetings?

Yeah. Oh, well, at— so Boston also had some really early computer conferences. They had something which I think was called something like, like the Northeast Computer Exhibition, which was downtown at the Hines Auditorium. And I went down there, probably on the subway. And again, you know, I'm trying to reconcile my fuzzy memories with reality. By the standards of the early '80s, it was a huge show with lots of booths, and Scott Adams was there. He had a booth that was designed to look like a castle. And I think—

Nice.

I think in old issues of Byte or Creative Computing, I saw a photograph of his castle booth pretty recently. And he had all his software. And this was at the point where I was still sort of flirting with trying to sell software. And I had a high school friend, Charles, who was a lot more successful at it than I was. and we had a sort of impromptu meeting with Scott Adams where he looked at our stuff and chose not to publish whatever I was showing him. Charles had a game called Pac-Droids, which maybe— I can't remember whether Adventure International had anything to do with that or not, but I always thought that Pac-Droids was like the ultimate name for a computer game in the early '80s because it combined Pac-Man Androids.

Right. Cool. All right, so now you're at Fast Company, and are you a staff member? Staff there?

Staff member? I'm the technology editor. We're headquartered in New York, but I'm based in San Francisco where a lot of the companies I write about are based.

Nice. What's awesome about that?

You know, it's a great place to work. When I worked for Time, there are lots of great things about working for an iconic publication like Time that everybody knows, but Time was owned by Time Inc., which was owned by Time Warner, so it was part of this behemoth of a publicly held company that was trying to figure out what the media world should be like in 2016. Fast Company is a small company. We're owned by one guy. We only do two things. We publish Fast Company and we publish Inc. magazine, which is our sister publication. It's just a nice place to work in that you have a lot of independence. You're able to follow your passions. I've written a fair amount about the history of technology for Fast Company and edited some other stories by people like Ben Jedwards. On the history of tech, and you don't need to seek permission or justify it. And essentially, if you cover a topic and people seem to like it, you're good. So I've done stuff— I've interviewed Regis McKenna about the earliest days of Apple for Fast Company, and he had kept the notebooks he took when he was formulating a marketing plan for Apple in 1976, and we were able to publish those, and that was very exciting. Uh, Benj Edwards has done some great stories for Fast Company. He did one on a company that Nolan Bushnell was involved in called ETAC, which developed a navigation system for the car in the 1980s before GPS even existed, and the maps were on cassette tapes. Uh, that was hugely popular for us. There really is an appetite for untold stories of tech history.

Yeah, you said before and just repeated that, that people always want stories about technology history. And why do you think that is?

Well, I think it's partially nostalgia. You know, if you owned an Atari 400 30 years ago, you're probably fond of that and you enjoy thinking about it. Uh, over the years I've written about stuff like OS/2, the Amiga still has its followers, the TRS-80, of course. Um, people are still passionate about this stuff and I think those computers matter to people. A lot more than modern ones. I mean, I do love my iPad, but I don't have an emotional attachment to it in the way I did to those machines back then. And I think that's generally true. And certainly if you have like a Dell computer today or a Lenovo, you probably, um, are not all that smitten with it, uh, right? And they're kind of a little bit generic compared to the machines back in the days when the industry was inventing this stuff. There are still a lot of untold stories, I have to say. There are, there are a handful of stories about tech history that people know, most of them involving Apple machines, but there's, there's still an awful lot of really interesting things that are not well covered. And, um, the great thing about tech industry— the tech industry is that it is still so young that a pretty high percentage of the people who invented the stuff are still with us and you can interview them. And that won't be true 10 or 20 years from now. And, and, uh, I'm excited by the fact that when I think about the stuff from the late '70s and '80s, I can often talk to those people. I did a story where I interviewed Dan Bricklin, although I should probably go back and interview him about starting VisiCalc, which I haven't done. I'm working on a story about another Boston Computer Society meeting I went to where Apple showed the Lisa, and I was able to make contact with the guy who did part of that demo. I'm really— a rare opportunity if you're writing about stuff 100 years ago or 500 years ago, you don't get to do that. And for now, we can still do it, right?

That's true. Nice. What haven't I asked you that I should have?

I'm trying to think, like, if there's any other significant things. I mean, I went to a lot of really early computer stores, uh, which were springing up in the Boston area. Um, there was one called Computer City, no relation to the later chain owned by Tandy, uh, where Charles, my friend, and I would go to. And I feel like we would like sometimes almost spend the entire day there and we would like hang out and read their magazines and use their computers. And oddly enough, they never told us to stop, but, uh, we went to Computer City. We went to, um, other really early chains. We spent a lot of time at early arcades. Again, I mean, this was all just sort of the normal part of being around 16 or 17 at the time.

Sure.

And I'm glad I have those memories.

Last question, I think. If you could send a message to the Atari, your fellow Atari 400 users who are still out there and listening to this, what would you tell them?

Well, in the case of the Atari 400, I would tell them never to let anybody make you feel bad about the fact you had an Atari 400. And I think generally speaking, the most significant fact about the Atari 400 was that it had maybe the worst keyboard in the history of computing, uh, because it was, it was flat and touch sensitive and really hard to type on. And, um, you know, the moment it comes up, people ask about that keyboard and Oddly enough, I don't remember having trouble with the keyboard, maybe because when you're programming, it is generally speaking not about the speed at which you type. So I, I don't think about that as an obstacle to using that computer. The main things I remember are the facts that, um, Ataris had the best graphics of their time and the best sound of their time. And really, the only significant difference between the Atari 400 and the Atari 800 was that the Atari 800 had a good keyboard and the 400 had a shabby one. But I couldn't have afforded an Atari 800 at the time, so it doesn't bother me that I didn't have one.

I can have what I need. Thank you, Harry.

Thank you, Kevin. This was fun.

If you enjoy these interviews and would like to contribute something, I encourage you instead to donate to one of our favorite organizations, the Internet Archive. At archive.org. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library with the stated mission of universal access to all knowledge. They've done incredible things to preserve computer history, including hosting thousands of programs in an in-browser Atari emulator, creating the Wayback Machine, and offering full-page scans of countless Atari computer books and magazines. Make your tax-deductible contribution at archive.org/donate.