For Those Who Marched with Martin Luther King on August 28, 1963

his daddy never hear the splash

willie james howard 15

sure can sing

he has a sweet round face

good-natured too

for a black boy sweeping floors

at the live oak florida dime store 1944

during the war we can agree was fought for justice and liberty

oh willie know alright

he know the rules

but cyndy goff she 15 too

she smile at him

silky blond hair eyes sparkling blue

willie know the rules

he know

he shouldn't write that note

i love your name

i love your voice

for a sweetheart you are my choice

and for this tiny bit of poetry

willie paid a terrible inflated price

cyndy goff she show willie's note to her daddy phil

her daddy phil show it to two more good ole boys

we forget their names

it doesn't matter now

they come for willie

they drag him off his front porch his momma lula

please oh god what my willie done

she clings to him

til they stick that pistol in her face

yes they come for willie

they fling him in the backseat of phil's old chevrolet

drive over to the bond howell lumber company

where willie's daddy work

james howard you'd better come with us

that boy of yourn in a heap of trouble

so james howard comes out

he tries talking to willie

son he say

but one of the ole boys shout shut up nigger

or we put a bullet in that boy's head

so james howard gets in

and they all drive down the old red clay road

that winds through mossy old oak trees

way down to the suwanne river

far far away

wha de old folks stay

and phil ask willie

did you or did you not write that note boy answer me boy

yes sir willie say

with rope they bind willie's hands behind his back

they bind his legs they force his daddy to haul willie out the car

they force his daddy to stand willie up on an embankment 

near the waters edge

phil ask willie

you know the penalty for what you done boy answer me boy

yes sir willie say

right then james howard know he'll find no mercy today in these white men

good southern christian white men

they do kindly oblige him bid his son adieu

willie i can't do nothin for you now

i'm just glad i belong to a church and can pray for you

then phil raise his gun

bullet or river boy bullet or river

bawling terrified willie stagger back

he stumble he fall

his daddy scream and scream

his daddy never hear the splash

good southern christian white men

they drive james howard back to the lumber yard

so he can finish his shift

before he come home to lula

all he say to lula

willie not coming home

--David Bunnell

Fathers Day Poem 2013

shouldn’t there be a fathers day for fathers lost

like the old bald man with shaky hands

who sat on the roof with me that sunny perfect october afternoon

listening to the sony transistor radio as brooklyn dodger after brooklyn dodger

went down swinging even jackie robinson couldn’t get a hit

even jackie robinson couldn’t get to first base

dad you explained to me baseball history was going down in yankeetown

and yes I’ve been a yankee fan since 1956

I wonder what you would think if you knew don larsen’s

jersey was auctioned on ebay for $756,000

more dollars than you made all those years banging away

on your old remington typewriter at the newspaper office

the place you gave your soul to

but I’m not complaining because you took me along

you taught me everything I know

except spelling because you always corrected my copy

that never stopped me though I thank you not just for the skills

the hard work focus fair play but more for the standing up for oneself

you screamed go to hell and slammed down the phone

when disagreeable readers called you at home

I’m still really sorry dad I really did want to win a pulitzer prize

before you died a way I thought to repay you though I never did and never will

I called you every fathers day

until you were gone

then I called my father-in-law the grocery store man

yes even after I was divorced I still called him on fathers day

I called him dad I reminded him

how we sat in his backyard after the barbeque was over

eating more corn on the cob

dad I’d say you always had the sweetest corn the fattest steaks

the most gracious style for a father of four rambunctious girls

the most beautiful lebanese wife this side of the red sea

who I still call mom

how we also had fun eating thin slices of frozen raw liver

followed by shots of old crow on new years eve

which he claimed was a middle eastern tradition some tradition

you made this up didn’t you  

I can still hear your chuckle

so swell to have known someone with such a chuckle

you taught me life can be joyful if you just look at it that way

the first fathers day when both my dads were gone

I cried thinking how dignified they looked in their caskets

one dad with double breasted suit colorful wide striped silk tie

the other in crisp army uniform that still fit perfectly

the greatest American generation returned to earth

destroyers of nazis

so naturally I turned to my sons and sons-in-law

determined to be a good father just like my dads were to me

I called jeff in utah

thank you jeff my granddaughters in utah have such a hard working dad

who keeps bread on the table

I called charles in california thank you charles my granddaughters

in california have such a fun dad

who commands respect and takes no prisoners

and I called john in missouri

thank you john all those grandchildren you’ve adopted more than I can ever hope

to keep track of

have such a big hearted dad

but now its 2013 and this particular fathers day is simply too much to bear

I once naively thought nothing could be more sad when old dads die

but now I know it’s sadder still when young dads die

hey charles where are you

why did you go so soon what’s with this cancer you had

you were the one dad who lived nearby who I could count on

for basketball games late nights at the bar hanging out

in my backyard always there for your girls you never missed

the violin recitals you took them to capoeira made sure they behaved

charles you were so creative coming up with nicknames

ruglebug for jamaica, inzahzi-ali for xaire,

t2 for the dog jk for your mom-in-law jackie

you should have made it big in some naming agency

nicknames for everyone but me you simply called me david

from you I always felt such great respect

but thank you anyway for sharing mutual adulation for cassius clay

rumble in the jungle you said you hung out with the champ in miami or was it la

thrilla in Manila float like butterfly slay the big ugly bear and we all know the rest

i imagine you must be roaming around some heavenly man-fatherland

with my dear son aaron

who at age 26 went to sleep in his fancy room at the waldorf astoria and never woke up

with your brother eddie cut down at 19

our friend scuba-diver-brad recently drowned at sea

three potential dads checked out early

no I don’t think I’ll bother this father’s day

grilling burgers or going to the ole ball game oh I’ll make a few calls

but mostly i’ll just reflect on all those fathers

and would be fathers lost

A Night at the Museum Where Old Computers Refuse to Die

Close-up from Group Photo taken during the Living Computer Museum reception. Paul Allen is seated
on the upper left, next to Bill Gates. I'm in the middle with the striped shirt. See complete photo below.

If there is a corner of heaven reserved for computer geeks, it must be very similar to Paul Allen’s Living Computer Museum, located in a 3-story warehouse south of downtown Seattle. 

One wonderful evening in April, I found myself milling about this museum with 150 technology pioneers, old-timers, game-changers, the people who laid the foundation of today’s digital reality, at a festive reception hosted by Paul Allen and his co-founder at Microsoft, Bill Gates.

Stuffed full of ancient, historical computers that have been painstakingly restored, the museum is a grand testament to the history, the glory of computers, how they evolved, and how they changed the world. Here you will find some of the few if not only actual working, fully functional mainframe and minicomputers as well as an extensive collection of the earliest personal computers (also “up and running”).

While I don’t know much about most of the pre-personal computers, it was nonetheless impressive to see a working Xerox Sigma 9, circa 1971, and to learn it was used to send the very first message over the ARPAnet, which is the precursor of today’s Internet.

And amusing to know that there once was a computer called the “XKL TOAD-1,” TOAD standing for “ten on a desk,” because it could scale down to desktop size. Introduced in more recent computer history, 1999, my guess is the manufacturer, “Large Systems Group,” figured they had a Macintosh killer. 

Altair 8800, World's 1st Personal Computer

Because my career spans the personal computer era, I was naturally more interested in the personal computers. In my office at MITS during the late 1970s, I had an Altair 8800 interfaced to a teletype machine, a setup similar to the one at the museum, and I still have an Altair stashed away somewhere. (Occasionally my wife asks me, “That old computer you have in the basement, do you think it’s worth anything?”)

Each personal computer in Paul Allen’s collection evoked memories. Seeing the Radio Shack TRS-80 with its cassette tape drive reminded me of the days when I was writing instructional manuals for computer games and how cumbersome it was to load programs into early PCs using cassette tapes. 

The first IBM Personal Computer brought back a flood of images, emotions related to the startup of PC Magazine, mailbags full of subscription cards delivered to my house near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, how the magazine grew to over 400 pages by its second issue, how we fought with our financial backer, how he sold PC Magazine out from under us, the resulting lawsuits, PC World, clashing media moguls Bill Ziff and Pat McGovern. 

I couldn’t look at the first Macintosh without thinking of Steve Jobs, the great opportunity he gave me to create Macworld magazine, how fast he walked and how difficult it was to keep up with him, his 30th birthday party, Ella Fitzgerald singing “Happy Birthday, Steve,” my teenage daughters stuffing the elevators at the Saint Francis Hotel with balloons.

My god, I thought, even if I was the only person here, I could spend hours and hours in this incredible place.

But then I was not the only one. As fascinating as the computers and related displays were, the assembled collection of digital luminaries was even more special. A one-time happening, a “be-in” for nerds, this particular human configuration will never be repeated, ever. I needed to pull myself away from the machines and mingle. 

Byte Shop Founder Paul Terrell 

About then I bumped into Paul Terrell, yes, the Paul Terrell, founder of the first chain of computer stores, the BYTE Shops, the man who took a chance on two scruffy, barefooted hippies named Jobs and Wozniak by agreeing to sign a purchase order for 50 Apple I computers, their first sale, the beginning of their company. 

Ed Roberts as depicted on a Living Computer
Museum Poster. Ed died on April 1, 2010

Terrell was just as I remembered him, ruddy faced, exuberant, and bubbling over with stories about the early days. We laughed and laughed about how MITS CEO Ed Roberts, sometimes referred to as “the Father of the Personal Computer Industry,” had me phone Terrell to tell him MITS was cutting off the BYTE Shops from receiving any more Altair Computers because Terrell had the audacity to carry competing products.

I was 25, MITS’s marketing director, and I thought this was crazy, why couldn’t the BYTE Shops carry competing products? Retail stores routinely carry competing products, but Roberts wasn’t having any of this. In 1976, if you wanted to sell Altair Computers, they had to be exclusive. As for add-ons, memory boards, and the like, they could come from other companies, but only if we pre-approved them. 

At the time, of course, Terrell wasn’t so sanguine, he was pissed. So he made deals to sell everything but Altairs‚ IMSAI, SOL, Apple I, Commodore PET computers, and this only made the BYTE Shops more successful while MITS went into a steep decline, was bought by a company no one had heard of, PERTEC, and by 1980 dissolved into a puddle like the Wicked Witch.

I found myself standing next to the great engineer, Lee Felsenstein, both of us admiring the SOL Computer he designed with its beautiful tactile keyboard that was so much ahead of its day. Did he remember hand-delivering a SOL to me at the Albuquerque office of Personal Computing magazine? Yes, he did, and Lee even recalled how we went out drinking afterwards.

It was a kick for me to describe to Felsenstein how the SOL became my very first word processor. “I loaded Electric Pencil into the SOL using its cassette recorder, a process that took several minutes and invariably failed once or twice,” I explained, “then I typed in my document and after making all the corrections I sat an IBM Selectric typewriter next to the SOL and typed the document over again.”

Lee looked at me as if I was nuts, but I pointed out his was still an improvement over just using the typewriter! 

With Bill Gates. The cartoonish poster behind my head
was the first Microsoft ad, which I produced in 1977.

By now, Bill Gates had arrived and was standing near the early Microsoft exhibit reading his first resume, which is posted on one of the Living Computer Museum walls next to Paul Allen’s first resume. Written in 1974 with identical formats, the resumes reveal both boys were looking for a job as a Systems Programmer or Systems Analyst, and both listed their previous salary as $15,000 a year.


Along with their ages, the resumes strangely include their physical dimensions: Bill was 18, 5'10" and weighed in at 135 pounds while Paul was 21, 5'11" and 185 pounds. 


I chatted with Bill for a few minutes and asked him if he would pose for a photo with me so that I could impress my granddaughters that I actually do know him, a topic of some dispute on the home front. 

Bob Frankston, David Bunnell, Lee Felsenstein and Captain Crunch

Next, I hung out awhile with Bob Frankston, co-creator of the world’s first electronic spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, the program that got the personal computer into the business world. We were joined by John Draper, famously known as “Captain Crunch,” who along with Steve Wozniak invented “the little blue box” for cheating phone companies out of what were then egregious long-distance charges. Ironic but fitting for the evening, one man made personal computers legitimate for business, the other invented hacking. 

The night went on like this. Roger Melen recalled the great story of the infamous “Dazzler,” the aptly named circuit board he invented to interface the Altair to a color monitor, thereby displaying stunning, kaleidoscopic colors, akin to giving your computer LSD. Left running in the window of the world’s first computer store, Arrow Computing on Pico Avenue in Santa Monica, it literally caused a traffic jam because people slowed up, stopped even, just to look at it. The Santa Monica police told Dick Heiser, the owner of the store, to take it out of the window or turn it off.

And Dick Heiser was there, of course. We chuckled about his quote in a 1976 issue of Computer Notes where he said it “wasn’t enough to be optimistic” about the future of personal computers, you had to be “wildly optimistic.” What an understatement that turned out to be! 

Jim Edlin and I started PC Magazine

My co-founder at PC Magazine, Jim Edlin, and I were treated to a few surreal moments with David and Betsy Ahl, the husband-wife editors of Creating Computing who were called in by Ziff-Davis Publishing to salvage PC Magazine after I quit and took all the employees with me to start PC World. I told David and Betsy they were “lucky” our lawyers instructed us to not damage anything as we went out the door because that was our inclination. 

“But you changed the map,” Betsy said. And she was right, we did change the map, which was the guide to where all the articles and ads were supposed to be placed in the upcoming issue. That was the last thing we did before walking out the door. Harmless mischief, really, but this was 30 years ago and I had forgotten about it.

The ensuing litigation was at the time the largest lawsuit in California, both sides claimed to be seriously aggrieved, we basically hated each other, but here we were cheerfully now recalling the incident about the map, looking back at the times of our young lives when we could do anything, when nothing stopped us, the days when we exceeded all reasonable expectations.

There’s more, of course, I could go on and on. Out of the 150 people I must have spent a moment or two with half of them and some of these moments were just as amusing (in my mind at least) as the ones above. But hopefully I captured the essence of it, a night at the Museum where Old Computers Refuse to Die, a night for the ages.

Thank you, Paul Allen.

Overture: Flying Upside Down

Drawing by Linda Harrison

In January 1975, the personal computer was born and I started flying upside down. Everything I knew, every experience I had, before this moment in time was suddenly irrelevant. My life changed completely and forever.

For the next 25 years I soared, tipped my wings, looped, spun out of control, nose-dived, nearly crashed, actually crashed, put myself back together, soared again, crashed again, soared again. I launched magazines, websites, online radio stations, TV programs, conferences, tradeshows, book imprints, software and Internet companies-- most often without the aid of business plans, because, hey, who has time for planning. I hung out with billionaires and soon to be billionaires. 

Profiles and photos of me appeared in The New York Times, LA Times, US Today, The Wall Street Journal, Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle and too many trade publications to mention. I was frequently on national TV and spoke at conferences around the world. I make millions. I gave away millions. I lost millions. 

I worked hard and played hard, raced sports cars, lived in mansions, left ridiculously large tips in fancy restaurants, drank far too many martini’s, had girl friends, left my family, was busted for smoking crack, went to jail, recovered, returned to my wife, bought a ranch in Colorado, stocked it with wild horses and buffaloes, started a community computer center for poor people, joined the board of the ACLU, and rescued my son from Hollywood only to lose him forever in a Waldorf Astoria Hotel room.

During this time I observed and participated in virtually every technological innovation from the first personal computer (the Altair 8800) to the first portable computer (the Osborne One), to the first spreadsheet (VisiCalc) to the IBM PC, the Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, Interactive CDROM and multimedia, the beginnings of the biotechnology industry, the Internet, the broswer wars, search engines, the Dot Com bubble and bust, Web 2.0, and social networks. 

My colleagues and acquaintances included inventive geniuses, unlucky dreamers who let themselves be royally screwed, megalomaniacs, ruthless empire builders, the real pioneers and prospectors, the deserving and accidental billionaires, the ones who should have made it but didn’t, and the one’s who did make it even though they had no real talent. 

Some of the characters among them the “Father of the Personal Computer,” Ed Roberts, Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, The two Steve’s from Apple, the visionary inventor of hypertext, Ted Nelson,  Gary Kildall, Lee Feldstein, Adam Osborn, Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston, Howard Reingold, John Brockman, John Sculley, John-Louis Gassee, Mitch Kapor, Bill Ziff, Pat McGovern, Ted Leonsis, Steve Case, John Doerr, Stuart Alsop, Jerry Yang, Esther Dyson, Heidi Roisen, Tim Draper, Dave Winer, Trip Hawkins, Richard Saul Wurman, Jaron Lanier, John Brockman, Robert Swanson, Eric Schmidt, Larry Ellison, Meg Whitman, and the list goes on.

Those were heady days. Sometimes I was in control, other times I flew autopilot. Either way it was full throttle. I was boring holes into the sky.