Bob Wallace
Bob Wallace, creator of one of the first major shareware programs, PC-Write, died at his San Rafael home on Sept. 20. The cause was not immediately known. He was 53.
Wallace attended Brown University, where he worked with a group of researchers on a project known as Fress, the file retrieval and editing system. Many ideas common to computers today came out of the Fress group, which designed early text editing and word processign programs. Their vision was of a world of linked documents which Ted Nelson, another member of the group, named hypertext.
Wallace "was one of the key designers of Fress," Andries van Dam told The New York Times. Van Dam was another member of the group and is now vice president of research at Brown. "He had this very gentle flower child demeanor and philosophy," van Dam added.
He went to work for a company then called Micro Soft in 1978, when it was in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was the ninth employee. His first project was to connect a computer to an IBM Selectric typewriter so Micro Soft could print its software manuals.
After developing an early version of Pascal, he left in 1983 to start his own company, Quicksoft, to sell PC-Write using a plan he called commission shareware. The term shareware had already been used by Jay Lucas in InfoWorld to describe software that was distributed free or for a small copying charge. Wallace sold the program disk for $10, and allowed users to register and receive a manual for $75.
Although he was unsure whether the scheme would work, within a few years Quicksoft had 32 employees and annual revenue of more than $2 million.
He was the first Microsoft employee to leave the company with stock. At one point, his wife said, his original 400 shares were worth $15 million.
Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, remembered Wallace as "a gentle soul who was soft-spoken, but creative, persistent and meticulous in his programming and thinking."
Wallace was known for participating in legendary pranks with Bill Gates. They once broke into a construction site together and drove bulldozers around, almost running over Gates' Porsche.
Wallace also had a long-time interest in psychedelic drugs, and founded Mind Books in 1996 to provide a source for books on the topic. In 1998 he founded the Promind Foundation to support research and education about psychedelics.
Jim Seymour
Jim Seymour, an influential technical columnist for PC Week and PC Magazine, died October 8 in Austin, Texas, where he lived.
He was born Rogers James Seymour, and worked briefly as a jazz musician and freelance photographer but became fascinated with computers even before the first IBM PC in 1981.
When computer magazines started to appear, he became a columnist, writing about the PC as a tool. He had a down-home, folksy style and shunned the hype and exaggeration surrounding the industry to focus on the usefulness of this new tool to businesses and individuals.
He frequently cut through promotional hyperbole with blunt, even acerbic observations.
He had a major influence on Dell Computer, introducing the young Michael Dell (who assembled his first computers in his dorm room at the University of Texas in Austin) to Lee Walker, who became the first president of Dell. The New York Times quoted Dell as saying, "Jim shared his wisdom more generously than we could have ever hoped for. His guidance helped shape our early success."
Seymour was the first editor of PC Computing, which was a finalist in the National Magazine Awards for general excellence. His wife is a former editor of the same magazine.
Keith W. Uncapher
Keith W. Uncapher, who oversaw the engineering work that led to the Internet, died October 10. He had a heart attack while flying from Washington to Los Angeles.
Uncapher joined the RAND Corporation in 1950 and became head of its computer science division. He was a hands-on engineer and had a reputation for being the only one who could make RAND's Johnniac computer work properly.
Another strength was in recruitment of skilled and talented personnel. One of his engineers, Paul Baran, specified the fundamentals of bundling and transmitting data, later known as packet switching. Baran's work was used to establish the Arpanet, which then became the Internet.
Uncapher left RAND in 1972 to start the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. Under his leadership, the Institute developed the Internet's name system, including the suffixes .com, .edu, and .net. He also oversaw a project, still in existence, which tried to develop cheaper ways of making silicon chips.
When he left USC in 1987, he helped found the Corporation for National Research Initiatives in Reston, Virginia, which researches information infrastructure.
Born in Denver in 1922, Uncapher served in the Navy during World War II, working in aviation maintenance and radar technology. He received a degree in electrical engineering from California Polytechnic University in 1950 and joined RAND after graduation.
