I think the problem is that in any sane, normal family you’re all equals, and so hierarchy doesn’t work very well in that. You’re used to calling each other out every time somebody gets a little uppity or too big for their britches or whatever and that’s what siblings are for, they’re supposed to do that. And so our solution usually was to fight; yell at each other – which terrified the rest of the company: “oh, the company’s going under” and so forth, but of course we had forgotten about it five minutes later. We had very short memories in my family – it’s congenital, even now I can hardly remember my name. It didn’t hurt us; we did learn to tone it down because it was scaring the staff. So we stopped doing that. Also three is easier than two, because there’s always an arbiter, there’s always a third person – usually it was Cathy, my sister, who would say, “Would you guys just cut it out? You both are sounding ridiculous,” and then you stop.

So I can’t say we didn’t fight – we did fight – but generally we worked together well, and we were all smart in different ways and that helped, we could find ways to work together. We also moved around inside the company – we didn’t always do the same things. I couldn’t code after the first year really, because you can’t code and answer the telephone, you can’t have your attention span broken constantly and yet, we didn’t have enough people that you could just go lock yourself away in a room. So that ended up terminating my coding career for about twenty years. Although I do it now, but that’s to keep the Alzheimers away.

Also, Gary, Cathy and I had worked together before; we built houses up in Maine and stuff like that, and so we had some experience in working with each other. And, because I was the oldest I got to be the boss and they did not like that, and so they constantly told me when I was behaving like a so-and-so. But we’re going to play tennis tomorrow morning – it’s a permanent thing, being a family as far as I’m concerned. And Cathy would be here with us except unfortunately she passed away a long time ago.

By most accounts you treated your software developers really well. Was this a personal or a business decision?

I don’t think we overtly thought about it as treating people well, it was how we were raised. We were also not in business to be in business – we were originally in business to get free software from other people and make a living, put food on the table. We liked hanging out with one another – we hung out with most of our competitors, we would go on these whitewater rafting trips with seventy or eighty people and they were mostly from other companies, so it was a time when this whole industry was so new that when you found people in it, it was a joy. I remember I did one sales trip our first year – cold calls give me the sweats – but I drove across the country 3000 miles and stopped in every town, found a computer store, loaded up software on their machines and they’d come out all upset that someone was touching their devices and then they would buy from me. I will say that about half the stores I ended up staying at their houses at night, because once they found another true believer – and these people were not shopkeepers, they were computer geeks who had a store so they could hang around the computers all the time, and they really didn’t want customers because they got in the way of their ability to enjoy the merchandise.