February 28, 1988

AMAZING STORIES: Adam Osborne’s Paperback Software has laid off about 20 percent of its 50-person work force in an effort to keep the company’s profits on par with the competition.

“Statistics show that the software industry makes about $200,000 (in sales) per annum per employee,” says Osborne. “We were only doing about $100,000 per employee.”

Osborne is still embroiled in a year-old lawsuit with Lotus Development, which sued Paperback for allegedly infringing on Lotus 1-2-3’s copyright with VP Planner.

He tells a great story about a Lotus representative who came from Cambridge to examine VP Planner disks as part of disclosure for the suit.

“We went around the office picking up all the versions of VP Planner we could find, all the way back to day one, and dutifully carted them over to the attorney’s office in San Francisco,” says Osborne.

The Lotus rep — under the watchful eye of Paperback’s lawyer who made sure she didn’t mess with them — spent an entire day putting disks in the computer and typing in “VP Planner.” Each time she typed in “VP Planner,” she’d get back a message that read, “VP Planner is an illegal command.”

“She didn’t have the wit to look at the directory to see how to execute the program!” cackled Osborne.

Witless or not, Osborne says a few days later he got a “stinking irate letter” from Lotus, saying Paperback was trying to hide what was on the diskettes.

They straightened out the misunderstanding, but Osborne is even more leery than before of the legal shenanigans.

“Frankly, I can only conclude that whoever’s running the lawsuit for Lotus has just run amok.” BROWNOUT AT APPLE: Apple Computer may have finally gotten the message about its security problems this week.

After hearing about the leak of a 160-page document detailing a possible version of its upcoming laptop computer, the company is now printing confidential documents on brown paper so they can’t be photocopied. The journey of a 1,000 miles begins with a single step.

Although many things behind the scenes reeked to high heaven around the Big Leak, internal high jinks at Apple are right up there with the reekingest.

The company is on the war path to find the leak, even to the point of allegedly threatening the jobs of innocent people.

“Someone is going to be sacrificed unless we find out who did this,” one Apple guy was heard to say. Why not just line everyone up and break their kneecaps? Get it over with.

In addition, Apple personnel have used tactics like: “Gosh, if you’ll just tell us who gave you this document, we’ll make sure he gets the benefit of the best psychological minds at Stanford to help figure out why he’d do such a thing.”

Oh right, and I’ve got some great swamp land to sell you in Florida, too.

RIGHT ON TOP OF IT: Yeah, I could have let you know a little sooner that February was Engineer Month but I didn’t.

At least I’m in under the wire with news that two local engineers, Jane Evans of Hewlett-Packard and Lee Hornberger, manager of design analysis for Apple Computer, have just been elevated to Fellows of the Society for Women Engineers.

Evans, a longtime regional director of IEEE, was one of the first female electrical engineering grads at San Jose State University in 1965. She was also the first member of Tau Beta Pi (the Phi Beta Kappa of engineering) at San Jose State, and one of the first female engineers at H-P.

“When I was in school, I was one of only a handful of female engineering students,” says Evans. “Today, 15 percent to 20 percent of most entering EE students are women.”

She’s now a technical grants specialist, managing computer systems grants to universities.

Hornberger, who’s in Japan at the moment, returned to an industry post after developing a pioneering program at the University of Santa Clara designed to introduce high school women to all fields of engineering. It still serves as a model for other universities.

Fellows must be senior members for eight years or more, or members at large for 20 years or more.

And lest you think this is a sexist organization, SWE does have male members.

“As long as you promote the idea of women in engineering, we’re not discriminatory,” says Nancy Huelsmann, president of Santa Clara SWE chapter.

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Denise Caruso can be reached c/o The San Francisco Examiner, 110 Fifth St., San Francisco, CA 94103 or through MCI Mail (Denise Caruso).