File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-23.012, message 11


Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 11:17:45 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: "That's the Ultimate Reward"


For Inventor of Eudora, Great Fame, No Fortune

January 21, 1997

By Jo Thomas

URBANA, Ill. -- A hedgehog ran under the sofa in Steve and Cindy 
Dorner's living room, dodging children and visitors, while two large 
tropical birds gave a running commentary. Out of range of the noise, 
Dorner, the man who invented Eudora, the e-mail software used by 18 
million people, was at work in his backyard office, intense and, as 
always, alone.

At 34, Dorner has to his credit not only Eudora, but also PH, an E-
mail and telephone directory program used by hundreds of universities 
and corporations all over the world.

On a cold winter morning, Dorner brewed tea in the tiny office that 
used to be his woodworking shop and explained how an inventor of 
software used by millions could end up neither rich nor famous.

He was working at the time, in the 1980's, on the computing staff of 
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which gave both the 
Eudora and PH software away. He was paid a salary, nothing more.

"To have other people use and enjoy your program is probably what a 
certain breed of programmer is really interested in," Dorner said. 
"That's the ultimate reward."

Growing up in St. Charles, Ill., he once wanted to write fiction, but he 
ended up writing computer software instead. When he needed a name 
for the electronic mail system he was designing, a short story by 
Eudora Welty came to mind. It was called "Why I Live At the P.O."

Working on e-mail day and night, he said, "I felt like I lived at the 
post office," so he named his program Eudora and transposed the short 
story title into the slogan "Bringing the P.O. to Where You Live." It 
was the only hint he gave, and the name elicited "all kinds of strange 
etymologies." Some thought it was a combination of Greek letters. 
Others thought he had named it for himself -- the "dor" in Eudora 
representing the "Dor" in Dorner.

"If I'd had any inkling that this program was going to be as successful 
as it has been," he said, "I would not have named it Eudora. Not 
because I don't think it's a good name, but because I feel presumptuous 
having named my program after a living person. I feel ----." He 
hesitated. "Embarrassed." He has never spoken with Welty.

Her agent, Timothy Seldes, said the author had been "pleased and 
amused" to hear of the tribute.

But comments about the name of the program paled in comparison 
with what Dorner calls his "snake mail." He had used a picture of a 
rooster with an envelope in its beak to announce new mail on his 
software program, but he needed something else to indicate that no 
mail was waiting. He decided on a snake. "The idea was that the 
rooster would have brought your mail, but the snake ate it first," he 
said. "It was a friendly little snake."

The hate mail flooded in. The hate mail flooded in. "I have had any 
number of people tell me they are afraid of snakes, and it's horrible for 
me to put this snake in the program," he said. Others were irate at 
what they saw as a slander on the good name of snakes. "I think that's 
amusing, because we have snakes, and I know they're nice," Dorner 
said. A large snake lay in a glass case just behind Dorner's chair, 
stashed there temporarily to keep it from trying to catch the Dorners' 
newest exotic pet, a sugar-glider -- a small, hopping marsupial from 
New Zealand.

In fiction and in life, the University of Illinois has been a creative 
center for computers and software. It was the birthplace of HAL, the 
computer in Arthur C. Clarke's novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and in 
recent years it not only became home to the National Center for 
Supercomputing Applications but also the birthplace of Mosaic, the 
browser that transformed the use of the Internet.

Mark Andreessen, the University of Illinois undergraduate who 
conceived Mosaic at the same time Dorner was working on Eudora, 
went on to develop the Netscape Navigator and became a 
multimillionaire at age 24 when the Netscape Communications 
Corporation went public. There was no such Cinderella story for 
Dorner. He left the university staff in 1992, only because he wanted to 
keep working on Eudora.

Qualcomm Inc., a communications company based in San Diego, 
signed licensing agreements with the university for the development 
rights to Eudora and later for the trademark, paying a sum a university 
official described as "not huge -- more than $100,000 and less than $1 
million." Dorner became a principal engineer at Qualcomm, working 
mostly on Eudora. But he did not get a cent in royalties, because the 
inventions of Eudora and PH were considered work-for-hire by the 
university. Nor did he move to California.

"Cindy is not interested in moving to San Diego," he explained. So he 
arranged to commute by telephone, and moved his office into their 
home. At first, he worked in a windowless bomb shelter, 8 feet by 8 
feet, built under the house in the 1950's and entered through a trap 
door. After two years, he moved  into the woodworking shop, which 
has windows and heat. He kept a time clock on his computer, at first to 
prove to himself that he wasn't working too little and, later, to prove to 
his wife that he wasn't working too much. "After four years of working 
at home," he said, "I never want to move back to an office."

Charley Kline, one of the creators of the CU-SeeMe audio-visual 
conferencing program on the Internet, counts himself among Dorner's 
admirers.

"Steve is one of those people who can still program," Kline said. "It's a 
young person's skill. It requires intense concentration. To do a good 
job, you have to have your mind wrapped around the whole program. 
It's very easy to get distracted. You do things and forget about other 
things and end up with bugs. It's like running a marathon. You have to 
be constantly focused on the goal."

The creative part of writing software, Dorner said, "is figuring out the 
real problem people are trying to solve and the best way to solve the 
problem, which is not always the way they suggest."

He gets about 100 e-mail messages a day and says that having 18 
million users "is very gratifying, but it can also make me feel a little 
hunted sometimes."

"I'm the one who has to, in the final analysis, deal with every single 
problem, and I tend to concentrate on what's wrong," Dorner said. 
"There are days when I think that every one of those 18 million people 
thinks I'm wrong, stupid and out to get them."

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company



     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005