Peter Norton Part V: The Contractor's Dilemma

But a programmer's life, solitary as it was, was not isolated enough for Peter, with the computer industry booming, most of his friends were striking out on their own, either as freelance programmers or as consultants.

Peter simply "lacked the guts, the gumption" to make the move himself. He felt "like a puppy" watching all the big dogs strike out on their own.

Finally, after several years of listening to him lament his lack of nerve, one of Peter's friends handed him a contract job and told him "to put up or shut up."

Peter put up: He handled the job easily. But when the job ran out, late in 1981, he was back in the same old bind. He simply didn't have the nerve to make "cold calls" to drum up another freelance job for himself.

It might have been back to the same old grind except for one curious coincidence. He'd been playing with a newly released product: the first IBM personal computer, which appeared in the fall of that year. To learn the system, he'd written a set of small programs that made the computer both easier and safer to use. Now that he faced the prospect of taking a regular job, it occurred to him that he might bundle these programs together and try to sell them. What do you suppose he called this bundle?

Excerpted from
The Great American Idea Book: How to Make Money from Your Ideas for Movies, Music, Books, Inventions, Businesses and Almost Anything Else!
Authors: Bob Coleman & Deborah Neville
Copyright: 1993;1995
All Rights Reserved