“I worked at Stanford and Xerox while they were doing experiments with graphical user interfaces,” said Charles. “That’s no surprise; a lot of the best people in the industry did, and those that didn’t could often wrangle a tour. You see the fruits of their labor every time you boot up your Dell.”

“So you copied your interface from Xerox?” James asked, adjusting his microphone.

“I was inspired,” Charles said evenly. “Lots of people were. In my spare time, I began coding a new UI. My idea was to combine the flexibility of a command-line interface with the user-friendliness of a Xerox-style GUI in an environment that could operate and multitask in less than 200k of address space. I needed to design new hardware to run it, but with the right friends it wasn’t so hard.”

“And then you decided to strike out on your own.”

“That’s the thing. A lot of people say that, but it was really the manufacturer that approached us. Ferris Computing had made a bundle with its ‘portable’ machines and then shot itself in the foot–they were looking for a next-generation machine to buy and bring to market quickly. I told Allen Ferris that my team could have our machine ready to ship by summer, 1985.”

James flipped to an earlier page and checked his notes. “June 3, 1985–the Ferris Buddy LT.”

“That’s right. We pre-sold over 50,000 of them. 256 color display, portable, two 5.25″ floppy drives, and a sound card. For $1800 there wasn’t a better deal on the market. Hell, we were doing stuff that Apple, IBM and Amiga wouldn’t get around to until ’87 or ’88.”

“Why did it fail, then?” James asked. “The figures I have here said that Ferris Computing only sold 10,000 units and declared bankruptcy in January 1987.”