Publisher:
Hayden BooksThis was the book that started everything for me in computer book publishing.
The short story is that Karen Whitehouse of Hayden Books called me to see if I was
interested in writing a book about using a Mac on the Internet. I checked out the
other three Internet books available at the time (a fourth one shipped before Internet
Starter Kit for Macintosh was published, making it one of the first Internet books
available) and agreed. I wrote the book, covering the Internet as a whole and the
specifics of setting up and using a Macintosh on the Internet, but the stroke of
genius came from David Rogelberg, then the publisher of Hayden and now my agent at
StudioB. David managed to get Apple to license
MacTCP to us, something which had been likened to pulling teeth from chickens.
When the book came out at the end of September in 1993, something became quite clear
to the Macintosh community. They could pay Apple $60 for MacTCP, assuming it could
be found for sale, or they could pay $30 for a useful book that just happened to
have MacTCP included on the disk. Needless to say, it wasn't a difficult decisions,
and thanks to word of mouth on the Internet, the initial slow seller (at the time,
the Internet was a minor niche market, and the Macintosh was also a niche market,
and combining the two was considered idiotic), suddenly took off like a rocket.
For a while, this book alone accounted for 20 percent of Hayden's sales. It was a
big deal, and it wildly exceeded my expectations.
At some point, several months after it had become clear that we had a best-seller
on our hands, I was telling Tonya that Ed Krol's Internet book, "The Whole Internet
Catalog and User's Guide" had reportedly sold 100,000 copies. In fact, it probably
hadn't at that point, since the number came from the cover (and as I later learned,
most sales numbers on covers are deceptive at best). Upon hearing that it was conceivable
that Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh could sell that many copies, she announced
firmly that if it did, she was quitting her job supporting Word 5.1 at Microsoft.
It did, and she did, on a most auspicious day in 1994 - April 1st, which aside from
being April Fools Day, was also the weekend of the Daylight Savings Time clock change
and also Good Friday.
Another interesting fact about Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh was that it marked
the very first flat-rate SLIP account (SLIP was the precursor of PPP, which is now
used by most Internet service providers). We were searching for an Internet provider
to include with the book, since we had MacTCP and InterSLIP on the disk, and a deal
with a provider would make it a complete solution. After striking out numerous times,
I was chatting with my provider, Northwest Nexus in Bellevue, Washington. I thought
they wouldn't be interested, since they were so local, but Ed Morin of Northwest
Nexus said he could think of worse problems than having customers from other locations.
He also thought we could set it up so people paid only a flat monthly fee for the
access. He was right, but it took a four-hour telephone call with working back and
forth to get it working. Still, we believe that those $22.50 per month flat-rate
accounts (plus long distance phone charges if you weren't near Seattle) were the
first flat-rate commercial SLIP accounts in the world. Now, of course, a flat-rate
PPP account is the standard used by thousands of Internet service providers.
Basically, Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh changed our lives, and as I've learned
from the email I've received over the years, it's changed the lives of untold numbers
of readers by introducing them to the Internet. To this day, I meet Internet-savvy
users who would never consider buying an Internet book and they confide quietly that
they first got on the Internet using Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh.