Publisher:
Hayden BooksOf course, there was a minor problem, which was that I didn't have a Windows machine at the time, nor did I know much of anything about Windows and the Internet. A co-author was definitely
necessary.
My friend Ed Morin at Northwest Nexus recommend
Cory Low and Mike Simon (and I'm not entirely sure how he knew them). They'd just
left Asymmetrix and formed their own consulting firm, Conjungi
Corporation.As it turned out later, the advance they got for the book was what
enabled them to start Conjungi.Overall, Internet Starter Kit for Windows was a little spotty. It had most of my original text about the Internet, but where the discussion became specific to the Macintosh or Macintosh software, Cory and Mike replaced it with Windows-specific discussion. Of course, it's hard for the book to sound like it was written by a single person at that point.
However, it didn't seem to matter. Internet Starter Kit for Windows was a tremendous best-seller, even outselling the the first edition of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh. The world was hungry for the Internet and even though we were a little late on getting the Windows version out there, there was still plenty of demand.
Eventually, Hayden put Internet Starter Kit for Windows into a box and released it into the software channel as Internet Starter Kit for Windows 1.0. That sold equally as well, since it had all the software you needed to connect a Windows machine to the Internet along with the flat-rate SLIP account that helped popularize the Macintosh version.
Something that I always found interesting was that I received hundreds of times more email messages commenting on the Macintosh versions of the books than the Windows versions. I'm certainly much better known in the Macintosh world, but I know how many copies of the Windows books were sold, and I'm still surprised that so few Windows users wrote in.