The Making of CPU Wars
Glossary of Terms
Summary
CPU Wars is an epic set in 1980 about a time when IBM, then successful in ruling the computer industry with a non-interactive batch-centric computer paradigm, was at war with upstart Digital Equipment Corporation who introduced minicomputers and interactive terminals. While technology and business strategies have changed, many of the concepts expressed herein as fiction (including computer viruses, a world wide network, and the displacement of workers by computers and robots) have now come to pass. Fortunately, companies have not had to actually physically fight, but imagine the possibilities...!
Rating: Politically Incorrect for 1990's, includes words like "hell"; some drawings may be considered sexist, but that was the way things were in the 70's .
When I published this in 1980, I was a bit worried about potential libel suits from IBM, since the parody is so thinly disguised. However, in 1984, Jerry Falwell, the Fundamentalist minister sued Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler for libel for a parody -- a lawsuit that ultimately went to the Supreme Court and secured First Amendment protection for parodies targeted at public figures!
A boon for CPU Wars and all the future artwork aimed at poking fun without malice. This newfound freedom of expression along with the enlightenment from civil rights for Afro-Americans to women to everyone has had the unintended consequence of a conservative backlash toward "political correctness" -- i.e. we can't talk about anything that might prove offensive to someone, therefore we can't talk about anything controversial or potentially funny at all. The truth is that humor is subjective and usually someone is the brunt of every joke. My editorial point is that we all need to laugh at ourselves, not take everything so seriously, if we want to be balanced human beings.
Anyone can see that I am not a fan of monopolies. I think it stifles innovation. One company can stifle innovation by making it too risky for new players to enter the market, and engineering talent is wasted making sure old technology still works, being bug-for-bug compatible, etc.
Anyone who plays Risk knows about the end game when all the bit players consolidate into one world ruler. As markets become mature, the same thing happens through consolidation, merging, or survival of the fittest. While this does bring down prices, it is important that we don't deliberately create more QWERTY problems -- i.e. a technology is hacked together to get the market first, then takes over by sheer ubiquity, and eventually renders other ideas (even superior ones) obsolete.
It seems I'm always in the rebel camp!
When I worked at Digital Equipment, it did appear that IBM was going to be that company, but that there would clearly be others in the market. As things turned out, IBM got to name their heir apparent, but lost control as soon as the BIOS was reverse engineered and the clone market made Microsoft what it is today.
As fate would have it, I find myself these days working for the rebels again -- Sun Microsystems' is the last great hope to keep the computer industry from reaching a stalemate. There is Coke and there is Pepsi. There are agreed-upon interfaces. Competition is good.
CPU Wars started as a in-house comic strip posted on bulletin boards in Digital's famous Mill in Maynard, Massachusetts, starting in 1977. As its popularity with Digital's employees and its customers grew, CPU WARS turned into a full-fledged comic book that was finally published in 1980. CPU Wars has been referenced for years as part of computer history. In the book The Ultimate Entrepreneur, CPU WARS was described as an allegory of the real market struggle between IBM and Digital.
Vintage versions of this comic book have been sold at auction to raise money for The Computer Museum and other organizations interested in preserving the history of US Computer technology.
The entire story will be available here for world wide access.
A short preview is now on line.
A few copies of the original edition are available. If you are interested in one of these as a historical artifact, or because you collect rare objects, please contact candres@ultranet.com for more information.
CPU stands for Central Processing Unit. It stems from the time when disk storage, memory, printers, etc. were each the size of a refrigerator or 2. To give you some idea of how much things have changed, a MB of memory cost $10,000. The most memory you could get on a VAX-11/780 was 8 MB RAM. An RP06 disk drive the size of a washing machine held 160 MB and cost $25,000. Floppies were 8" across and held 256K. The monthly power budget for a system was about equal to what you now pay to buy a complete top-of-the-line PC that runs 1000 times faster than the fastest machines commonly in use just 20 years ago. And oh by the way, a mouse or pointing device was an experimental device at Xerox PARC.Barnyard - MaynardBetyerass River - Assabet RiverLa Petite Quicklunch - La Petite Auberge, A French restaurant in Maynard during Digital's heyday.BLISS - A computer language from Digital, 1978Hollerith - the name for a preforation in an IBM card. Named for Herman Hollerith who is credited with inventing punch cards in the nineteenth century to help count the 1870 national census.IBM card - a 4x6" oaktag storage method of punching holes or holleriths to signify each ASCII character. The cards were typed on keypuches and are still in use today on toll roads, although they tend to be smaller now to hold the bar code. (Remember "Do not bend fold spindle or mutilate?)VEX = VAX the most successful minicomputerVT-52 - the predecessor to the VT-100, both were 80 character x 24 line ttys (which is shorthand for teletypewriters, their predecessor). At that time, a keyboard and ASCII was about it. Graphics were something done on an expensive framebuffers or vector terminals or plotted. The GUI had been invented at Xerox, but few had seen this... Steve Jobs saw it, grokked it, made it commercially successful for a time with the Mac, and the rest is Windows '95...
1977 - 1980
CPU Wars started as a one-page copy stuck on a few bulletin boards near the coffee machines in Digital's Maynard Mill in 1977, a few weeks after Star Wars -- A New Hope was released. The demand for more copies grew as word spread through the company, and it shortly turned into a sequel, and the start of a longer epic.
By 1979, it became a comic book which ultimately was published in 1980.
The original artwork was done in pen and ink on Bristol Board with some paste up work for the type.
The original art then became "stats" a process where a camera takes a black and white negative to reduce everything to black and white. (Grey was acheived through "ben day" patterns.) The stat is then used to make a printing plate.
Why so much detail? Why not? Most comix don't have detail because they get printed in the newspaper so tiny you can't see them if they had any detail in them . Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes) has made excellent points about this issue, which ultimately meant that the distribution media of newspapers put so many restrictions on him that he could not be creative. The Web is a much better place to publish illustrations that don't fit the pablum of talking heads and inoffensive dialog which makes our comic pages so much less than they could be. Long Live the Web!
Historical background. CPU Wars was created during the late 70's and as such there are a bunch of now-historical references which have been all but forgotten. Inflation and gas crises made it seem that shortages were going to be a fact of life forever. This was scarey. It was a hassle. Jimmy Carter got blamed for letting the Shah into the US for treatment. Iran overthrough the dictator and replaced him with a despot. Iran and Iraq went to war. Oil supplies seemed uncertain. The price of gasoline doubled from .70 to 1.40. Inflation went to 14%.
The text was all done on an old fashioned type setter. You typed the text into a tty, took guesses at point sizes, guessing where the carriage returns needed to be to make it fit the balloons but in back when I did hand lettering for the xerox copies, exposed the film developed the film, and cut out and pressed the type onto the art....
Please note that the original work was made for a large format page. Some of the images therefore, are awkward sizes for display. However, given the level of detail in the illustrations, a large image size is required to reproduce these. Sorry for the download waits! I tried to make these as small as possible without losing too much detai.
1997
The web is the fundamental sea change in content distribution. While it is primarily used as a marketing tool, it's promise is content. CPU Wars can now easily reach an international audience without worrying about stalking newsstands through a syndicate or distributor.
I am following in George Lucas' footsteps again, but I think he is right -- the artist should have the right to determine when a work of theirs may
be modified or updated, especially when new technology makes it affordable.
I have digitally retouched some scenes to make them more like what I originally had in mind, but which just took too much time to do with conventional artist materials. For example, filling an area with a half tone screen used to involve buying expensive benday materials consisting of a clear plastic sheet with little black dots on it and cutting it out with a razor blade in the shape needed, and pasting it on the artwork. Now, its just select the right shade of grey, click, and fill!
While I like a lot of the campy feel of CPU Wars, I wish I had the time to make it more perfect. I have taken out most of the typos that I didn't catch on those evenings at the typesetter and pasteup table, and I have tried a little enhancement to increase the amount of halftones that are now just a fill in Photoshop, but which before involved painstakingly cutting out benday screens, or using a paintbrush to ink, which I never did master. 
