Category: 1. Front

50s: Table of Contents

50s: Authentic Post-war Boom Times
Boom times. We’d won the war and destroyed the industrial base of our main would-be competitors. There were jobs everywhere. Good jobs in manufacturing, on …
50s: Howdy Doody, B/W etc.
I was three years old. I sat in a basement family room straining to see a small black and white television set. The big kids, …
50s: Nomads
We moved around in the early fifties. I was born in Milford MA where my Dad’s family had lived for generations. He was a doctor …
50s: Suburbia
There were a lot of other kids in that neighborhood. On weekends and during the summer, we’d leave home after breakfast and play with five …
50s: TV takes over
Throughout the fifties, as I grew up, television was mostly a family activity. Sure, we had endless cartoons on Saturday mornings if we wanted them, …
50s on 50 cents per week
As a kid, I got 50 cents allowance every week. I had to choose between buying a Matchbox brand car or truck (about an inch …
50s: Oddly Rural
In 1956, when I was eight, we moved from the flats up into the hills. To Eastbrook Ave. We moved from classic fifties suburb to …
50s: Mom Held Court in the Kitchen
On most afternoons, middle to late fifties through middle sixties when I left home for college, Mom held court in her kitchen. She’d talk with …
50s: Dad Taught by Example; Mom by Talk
We were a typical family of the fifties. Dad was the breadwinner and Mom kept house. We had a family meal at six o’clock every …
50s: Gender in the Fifties
We were taught to respect women. Even back in those gender-restrained days, as we grew up, Dad was never disrespectful to women. Not when he …
50s: We Learned Duck and Cover
Monday, Oct. 7, 1957. Sputnik. The Russians put a man into space before we did.  Less than a year after Russian head of state Nikita Khrushchev’s …
50s: Ojai Grandparents
I took my first plane trip in 1958. It was a small propeller plane from San Francisco to Santa Barbara. A commercial airplane, but tiny. …
50s: Smoking was Common
Sometime in the 50s Mom gave up smoking. Chip and I hated her smoking and I think she gave it up while pregnant with our …
50s: Dodge Ridge, Badger Pass, Tahoe
Skiing was a four-to-five-hour drive from Los Altos. We’d leave before dawn, drive, ski, stay in a hotel, ski Sunday, and then drive back. We …
50s: Southern California Beaches
For several years in a row, Chip and I flew to Santa Barbara for a week in Ojai with Grandad and Granma. Then the rest …
50s: Living by the TV
The television grew steadily more important. By the late fifties we had a bigger black and white set in the family room. We gathered — …
50s: Stanford Games etc.
Dad took the two of us and later on the three of us to watch football live at Stanford Stadium, nine miles away from the …
50s: The “Broken Home”
I had a friend who came from “a broken home.” Billy’s parents had divorced, and he lived with his single mother, close to Loyola School, …
50s: K-12 Social
For my first and second grade I rode my bike about a mile through suburban streets to get to St. Nicholas Catholic School. My brother …

60s Table of Contents

1960: Kennedy-Nixon
Sept. 26, 1960. We watched the first televised presidential debate, Kennedy vs. Nixon, together. Mom and Dad and Chip and me. We wanted Kennedy …
60s: Peace and Freedom. Rebellion
What seems so important, and so different, about the sixties was the overwhelming sense that we were part of an unprecedented worldwide movement that …
1961: JFK Inauguration
January 20, 1961. Three days after I’d turned 13. We watched JFK’s inauguration speech on a black and white television that Miss Alexander brought …
1962: Bay of Pigs et al
Just a few months later, April of 1961, a US-sponsored invasion of Cuba failed. A force of Cuban exiles landed in Cuba at the …
60s: Cars and cool
Mom cried the day dad brought home a used 1960 dark red Oldsmobile Super 88 convertible. “Frank, you bought a red convertible,” she cried, …
1962: Big California Snowfall
Jan. 21, 1962. We spent two freezing hours trapped alongside an icy snow-covered highway down Merced River while Dad struggled, under the car, going …
60s: The Trees and the View
Mom also cried bitterly, off and on for days, when a new neighbor planted trees across the street. Mom knew they would eventually block …
1962: The Last Run. Snap crackle pop.
I mentioned wooden skis and cable bindings in this story from the fifties. In 1962 those wooden skis and cable bindings failed me as …
1964: Beatles, Sierra, Free Speech
1964. The year of the Beatles, Mario Savio and the Berkeley Free Speech. The year I also began protesting the Vietnam War, racial segregation, …
1965: Worst Job Ever
Worst job ever: selling encyclopedias door to door. Or, in my case, not selling encyclopedias, door to door. You may not be aware of …
1966: High School to Haight Ashbury
The summer of 1966 changed my life completely. Magic for me, black magic to my parents. Finishing high school, followed by a magical summer, …
1966: The Haight to Notre Dame
Through August of 1966 I evolved from Catholic High School kid to the Trinity Alps to Haight Ashbury hippie. In September I devolved into …
1967-68 Innsbruck
In early July, 1967, I sat at breakfast in the dining car of the Orient Express train from Paris to Salzburg, Austria. The train …
Protected: 1969: Crazy Love
She just stuck in my mind. I couldn’t date her, yet; but I couldn’t let go either. It wasn’t just that she was gorgeous …

80s: Table of Contents

1981: My Stupid MBA Mistake
It was August of 1981, early morning, in the office of John Lutz, managing partner of McKinsey Management Consulting in Mexico City. I was …
1981: My Worst Business Plan Engagement
It's not for nothing that I always say a business plan has to be your plan and nobody else's. It can't be your consultant's …
1982: Metrics, Swag, and 3 Types of Lies
(Reposted from timberry.bplans.com) This is a true story. Back in my market research days, 20-some years ago now, I watched one of my friends …
1983: First Day of a New Business
(This is reposted here from my blog at timberry.bplans.com) This is a true story. I think it's worth telling because it's one real example, …
1983: I Don’t Create Competition
In 1983: The First Day of a New Business I told the story of leaving Creative Strategies and going out on my own to write …
1983: Oh No! They’re Developing Their Own Compiler
Late summer, 1983. I asked Philippe how his software project was going. “They are writing a new compiler,” he answered. “They’ve decided there is …
1983: Why Did I Start My Business
I was speaking to a group of students in 2007 when one of them asked me to comment on what makes an entrepreneur. The …
1987: Business by Handshake
(Reposted from timberry.bplans.com) As a four-year mutually beneficial relationship ended, turning our cooperation into competition, Emmett Ramey offered this as a final thought: So …
1987: The Heat, the Kitchen, and Credit Cards
(This is reposted from my blog at timberry.bplans.com) I was furious. This guy had stolen from us, blatantly, by ordering a software product, returning …
1988-89 Macworld & The Fishbowl Story
The first time I took our company to exhibit in a trade show we brought along a big plastic fish bowl with a sign …
1988: Focus on What Was Right
(Reposted from timberry.bplans.com) Years ago we were coaching a soccer team of six-year-old girls. That was me and two of my teenage kids. Another …

90s: Table of Contents

1993-94: PAS on the Brink of Doom
It was a dark February night in 1994 when I boarded a late plane from New Orleans headed home, dealing with impending doom. It’s …
1994-95: I Saved It!
In February of 1994 Palo Alto Software was on the brink of failure. By February of 1995 it had a successful new software product …
1992: Moving to Eugene
People ask why Palo Alto Software is based in Eugene, Oregon. I think business stories are a good way to communicate different elements of …

70s: Table of Contents

1970: A Quick Change in Direction
I didn’t just fall in love with journalism. I also fell out of love with literature. Well, the graduate level study of literature. We’d …
Protected: 1970: Crazy Married
January 24, 1970. It was crazy, obviously. I was one week past my 22nd birthday. I was still an undergrad at Notre Dame. We …
1971: Getting a Job in Journalism
June of 1971. We lived in the old Amazon married student housing that has long since been plowed over. It was a collection of …
1972: Get the Story or Don’t Come Back
June, 1972. I had turned 24. Vange was due with Laura, our first, in a month. I’d been Night Editor, Mexico City, fox six …
1973-74: Around the World in 31 Days
“Tim, can you get six weeks off, beginning next month? I want to send you around the world, as a tour guide for my …
1973: Allende in the Hotel Garden
April of 1973. It was two or so in the morning. Pleasantly warm. I walked the paths that crisscrossed the interior gardens of the …
1973: Headlines: Naked, Vicious, Brutal, and So Forth.
I was 26 years old. Married, already a father, but still, so young, and so full of illusions. I still thought – although I …
1974: I Sold Out
Back in the late sixties, when I was a hippie and hippies were everywhere, there was this thing called “selling out.” The whole hippie …
1974: Jews? Yes, Tomato.
(Reposted from timberry.bplans.com.) Although it was tame compared to recent years, Israel was very tense in 1974. It was just a few months after …
1977: Me in Cuba with Fidel
Castro, in person, was amazing. I loved the guy. I should remind you that my Spanish was fluent by 1977, when this happened. It …
1979: Forecasting a New Market
(Reposted from timberry.bplans.com. In the summer of 1979, after we had moved from Mexico to Escondido Village on campus at Stanford, while waiting to …
1979: Hong Kong or Stanford
Hong Kong was magical. March of 1979. Exotic. Huge hotels along the waterfront. Me running along the bay, on the Kowloon side, in dark …