Edu-Ware Services

~ the goodbye ~

Sherwin Steffin met Steven Pederson at UCLA, where Steffin was a faculty advisor to the campus radio station and Pederson was a student working there. When the university let Steffin go in the spring of 1979 he decided not to look for another post. He had degrees in experimental psychology and instructional technology and a complaint about schooling, and the Apple II had just arrived in classrooms. The two of them started Edu-Ware out of Steffin's apartment in Woodland Hills, California. Steffin wrote the educational software. Pederson preferred games.

The first products were Perception and then Compu-Read, which Steffin had started writing before the company existed, with the intention of licensing it to somebody else. The software store Rainbow Computing liked Pederson's idea for a role-playing game enough to hand him an Apple II, on which he wrote the strategy game Terrorist and the educational program Compu-Spell. Disks went out in sealed plastic baggies that the founders copied and filled by hand, which was entirely normal in 1979 and is close to unexplainable now.

In 1980 they contracted a young developer named David Mullich, who had met Steffin while working at Rainbow Computing, and his first assignment on joining full time was an adventure game called The Prisoner. It is the thing Edu-Ware is remembered for today, and it made enough money to move the company out of the apartment and into real offices on Sherman Way in Canoga Park. The company later took a bigger building overlooking the 101 in Agoura Hills.

But the education catalog was the business. The Compu-Math programs taught by stated objectives with a test before and a test after, and in 1981 the first of the Algebra series shipped with a feature almost nobody else was trying: the learner picked which cognitive approach they wanted to be taught by. The Algebra series went well past The Prisoner in sales and became the company's biggest single source of revenue. By 1982 the founders could see that a one and a half million dollar software company could not be run by the two of them any more, not with marketing costs climbing and Davidson & Associates and Spinnaker Software coming hard at the same shelf.

Edu-Ware was finished before I could read, on a machine I have never owned, in a state I have never set foot in. It earns a page here for one reason: in 1981 somebody shipped a math course whose first premise was that the student picks how to be taught, and three years later an accounting software division had it in a beige box with the word Education on the side.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the argument ~

Steffin had spent years around teaching machines and had come away unconvinced. The problem with programmed instruction, as he put it, was that it was only good for convergent thinking, meaning that problems are posed and every student is walked to the same answer. What he wanted was the other thing, the divergent kind, where a student arrives somewhere the author did not plan. The reason he gave for caring about it was that thinking is the path to freedom.

You can see the argument in the games as clearly as in the courseware. Windfall handed you the oil crisis, and Terrorist ran hostage and hijacking scenarios. The one I would most want to see running is Network, which put you in charge of a television network and which the Digital Antiquarian reads as possibly the first procedural satire anybody shipped on a floppy disk. These were arguments about the world, sold off the same shelf as the spelling drills.

~ the peach-scented insert ~

Management Science America announced in July 1983 that it was buying Edu-Ware for cash and MSA stock worth $1.5 million, plus a cut of future earnings. MSA was the largest independent software maker in the world and had built that on mainframes, and it wanted into educational software because it looked like growth. What it did with its new property was hand the marketing to Peachtree Software, its accounting division.

The results arrived on newsstands in October 1984. That month's Personal Computing carried a peach-scented insert that unfolded to eight pages and thirty-two inches across, displaying sixty-seven Peachtree products in identical packaging. Forty-five of them were Edu-Ware titles. The only thing distinguishing a game from a general ledger was the word "Education" printed on the box, and that included Prisoner 2.

Steffin had been complaining about MSA's handling of the brand and was fired in August 1984. He sued the following month. The complaint said MSA had made fraudulent representations to Edu-Ware's stockholders and had broken a promise of four years of employment, and it accused the company of deliberately holding products back and cutting advertising in order to shrink the earnings payments it still owed. Two months later MSA announced it was selling the whole retail microcomputer group, which had lost $2 million that year. It named the peach-scented insert as one of the costs that got it there.

~ what came after ~

Encyclopædia Britannica bought DesignWare and Edu-Ware from MSA in March 1985 for a sum nobody disclosed. The plan was for DesignWare to handle both catalogs from then on, and the Edu-Ware development team was to be disbanded. As a working company it stops there.

The people scattered usefully. Steffin started BrainPower with the old sales manager. Mullich and a few others bought two unfinished games off the carcass, a survival adventure and a space flight simulator, and set up as Electric Transit. There is also the famous thing that did not happen here: in 1980 Ken Williams brought Mystery House to Edu-Ware, did not like how the negotiation was going, and went off to publish it himself under a company that became Sierra On-Line.

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