0.2 The funeral of bobo  (Page 10/12)

I’m gonna blow a hole

In a famous face

I’m gonna put my face

In that famous place.

Invisible Seattle’s greatest triumph was the highly publicized mock trial of Tom Robbins, who came to fame in the early 1980s with two novels, Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues . Robbins had been a colorful newspaper writer and art critic for the Seattle Times , and had been largely responsible for bringing alive the Seattle visual-arts scene of the 1970s through his reviews in the Times . He left journalism in the late 1970s after, as he put it, “calling in well” one morning, and began publishing fiction. With the success of his novels, he discovered that he had an overpowering taste for celebrity. By 1984, he seemed to be everywhere, zestfully posing for photographs and spouting such self-consciously cute aphorisms as “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” Since he had become the headline-hungry antithesis of a Seattleite, a Bobo without portfolio, and since his books were distasteful enough to become best-sellers, an outraged Invisible Seattle prosecuted him and put him on trial. After months of pre-trial publicity in the local press, to which Robbins reacted with increasing bewilderment, Invisible Seattle staged its trial at Seattle Center, before a packed house and a rigged jury. Winchell was judge, Wohlstetter prosecutor, the jury a gospel choir, and a parade of witnesses was played by various members of Seattle’s underground arts world. Robbins wisely declined to attend; Invisible Seattle summarily found him guilty of being “completely visible.”

By 1983, Melmoth had two customers: Microsoft and Butterworth Legal Publishers, the latter publisher primarily of a book-thick periodical entitled Land Use Board of Appeals Reports, LUBA being an Oregon government agency. Between the two, Melmoth was bringing in nearly $100,000 per year. I was able to get a bank loan for a new $30,000 state-of-the-art typesetting machine, complete with a modem, and thus could receive files electronically from capable customers rather than having to retype their manuscripts.

Microsoft began showing that year what a force it and its industry promised to be, predicting it would post an impressive $70 million in software sales in the coming year and announcing that it was about to take what the Weekly saw as a colossal gamble, moving into the “application software” market against such solidly entrenched competitors as Visicorp, Micropro, and Digital Research. With its operating system, MS-DOS, installed in “40 percent of all microcomputers sold,” the company wanted to expand the reach of its operating-system sales and strengthen its position against more established software companies. To do that, Microsoft would have to hire and train legions of sales representatives In 1983, the company had only 27 sales representatives. and learn how to sell directly to customers—“called, at Microsoft, ‘end users,’” wrote Weekly reporter Joey Pious. MS-DOS had been sold almost exclusively to microcomputer manufacturers, who installed the operating system on computers before shipping them to retailers, and Microsoft lacked experience in the retail market.