- [Man] With a couple inspired keyboard strokes,
a brilliant idea can come to life as a genius invention.
Whether it's a successful game or a polarizing font,
these four computer pioneers
changed our office life forever.
(upbeat music)
(whooshing)
- [Woman] solitaire is one of the most popular
computer games of all time.
And we went to find the guy who created it.
(bell dings)
- [Wes] Yes. May I help you?
- [Woman] Are you the person
that wrote solitaire for Microsoft?
- Yes, but that was a long time ago.
- We got to talk. Can we come in?
Great. Thank you.
All right. This is Wes.
- I'm Wes Cherry and I wrote Windows solitaire.
I wrote the game in 1988 as an intern.
Internships at Microsoft were really
an all encompassing thing,
but I squeezed it in there
in the few little hours of my free time.
- [Woman] For those who need a refresher,
solitaire was played on the computer using a mouse.
Cards are pulled from the deck in an effort to stack cards
in order by suit.
And if you won, you got an awesome display
of cards cascading towards you.
- [Wes] I came up with the idea
to write solitaire for Windows out of boredom, really.
There wasn't many games right at the time,
so we had to make them.
In the mid to late 90s was just when people started
really getting computers in their home.
Microsoft officially said that solitaire was there
to teach people how to use the mouse.
But in reality, it was just really just something
to have fun with.
Before they released windows,
of course, Bill Gates got a shot at it.
His biggest complaint was that solitaire was
too hard to win.
- [Woman] And once people figured out the mouse,
it became a favorite pass time.
- The number of hours wasted on solitaire
is really countless.
I can say that right after solitaire was released in 1990,
there was a world recession.
- [Woman] So many people were playing it in the workplace
that Wes came up with what he called the Boss Key.
- Press the special key and a spreadsheet would come up
that made it look like you were doing real work.
But Microsoft made me take it out.
- [Woman] Considering this game has been around for decades,
you must've made a ton of money?
- I was not paid, not a single cent.
At one time I said, "If I only got a penny per copy,
I would be very rich."
So far only 14 people made good on that.
I'm still waiting for the rest of you.
- [Woman] Well, you heard the man.
Do you still work with computers?
- I work with Apple now.
- Apples actually, and I own a cidery. (munching apple)
- [Woman] Wes, there's something behind you. Wes, run!
(cards thumping)
- [Warren] It's a time honored thing to put your name
on your artistic productions.
Writers have their name on the book.
Painters write their name in the corner.
Why couldn't video game designers
have their name in their games?
- [Man] This is a story about one man
who took on a giant tech company
and changed the gaming world in the process.
- [Warren] My name is Warren Robinett,
I'm the creator of Adventure,
the first action adventure game.
This was a video game that I wrote
working for Atari in the late 70s.
They treated us badly in several different ways.
No royalties, no name on the box, no external recognition,
being told that we were easily replaceable.
They disrespected us.
- [Man] So ward hatched the perfect plan.
- [Warren] What I did was I hid my name in the game.
In a secret room that was really hard to get to.
When you got in there,
the screen filled up with a flashing movie marquee
that said Created by Warren Robinett.
- [Man] Atari shipped out 200,000 copies of Adventure
before anyone discovered Warren's secret room.
How did they find out about that?
- [Warren] A 15 Year old boy in Salt Lake City
wrote a letter to Atari and he very clearly explained
how to get into the secret room.
- [Man] And Warren wasn't worried at all
about repercussions.
- [Warren] What are they going to do? Take away my royalty?
Well, they weren't giving us any royalties.
Fire me? So happened that I had already quit.
- [Man] But to Warren's surprise,
his active rebellion was well received
by Atari's new lead game designer, Steve Wright.
- [Warren] His musing to himself about this situation
and he said "It was kind of cool
to have hidden surprises in video games.
It's like waking up on Easter morning
and going out and finding colored Easter eggs
under the bushes and flowers."
- [Man] Everything ended all right from Warren Robinett.
You can't say the same for Atari.
- [Warren] Atari actually collapsed in one year.
It imploded.
Personally, I think there's some poetic justice there
that the big powerful, rich New York pushy guys
could not defeat the one little 26 year old programmer
who just had a sneaky idea and pulled it off
without telling anybody.
(bright music)
- [Man] It's 1995.
Your word processor is open
and before you press a single key,
you make the most important decision of your life.
What font do I use?
All the usual fonts are too conventional.
- [Vincent] There were very, few very casual typefaces
that you could use.
- [Man] You keeps scrolling.
Too stately, too boring.
But then...
- [Vincent] It pops out at the menu.
- [Man] What is this font?
- [Vincent] It was so different than everything else.
- [Man] The way it flows is strange.
- [Vincent] It had irregularity about it.
- [Man] And uniquely flawed.
- [Vincent] The stems aren't perfectly straight,
it were quite wobbly.
- [Man] This is the font you want.
And in that moment, you and millions of other people
click on the button that says Comic Sans.
(upbeat music)
How did a font, both loathed and cherished,
come to dominate the world?
- [Vincent] My name is Vincent Connare.
I was a typographic engineer at Microsoft.
I contributed to lots of fonts like Web Things,
Trebuchet and most notably, Comic Sans.
So it's all my fault.
- [Man] To understand Comic Sans,
you have to understand its creator.
Years before his work at Microsoft,
Vincent was working on his undergrad in New York city.
- [Vincent] We went to university in the 1980s.
I was a quite young, rebellious, fine arts student.
- [Man] He'd spend a lot of time in art spaces.
- [Vincent] And I'd walk through the galleries
of the old Soho and look at paintings and artwork.
- To him, what separated good art from bad art
was this simple benchmark.
- [Vincent] If you didn't notice them,
I considered that was bad.
And if you did notice, it was good,
because at least they made you stop and look.
It either shocked you or you really liked it,
but if he didn't even notice and you just walked through,
it was a disaster.
- [Man] Vincent would take that philosophy to Microsoft,
where he was challenged to make a playful font
for a program called Microsoft Bob.
- [Vincent] And so I looked at Batman and the Watchmen
and pretty much tried to draw on the computer,
something that looks similar to that, but not copying it.
So that's how Comic Sans was made,
by just looking at comic books and comic characters.
- [Man] Not everyone was a fan of the font's quirks.
- [Vincent] My boss, Robert Norton,
And he didn't really like the font
and he thought it should be a bit more typographic.
- [Vincent] And I argued and said, "No, it should be weird."
And I thought it stood out and it wasn't boring typography
that's in a school book,
- [Man] Though the font didn't make it to the release
of Microsoft Bob, it was eventually pre-installed
on every Macintosh by 1996.
- [Vincent] I started to see it when it was in the wild,
so to speak.
The first one I remember was a neon sign
over a store called Fun Stamps.
That's when I realized it's going to get used
anyway anybody wants to use it.
And that just snowballed from there.
- [Man] The font spread like wildfire
in ways Vincent didn't even imagine.
- [Vincent] When I traveled the world and see it
on beach towels.
- [Man] War memorials.
- [Vincent] On bread.
- [Man] Street signs.
- [Vincent] On everything.
- [Man] Its overexposure even spurred a group of designers
to start an anti Comic Sans movement.
- [Vincent] I thought it was funny.
I didn't really find it offensive.
- [Man] After all these years, Vincent finds himself content
with how history will remember him.
- [Vincent] And Comics Sans is not one of the better
pieces of art, but conceptually it's one of the best things
I've ever done.
It probably is the best thing I have ever done.
(whooshing)
- [Man] This is the IBM Personal Computer.
It was the most advanced computing machine ever created.
However, this isn't a story about a computer,
but a story about when a computer stops working
and the man who created a way to start it all over,
the man who invented Control + Alt + Delete.
(bright music)
Let's get into it.
- [Dr. Dave] Hi, I'm Dr. Dave Bradley,
but you can call me Dr. Dave.
Back in 1980, I worked on the IBM Personal Computer.
My particular job on the IBM PC
was writing the basic input output system.
- [Man] Even with an elite team of engineers and designers,
not everything goes smoothly
when you're building a computer.
- [Dr. Dave] We had programs that ran most of the time,
but when they failed,
the only way to reset the system was turn the power off,
wait a while, turn the power back on.
And it would go through a very long self test.
But the system might die every five to 10 minutes.
- [Man] What he needed was a way to shortcut
the restart process.
- [Dr. Dave] One of the things we discussed
was putting a reset button on it.
But if you put it on the system board,
there was a chance that you could hit it by mistake
and all your data gets lost.
So what we did was came up with a three key sequence
that would reset the computer and couldn't hit by mistake.
A single Control key, a single Alt key,
and then all the way over at the right hand side,
a single Delete key.
When you hit that Control + Alt + Delete,
you're deleting everything that you're working on right now
and starting there.
I was also able to skip over many of the tests.
So instead of taking a minute or two,
it was 10 or 15 seconds.
But it wasn't a big deal at the time.
It was like number 17 on the list
of a hundred different things I had to fix.
- [Man] Even though it was built only as a development tool,
programmers began incorporating the feature
into their applications.
From there, it was released into the wild,
but didn't immediately reach pop culture status.
- [Dr. Dave] For years, it was no big deal.
And then at the 20th anniversary of the IBM PC,
that's when Control + Alt + Delete became
sort of a cultural icon.
(intense shrieking)
It was the simplest and easiest way to fix your problem.
Hit Control + Alt + Delete,
start all over.
(ominous music)
- [Man] Despite all this, Dr. Dave doesn't think much
of this contribution to computing history.
- [Dr. Dave] I did lots of things with IBM,
but all everybody remembers is Control + Alt + Delete.
But I'll take that.
The fame of Control + Alt + Delete
means that I worked on a very successful product
and I'm very proud of having been able to do that.
(bright music)