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I was brooding about all this when it was announced that Adobe Systems was buying Aldus in a transaction that would convert all Aldus shares of stock into Adobe shares and make early Aldus shareholders—particularly, to my ever-more-envious mind, Ann Senechal—rich in the process. Press accounts of the merger were filled with expansive visions of a digital future. Phrases like “$2 billion desktop publishing industry” and “the breadth of new market opportunities offered by the digital revolution” littered the local papers when the deal was announced in mid-1994, as did visions of a near future when everyone would be wired up to a digital grid. “A driving force behind the deal,” reported the Seattle Times , “is expected to result in a new software product, called an ‘authoring tool’ in industry lingo, that will help people create an electronic document out of video, sound and data received over fiber-optic cables expected to be fed into many homes and offices in the not-too-distant future.”

I sat in my grimy cubicle the afternoon of the announcement and wondered how far the software wealth, no longer confined to Microsoft, was destined to spread.

Would the last person clinging to Seattle’s past please get with the program?

When I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself, mourning the financial opportunities I’d missed, the security I could have bought for my family with very little effort, and regarding the infusion of software wealth into Seattle as something benevolent, I was lamenting the money-driven material progress and moral regress I saw threatening the city at every turn. It was as if my mind saw marvelous progress and prosperity on the horizon while my heart saw only software-wealth-driven danger. Was Seattle being redeemed or destroyed? For every Jan Allister, Ann Senechal and Kevin Gammill I saw out there, I decided there were thousands of less admirable good-fortune cases.

There was, for example, Paul Allen, who seemed intent on razing and rebuilding the city as a monument to himself. While he came across largely as a harmless, shy, awkward but well-intentioned kid who ended up with $13 billion in the bank, he also appeared to have a profound Edifice Complex. Allen had retired from Microsoft in 1983 (although he remained a board member), when he was diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease, and settled into a life far less frantic than Gates’s. He started a modest new venture, Asymetrix, to make software authoring tools; he founded another company, Vulcan Ventures, in 1986, to invest in new businesses; and in 1987 he bought the Portland Trailblazers. In 1992, he established Interval Research in Palo Alto with the mandate that it do the kind of pure research-and-development that Xerox PARC had done, and that had largely faded away as American corporations both in and out of the personal-computer industry focused increasingly on research promising short-term returns. Only in a pure research environment, Allen reasoned, free of the pressure to placate shareholders, could the next Alto be discovered.