A COMIC ROMAN A CHIP

By NOAH ROBISCHON

Jake McGowan is squirming. It's this new book, Po Bronson's The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest (Random House; 302 pages; $23). Bronson, whose first novel, Bombardiers, skewered the world of Wall Street bond traders, has now set his sights on Silicon Valley. What fascinates McGowan is that the book reads like an old-fashioned roman a clef, in which fictional characters bear an uncomfortable resemblance to people you know--in this case, several computer-industry legends.

The story is about a young entrepreneur who (like McGowan) gets frustrated with the ineptitude of a middle-sized computer company (like McGowan's former employer, Silicon Graphics) and quits to launch his own scrappy start-up (like McGowan's Pantheon Interactive, an Internet design and consulting shop). "The first chapter," says McGowan,"was like reading my exit interview."

As it turns out, $20 Million isn't really about McGowan. But he's not alone in wondering whether his life has been turned into pulp fiction. Half the San Francisco Bay Area, it seems, is busy playing pin-the-tale-on-the-programmer with pre-release copies of what may turn out to be the Primary Colors of Silicon Valley.

This deftly written book, which is excerpted in the current issue of Wired and will be in bookstores beginning this week, charts the development of the "VWPC" (for Volkswagen Personal Computer), a consumer-friendly $300 device that emerges from La Honda, an elite research center in the Silicon hills, and threatens to lay waste the industry-standard PC. By the time the new computer is ready to demo, Bronson has filled the plot with enough corporate double dealing, espionage and sleight of hand to libel all of California.

So who's really who in Bronson's book? At the heart of the new machine is a revolutionary computer language called the "hypnotizer," the brainchild of an archetypal "pear-shaped" geek named Tiny Curtis Reese. He bears an uncanny resemblance to James Gosling, the pear-shaped Sun Microsystems programmer who created Java, the computer lingua franca of the Internet.

Like Java, which knocked around Sun for years before it emerged to transform the computer industry, the hypnotizer and VWPC have their share of detractors. One of them is Hank Menzinger, the hapless president of La Honda, who dismisses the VWPC as unworthy until the concept catches on, and then steps forward to claim credit. He sounds a lot like Eric Schmidt, Sun's chief technology officer, who thought the Web was such a waste of time he once threatened to charge employees $50 apiece for their Web browsers, but in the end took credit for Java.

The book's most unflattering portrait is the one drawn of Francis Benoit, a brilliant but intimidating chip designer who has more money than he will ever need but still keeps his tentacles in dozens of high-payoff projects. Insiders say he sounds a lot like Bill Joy, Sun's fiercely independent co-founder, who holes up in a research lab in Aspen, Colorado, developing consumer devices, including the interactive gizmo that helped spawn Java.

Bronson is almost as unkind to Lloyd Acheson, the chief executive of Omega Logic, the fictional middle-size firm caught between giant Intel and the upstart VWPC. Like the real-life executive Jim Clark, who left Silicon Graphics to co-found Netscape, Acheson bails out of the hardware-manufacturing business and co-founds "Everyware Corp." with Benoit. Clark, of course, became an instant Internet multimillionaire when Netscape went public. By the end of Bronson's tale, Acheson and Benoit too are "skipping the conventional second and third round financings...and gunning straight for a public offering."

Perhaps the most intriguing character to ID is Andy Caspar, the 26-year-old protagonist whose exit interview ("You understand that your memory ... is also the property of Omega Logic?") opens the book. His tireless idealism is the catalyst that creates the low-cost alternative to Omega's overpriced computers. In the end, Omega is forced to hire Caspar back to lead the company's Internet effort. Does the name of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs--whose public grudge against his old firm disappeared as soon as he was rehired to provide Apple with a badly needed Internet-friendly operating system--sound a wild eep?

Hardly anyone comes out of $20 Million with his or her integrity intact--not even the pretty San Jose Mercury-News reporter who wants men to find her beautiful and brainy, but who can't seem to master the complexities of computer-chip design well enough to write about them. I wonder if Bronson was thinking of...Nah. Couldn't be.