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"I woke up every morning wanting to go to work," King recalls. "Instead of being 10 minutes late to work, I was five minutes late to work. Josh would have to send me home every night, or say, 'When I get back, I don't want you here.' It was just the greatest experience; I mean, they were so open to letting us do what we wanted to do."
And so it went, for a while. Work consisted of occasional months-long cram sessions to get new versions of the software out, some heated debates about design philosophy, and interludes of joking, musical jamming, and assorted substance abuse.
They conducted hours-long rap sessions with users around the world, many of whom came to view Deck as a valid subject of high-minded intellectual debate, a la Kant or Foucault.
"I would have one of these conversations with Josh, or with John Dalton over a hamburger, and we would get off on a philosophical tangent about intellectual property, and that tangent would, two weeks later, become an editorial in the Anarchist," Souvignier recalls.
In another unique approach to research and development, OSC worked with the San Francisco avant-garde musical group the Residents, who set out to produce a record using an early version of Deck. The group was inspired by OSC's music-production-for-the-masses sensibility, recalls Residents manager Hardy Fox. Residents members and OSC engineers huddled together for months to bring the software up to the point where it could produce a commercial-quality CD, Fox says.
"They set out to do the album Freakshow as the first digital project done on inexpensive software," he says.
Perhaps the funnest, coolest, hippest part of all, though, was striding the globe like heroes. Session musicians for famous rock bands got in the habit of calling OSC to chat about compositional problems; they showed up at OSC parties and generally associated themselves with the OSC circle. A 1994 magazine article even quoted Chris Isaak band member Jimmy Wilsey as calling Rosen "a heavy dude."
The OSC Audio Anarchist iconography became popular even beyond the company's circle of customers. It is not unusual to see an old OSC "Tools Don't Equal Talent" poster in college dorm rooms and alternative rock sound studios.
The OSC boys' status as Valley heroes was etched in silicon in the December 1994 issue of Wired magazine. They're geniuses, they're rebels, they're changing the world, and they're fun to talk to was the gist of a four-page article. While OSC alumni don't take issue with the thrust of the article's assertions, one passage so exaggerates reality that it evokes weary, knowing smiles.
"OSC, so far, has managed to avoid the corporate pressures that so often close in on entrepreneurs once the company they've founded begins to grow," the article said.
This, of course, was a ridiculous notion. The pressures -- the bills, the software bugs, the upgrade deadlines, the capital shortages, the interest payments on mountains of credit-card debt the founders had used to keep the company going -- all were mounting until they seemed to press against everybody who worked at the place.
Todd Souvignier recalls selling product by telephone at such length that the receiver felt like it had dented his skull -- just so OSC could meet its payroll. This bimonthly payroll/selling panic was so great that Souvignier developed ulcers.
That Josh Rosen, who was nominally in charge of things, had little affinity for organization did not help matters. "Part of my job was hounding Josh when it would be the third bill that would come in. That was Josh's method, waiting until the third bill would come before paying," Kathy Tafel recalls.
Things weren't all rosy on the engineering front, either. The myriad modifications that resulted from online user rap sessions, combined with Dalton's tendency to write byzantine computer code, led to software that was unwieldy and buggy, Jeff Moore recalls. The software's growing complexity, combined with the practical imperative that, unless OSC produced periodic upgrades, they had nothing new to sell, led to a programming nightmare. Deck's 2.5 release, which was supposed to clean up bugs, add new features, and keep life-sustaining income flowing into the company, was delayed for months.
"Remember the old hippie axiom 'You're either on the bus or off the bus'?" Souvignier asks. "Well, in the software industry, you're either fixing the bus, or you're being run over by the bus."
Ideally, OSC would have hired additional engineers, sales people, accountants, and secretaries to handle the company's growing complexity. But the firm faced the classic conundrum of start-up businesses: OSC didn't have the capital to grow at the rate necessary to survive.
The choices were simple. OSC could fold, it could begin knocking on the doors of Silicon Valley venture capital firms -- the move that the Audio Anarchist swore OSC would never make -- or it could find a buyer.
"We seriously had a lot of companies come through and sniff our butts, including a few wacky companies," Souvignier recalls. "Our jobs began to fully fucking suck, and it seemed like the best thing we could do would be to sell out and see what we could get and quit killing ourselves over this crap."
The more the OSC founders talked about it, the more selling out seemed to make sense. If they could find a company that would allow them to continue developing Deck and its peripheral products while taking care of the marketing, payroll, and other problems, they could achieve the best of all worlds, the owners reasoned.
Macromedia, the 400-employee South of Market maker of computer graphics software, seemed just the choice.
