CHAPTER 8
Bill’s intensity was nonstop, and I couldn’t keep working with him and living with him, too. It was time to leave the Portals. I rented a rambling three-bedroom house in the suburbs with Ric and Marc, while Bill and Chris Larson took an apartment near the air force base. When Bill asked me for a walk and talk one day, I knew something was up. We’d gone a block when he cut to the chase: “I’ve done most of the work on BASIC, and I gave up a lot to leave Harvard,” he said. “I deserve more than 60 percent.”
“How much more?”
“I was thinking 64–36.”
Again, I had that moment of surprise. But I’m a stubbornly logical person, and I tried to consider Bill’s argument objectively. His intellectual horsepower had been critical to BASIC, and he would be central to our success moving forward. That much was obvious. But how to calculate the value of my Big Idea—the mating of a high-level language with a microprocessor—or my persistence in bringing Bill to see it? What were my development tools worth to the “property” of the partnership? Or my stewardship of our product line, or my day-to-day brainstorming with our programmers? I might have haggled and offered Bill two points instead of four, but my heart wasn’t in it. So I agreed. At least now we can put this to bed, I thought.
Our formal partnership agreement, signed on February 3, 1977, had two other provisions of note. Paragraph 8 allowed an exemption from business duties for “a partner who is a full-time student,” a clause geared to the possibility that Bill might go back for his degree. And in the event of “irreconcilable differences,” paragraph 12 stated that Bill could demand that I withdraw from the partnership.
Later, after our relationship changed, I wondered how Bill had arrived at the numbers he’d proposed that day. I tried to put myself in his shoes and reconstruct his thinking, and I concluded that it was just this simple: What’s the most I can get? I think Bill knew that I would balk at a two-to-one split, and that 64 percent was as far as he could go. He might have argued that the numbers reflected our contributions, but they also exposed the differences between the son of a librarian and the son of a lawyer. I’d been taught that a deal was a deal and your word was your bond. Bill was more flexible. In my experience, he believed that agreements were open to renegotiation until they were signed and sealed. There’s a degree of elasticity in any business dealing, a range for what might seem fair, and Bill pushed within that range as hard and as far as he could.
THE MOMENTUM IN personal computers shifted for good in 1977, away from self-made trailblazers like MITS and IMSAI and toward big brand-name companies. Three second-generation machines, the “1977 Trinity,” were released over a span of six months: the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and Tandy’s TRS-80. All were fully assembled, out-of-the-box computers with built-in keyboards. The Commodore and Tandy threw in integrated monochrome monitors and cassette recorders, and were bargain-priced at around $600. The higher-end Apple II, at $1,298 and up, was easily expandable and offered color graphics capability. (By contrast, an assembled Altair 8800b—with no monitor, keyboard, memory, or data-storage device—sold for $1,070.)
The newcomers were plastic builds with ersatz space-age stylings, and none of them bowled me over. The PET had a horrible “Chiclet” keyboard; the TRS-80 was awkward to expand. The Apple II had a better design, but it was pricey and came without a monitor. None of the three were packaged at the start with floppy disk drives. But despite their flaws, they offered more computer for less money than anything before them, and they all sold well. It wouldn’t be long, I thought, before turnkey machines—better turnkey machines—were everywhere. And as computer hardware kept getting smaller and faster and cheaper, better software would be needed to create a compelling package.
Even as I tracked the computer flavor of the month, I never stopped thinking about the advances to come and how people would use them. Here’s an excerpt from my column in Personal Computing, circa January 1977, four years before the Osborne I became the first portable computer: “I expect the personal computer to become the kind of thing that people carry with them, a companion that takes notes, does accounting, gives reminders, handles a thousand personal tasks.”
A few months later, in an interview with Microcomputer Interface, I took my train of thought further. Fifteen years before the World Wide Web, I imagined a computerized society that was far-flung yet intimately linked:
For machines like the [Commodore] Pet that aren’t connected to any central network, I don’t see much of a future. I don’t see the housewife really learning to program in BASIC. What I do see is a home terminal that’s connected to a centralized network by phone lines, fiber optics or some other communication system. With that system you can perhaps put your car up for sale or look for a house in a different city or check out the price of asparagus at the nearest grocery market or check the price of a stock. …
The technology wasn’t nearly there yet, and I didn’t use the phrase in so many words, but that was my first public intimation of what I’d later call the Wired World.
THE 1977 TRINITY effectively doomed the Altair. Ed Roberts was a man of huge vision but weak execution; he’d set off the revolution but couldn’t keep his company in front. Most of all, Ed lacked the relentless price-cutting mindset you needed in a company selling to a mass market. But even had he done everything right, MITS’s days were numbered from the start. As microcomputers became more functional, hobbyists were finding ways to use them at their jobs as stockbrokers, research scientists, and engineers. And as the market became more lucrative, big companies swooped in, just as Texas Instruments had with handheld calculators. There was no way for MITS to match Apple’s innovation or Tandy’s economy of scale and its RadioShack distribution network. Ed got overwhelmed and burned out.
For Bill and me and our compatriots at the young Microsoft, on the other hand, this should have been the best of times. The makers of the Trinity knew that they couldn’t develop their own BASIC quickly enough, certainly not one as good as ours. Apple tried to get by with a homegrown version, but customers complained that it lacked floating-point math. The company wound up licensing our 12K BASIC interpreter, burned it into read-only memory (ROM), and branded it Applesoft. (Whereas RAM is reusable and can accommodate any number of programs, ROM is a fixed-memory chip on a computer’s motherboard.) Just two years out of the gate, Microsoft was establishing the industry standard for microprocessor languages. In a news report that spring on Albuquerque’s KOB-TV, a local expert marveled that it was “getting to the point where software will cost as much as the machine.” Our company seemed poised to prosper. Until, that is, we were threatened with the loss of our keystone product.
As MITS’s market share eroded, and Ed Roberts became desperate to retain a competitive edge, he began killing deals to license our software to Altair rivals. He maintained that he was under no blanket obligation to sublicense our source code to competitors. That was a big problem for Microsoft, because he perceived just about every microcomputer company as a competitor. The issue became acute after Ed decided to sell MITS to Pertec, a Southern California manufacturer that believed it was buying all rights to BASIC. In April 1977, as the deal with Pertec was closing, Ed canceled two of our third-party sales. After we threatened to terminate the MITS contract, MITS/Pertec filed for arbitration. They got a judge to bar any new BASIC sales while the decision was pending. We were frozen out of our main source of revenue.
In June, with our cash flow drying up, Bill and I prepped for our testimony with our attorney, Paull Mines. After each session, we’d race down to the garage to see who could get back to our office first without a traffic ticket. My Monza was quick but no match for Bill’s Porsche. I had to be crafty to beat him, taking shortcuts through alleyways and parking lots, and even then I’d be hard-pressed to win one time out of four. One day I left a session to get a document from Bill’s car. At the end of the afternoon, Bill and I looked at each other and nodded, our signal that the race was on. I tore out of the garage and won easily, though I thought it was strange that I hadn’t seen the Porsche the whole time. Then I felt in my pockets and found Bill’s car keys. After I returned to the law office, Bill shook his head in disgust. “That’s the only way you beat me,” he said.
The hearing was grueling. It was disquieting to see Pertec line up their three lawyers against our one, and tough to watch Ed testify against us. The arbitrator’s leanings seemed to shift from day to day. It gradually dawned on us that he had little understanding of software, a mostly untested arena for litigation. After ten days of testimony, he took the case under advisement with no telling when we’d get a final ruling.
A lot rode on the outcome. If Pertec won the rights to our source code, it would mean the end of Microsoft BASIC as we knew it, along with the lion’s share of our business. We’d have to write a new BASIC from scratch or move on to a different kind of software. Our future would be imperiled.
Meanwhile, the restraining order was starving us. As summer turned to fall, we struggled to make payroll and to cover our rent and time-share expenses. It reached the point where we had to borrow $7,000 from Bob Greenberg, a Harvard classmate of Bill’s whom we’d hired to write a BASIC for a new Texas Instruments chip. We owed our lawyer and could be liable for the costs of the hearing if we lost. The other side figured they could use their deeper pockets to outwait us, and I began to wonder if they might be right. “Look, we’re just about out of money,” I told Bill over dinner one night. “I think we should consider settling.”
And Bill said, “You’ve got to trust me on this one. I talked to my dad, and he thinks we’ve got a good chance to win.” When pressed, Paull Mines took the same position. So I swallowed hard and hung in there, and it was the best advice Bill never took from me. In November, seven long months after the process began, the arbitrator handed down a twelve-page decision. The special clause in our contract, those papers that Ed never checked, had made all the difference. “The testimony was undisputed that MITS never really embarked on what could be considered best efforts in marketing the source code,” the decision read. By vetoing our sublicense sales, MITS/Pertec “materially breached its best efforts obligation. … I find this an act of corporate piracy not permitted by either the language or any rational interpretation of the Contract.”
The ruling was a total victory for Microsoft. Our contract with MITS was terminated, with Pertec held accountable for all unpaid royalties. Most crucially, Bill and I recovered all rights to our BASIC interpreter and could now sell it to whomever we pleased—and better yet, keep all the revenue. Our one big roadblock was gone.
Not long after that, Ed Roberts quit Pertec after the company rejected his design for a laptop computer. “We’re not convinced that people need personal computers on their desks,” an executive told him, “but we’re sure as hell convinced that they don’t need them in their laps.” (Like me, Ed could be too early with a promising idea.) In 1978, the TRS-80 shipped 100,000 units; the Commodore PET, 25,000; the Apple II, 20,000; the IMSAI, 5,000; the Altair, 3,000. Soon after, Pertec discontinued the Altair brand in favor of its own label. It closed the Albuquerque plant in 1980 and moved production to California.
As always, Ed found something else to do. He bought a vegetable farm in Georgia, entered medical school in his midforties, and became a country doctor. Though he lived a rich life after MITS, he felt bitter to be left out of the history books. “We created an industry,” he said in Triumph of the Nerds, a 1996 documentary, “and I think that goes completely unnoticed.” He was half right. Ed did indeed create the first truly commercial personal computer, the first widely affordable general-purpose machine. He spearheaded every aspect of microcomputer marketing, from publications and conventions to a retail dealer network. His imagination was boundless. The Altair even debuted a digital camera interface back in 1976.
And he gave two college dropouts the opportunity of their young lives.
But Ed was wrong about being forgotten. When he passed away in April 2010, his obituary made the front page of the New York Times. (The photo showed him leaning over the Altair 8800 in his doctor’s whites.) I’d made up with Ed a long time before, and he and Bill had gotten past their differences. When Bill flew out to see him a few days before he died, Ed was talking about the latest nanotechnology and how he might work with it. He was looking ahead all the way to the end.
AFTER WINNING IN arbitration, we repaid Bob Greenberg with interest and closed our BASIC deals for the Commodore PET and the TRS-80. The flat-fee price tags on those licenses were whatever the market would bear, because no one knew for sure what the personal computer would become. I flew to Fort Worth to meet Bill for a demo at Tandy, which had taken a lot of heat for using Tiny BASIC in an initial manufacturing run of the TRS-80. We were ushered into the sprawling office of John Roach, a tall, plain-spoken Texan who was en route to becoming Tandy’s chairman and CEO. He was not a man to be trifled with.
“Now,” Roach said in a thick drawl, “can you boys really deliver a BASIC interpreter that works for our computer?”
“We believe we can,” Bill said, and then he rattled off some of our software’s outstanding features.
Roach nodded and said, “And how much is this going to cost me?”
And Bill said as coolly as he could, “Fifty thousand dollars.”
“That,” Roach said flatly, “is the biggest pile of horseshit I ever heard.”
Bill and I looked at each other, wide-eyed. We’d heard a lot of bargaining tacks, but this was something new. Afterward Bill said to me, “Well, maybe I did ask for a lot, but horseshit?”
We didn’t back down, though, and eventually got our price. I always marveled at Bill’s bravado; he’d come on superconfident, and people like John Roach never knew how much we feared losing the deal. Our near-disaster in arbitration was one more lesson for us. Going forward, we would aim for maximum market share in any sector we entered. You could never have too many customers.
In any event, Tandy did well by our arrangement. With our BASIC inside, the TRS-80 became the hottest-selling computer in the world until Roach got outflanked by Apple. But we were used to the shifting landscape of the hardware market by then. Machines came and went; good software lived on.
FREED OF MY obligations to MITS, I fell into the programmer’s natural cycle and coded long into the night, when distractions are fewest and you can submerge into a problem. Then I’d crash for six or seven hours and drag in close to noon. Our office culture was much the same as at MITS, with loud rock and casual attire. We weren’t much for corporate trappings. When Texas Instruments came to confer one day, we had to send someone out to buy two guest chairs for the reception area.
“Hope you are not working too hard,” my father wrote me. “You need to take it a little easy and get away for a time, otherwise you will burn yourself out. Also hope you decided to buy the nice leather coat.” The truth was that time and money were both in short supply. I continued to make $16,000 in salary, plus a low-five-figure distribution as a partner—as in most start-ups, we plowed our profits back into the business. Three years after Ed Roberts sprang for my hotel room, I still didn’t have a credit card. In February 1978, the Albuquerque National Bank rejected my application for a MasterCharge, citing “insufficient credit file.” Offended, I appealed: “I am particularly interested to know how much of a factor my religion is in your continued rejection of my application.” (When asked to designate my denomination, I usually checked “None.”)
In general, money wasn’t an issue because there wasn’t much to spend it on. Albuquerque, as I used to say half-jokingly, was a repeating pattern of a 7-Eleven, a gas station, a movie theater, and a fast-food joint. Bill and I never missed a blockbuster opening; I remember Superman and especially the first Star Wars and its epic opening battle scene. There were occasional concerts, like Ted Nugent or the Marshall Tucker Band, where I’d watch the guitarists to see how I might copy their licks. That was about it.
After renting a house within walking distance of the office, I splurged and bought an Advent front-projection television, one of the first of its kind, with a twenty-four-square-foot screen. Bill would come by to watch any Muhammad Ali fight, shadowboxing along with the champ. Others joined me for Saturday Night Live, or I’d visit Marc, who’d invested in another avant-garde technology coinciding with the Altair: the Betamax videocassette recorder. He built a library of fastidiously labeled movies and SNLepisodes; we never tired of the “Czech Brothers” skits with Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd, who later became a close friend.
Marc was an outstanding programmer who talked a thousand miles a minute and got cantankerous at times. He liked to be different. He kept a pet iguana and swore by Saabs and their floor-mounted ignition switches. He stuck by Betamax until the bitter end and was almost apoplectic when it got supplanted by VHS, an inferior technology.
We had close to a dozen people on staff, and most of us were single and in our early twenties. Programmers tend to be loners, but Steve and Marla Wood would gather everyone to hang out from time to time. Marla volunteered as a docent at the local zoo and became the foster parent of a bull snake and a baby reticulated python. The python was only about five feet long, but it could startle people the first time they noticed it wrapped around her neck. Once she sat down next to Ric, who was oblivious for a minute. Then the snake moved and Ric levitated off the couch.
We had our share of characters. Bob Wallace was a wry jokester who later helped originate shareware and funded research on psychedelic drugs. Jim Lane owned a broadsword and rarely missed a medieval fair. But no one was more idiosyncratic than Gordon Let win, a brilliant nerd’s nerd who would lock himself in his office and generate reams of flawless code. Gordon trusted nobody. He would use a different name on every magazine subscription—A. Gordon Letwin, B. Gordon Letwin, and so on—just to track down the source of any junk mail. He married a woman named Rose, and they adopted a baby pig that they treated like a member of the family. The pig grew to be seventy pounds or more, and would blast through its pig door into their home like a fullback going off tackle. Years later I heard that Gordon was taking it around with him on his Learjet.
* * *
TO RECRUIT TALENT, we published a help-wanted ad with my contact number in hobbyist magazines: “Microsoft is hiring systems programmers to work on APL, BASIC, COBOL, and FORTRAN. … Microsoft is the leader in microcomputer systems programming.” In June 1978, Intel introduced the 8086, one of the first 16-bit microprocessors and the next evolutionary step in personal computer technology. I was in regular contact with Intel and had the 8086 data sheet and instruction set well ahead of the official release. By then it was old hat for me to create development tools for chips from their specs, sight unseen.
The 8080 handled up to 65,536 bytes in memory; the new chip could address up to a megabyte. One million bytes—at the time, it seemed unlimited. I saw the potential for powerful word processing, with plenty of headroom for improved video and graphics and a full-featured operating system running underneath. To me, it was inevitable that future microcomputers would become so useful and usable that they’d be de rigueur in the corporate world.
Though there was no 16-bit hardware on the horizon, I was determined not to wait as we had for the Altair. I set to work to simulate the 8086 on the PDP-10 and rewrote my macros for the larger instruction set. When the next-generation boxes materialized, we’d be ready.
Our 8-bit business was booming, and we ran late on our deadlines as new work kept pouring in. With Bill always worried about meeting expenses, we’d make commitments with little regard for our capacity to fulfill them. People had no choice but to work longer and harder—even Miriam Lubow, Bill’s secretary, who sneaked in on weekends to do her filing without telling her husband. We maxed out what we could do on the school district’s PDP-10 and switched to a faster one in Denver. My own job became a little easier when CP/M, the operating system developed by Gary Kildall at Digital Research, began to gain traction as a de facto standard. Once I adapted BASIC to it, we no longer had to customize our software for each new computer.
Bill consciously aspired to be “hardcore,” a favorite adjective dating back to this Harvard days. He’d gulp his Cokes and work in his office deep into the night, and come in the next day cranky and bloodshot. When he really wore down, he’d take a catnap. Just after Miriam started, she was alarmed one Monday morning to find her boss sprawled on the carpet. She ran to see Steve Wood, who’d taken over from Ric as office manager, and cried, “Help me! Bill’s on the floor, and it looks like he’s unconscious!”
Steve puffed calmly on his pipe and said, “Ah, he was probably here all weekend, don’t worry about him. Just go back to work.”
“But what do I do if somebody calls for Mr. Gates? What do I tell them?”
“Tell them he’s out,” Steve said, “and you won’t be lying.”
Microsoft was a high-stress environment because Bill drove others as hard as he drove himself. He was growing into the taskmaster who would prowl the parking lot on weekends to see who’d made it in. People were already busting their tails, and it got under their skin when Bill hectored them into doing more. Bob Greenberg once put in eighty-one hours in four days, Monday through Thursday, to finish part of the Texas Instruments BASIC. When Bill touched base toward the end of Bob’s marathon, he asked him, “What are you working on tomorrow?”
Bob said, “I was planning to take the day off.”
And Bill said, “Why would you want to do that?” He genuinely couldn’t understand it; he never seemed to need to recharge.
Our company was still small in 1978, and Bill and I worked hand in glove as the decision-making team. My style was to absorb all the data I could to make the best-informed decision possible, sometimes to the point of overanalysis. Bill liked to hash things out in intense, one-on-one discussions; he thrived on conflict and wasn’t shy about instigating it. A few of us cringed at the way he’d demean people and force them to defend their positions. If what he heard displeased him, he’d shake his head and say sarcastically, “Oh, I suppose that means we’ll lose the contract, and then what?” When someone ran late on a job, he had a stock response: “I could code that in a weekend!”
And if you hadn’t thought through your position or Bill was just in a lousy mood, he’d resort to his classic put-down: “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard!”
Good programmers take positions and stick to them, and it was common to see them square off in some heated disagreement over coding architecture. But it was tough not to back off against Bill, with his intellect and foot-tapping and body-rocking; he came on like a force of nature. The irony was that Bill liked it when someone pushed back and drilled down with him to get to the best solution. He wouldn’t pull rank to end an argument. He wanted you to overcome his skepticism, and he respected those who did. Even relatively passive people like Bob Wallace learned to stand their ground and match their boss decibel for decibel. They’d get right into his face: “What are you saying, Bill? I’ve got to write a compiler for a language we’ve never done before, and it needs a whole new set of runtime routines, and you think I can do it over the weekend? Are you kidding me?”
I saw this happen again and again. If you made a strong case and were fierce about it, and you had the data behind you, Bill would react like a bluffer with a pair of threes. He’d look down and mutter, “OK, I see what you mean,” then try to make up. Bill never wanted to lose talented people. “If this guy leaves,” he’d say to me, “we’ll lose all our momentum.”
Some disagreements came down to Bill and me, one-on-one, late at night. According to one theory, we’d installed real doors in all the offices to keep our arguments private. If that was the case, it didn’t work; you could hear our voices up and down the eighth floor. As longtime partners, our dynamic was unique. Bill couldn’t intimidate me intellectually. He knew I was on top of technical issues—often better informed than he, because research was my bailiwick. And unlike the programmers, I could challenge Bill on broader strategic points. I’d hear him out for ten minutes, look him straight in the eye, and say, “Bill, that doesn’t make sense. You haven’t considered x and y and z.”
Bill craved closure, and he would hammer away until he got there. On principle, I refused to yield if I didn’t agree. And so we’d go at it for hours at a stretch, until I became nearly as loud and wound up as Bill. I hated that feeling. While I wouldn’t give in unless convinced on the merits, I sometimes had to stop from sheer fatigue. I remember one heated debate lasting forever, until I said, “Bill, this isn’t going anywhere. I’m going home.”
And Bill said, “You can’t stop now, we haven’t agreed on anything yet!”
“No, Bill, you don’t understand. I’m so upset that I can’t speak anymore. I need to calm down. I’m leaving.”
Bill trailed me out of his office, into the corridor, out to the elevator bank. He was still getting in the last word—“But we haven’t resolved anything!”—as the elevator door closed between us.
I was Mr. Slow Burn, like Walter Matthau to Bill’s Jack Lemmon. When I got mad, I stayed mad for weeks. I don’t know if Bill noticed the strain on me, but others did. Some said Bill’s management style was a key ingredient in Microsoft’s early success, but that made no sense to me. Why wouldn’t it be more effective to have civil and rational discourse? Why did we need knock-down, drag-out fights?
Why not just solve the problem logically and move on?
WITH THE COMPANY en route to its first million-dollar year and having outgrown the bank building, Bill and I faced a decision: stay or go? After three years in New Mexico, I was ready to move. It was hard to recruit top-flight programmers to Albuquerque, not exactly a hotbed of research or technology. After the sale of MITS to Pertec, there was no real business reason to stay.
On a personal level, there were many things to love about Albuquerque: the sunsets, the climate, the clean desert air. But if you grew up around water and trees, a high desert city can never feel completely like home. I missed the green of the Pacific Northwest, and I missed my family, too.
Bill came to my house to discuss our options. He was dead set against moving to the Bay Area. He’d seen how people in Silicon Valley changed jobs every year or two, which couldn’t be good for our long-term projects. That left Seattle, because Bill missed his family, too. We could fly out to our Bay Area customers in ninety minutes, and the rainy days were a plus; they’d keep programmers from getting distracted. We agreed to finish out our lease and move home at the end of the year.
Which is the story of how Seattle inherited what is now its second-largest employer.
On Pearl Harbor Day, 1978, the Microsoft staff convened on the second floor of a shopping center for a group portrait. Despite a rare and raging snowstorm in Albuquerque that day, eleven of thirteen made it to Royal Frontier Studios. Ric Weiland was house-hunting in Seattle, and Miriam Lubow’s husband told her she’d be crazy to drive the three miles into town. (Miriam was the only employee who wouldn’t make the move with us, though she’d follow later on.)
When I look at that iconic photograph today, I see a group of young people excited about their future. Back in Boston, Bill and I had been searching for the next big thing, little knowing that we’d find it in this remote city in the Southwest. Now we had a real team behind us, and a firm sense of direction. In four years, we had come a long way.
If you look closely at that photo, you’ll see just about everyone smiling. That captures our spirit back then. When I talk about the early days at Microsoft, it’s hard to explain to people how much fun it was. Even with the absurd hours and arguments, we were having the time of our lives.
I had to leave two weeks before the others to set up the mainframe we’d bought for our software development. I scanned the map and saw that the shortest route went through Utah and Idaho, and then into Washington. I didn’t bother to check the forecast, and it was snowing like the dickens by the time I reached the Four Corners area in Utah. I was sliding all over the place in my rear-wheel-drive Monza. At one point I was listening to Earth, Wind & Fire when I spun clear off the road, which scared the heck out of me.
I tend to be obstinate in adversity. I put chains on my tires. By the time I reached a mountainous stretch between Utah and Idaho called Dead Man’s Pass, the highway was one solid sheet of ice. I passed lines of semis that had either skidded off the pavement or swerved onto an escape ramp. Most sensible people would have turned back. But I white-knuckled it down that mountain, half-sure that I was going to shoot through the guardrail.
When I finally reached Seattle (and it took close to a week), I sent word back that people should take the California route instead. They all had smooth sailing, except for Bill. He reportedly collected three speeding tickets, two of them from the same cop.