 Reasoning that the educational market would be of interest to public foundations and many companies, Ahl sent funding proposals to over a hundred companies and received nothing.Instead, he used his own funds to print 11,000 copies of a flier that he sent to Hewlett-Packard and other minicomputer vendors, which resulted in 850 subscriptions to a magazine that did not even exist yet.Instead of printing 850 copies, Ahl split the subscription money in two; he kept one half for future operations, and used the other half to print as many copies of the new magazine as he could.