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Pastimes : The Death of Silicon Investor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: (Bob) Zumbrunnen who wrote (329)	12/25/2001 11:17:32 AM
From: 10K a day	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1003

Bob...21 machines and 15 phone lines,,,,Thats an amazing story...especially ,,,if your wife put up with it...

To: (Bob) Zumbrunnen who wrote (329)	12/25/2001 4:54:13 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 1003

That's impressive. I do remember Fido. I also used Desqview; it was clutzy, but it worked. Got me hooked on multitasking. The company I worked for hand built multi tasking, multi user machines based on the Z-80 chip. This was starting in 1978. We hand wired the boards (the boss's daughter turned out to be a whiz at hand wiring), and installed the boards in a file drawer size drawer in the pedestal of the desk which we hand built for each computer (as I mentioned before, we installed a 5 meg hard drive in the bottom of the pedestal when they became available. I wasn't up on all the technical stuff, I was the financial guy, but I do know that we did some software tricks that Intel said we shouldn't have been able to do. When the PC came along, the boss saw the handwriting on the wall for small local computer makers, and we switched out whole system from our boxes to PCs. I know what you mean by the hum of computers -- at the peak of the business, in about 85, we had about 30 PCs, all without cases because they were forever tinkering with the innards (which meant there was no sound deadening) in the main engineering room (a former Model T garage, the floor was slightly sloped to let the oil run down to a central drain so all our tables had to be shimmed up and the rolling chairs were forever rolling down to the center of the room if you didn't leave them snugged jup to a desk or something. The whole thing was very casual and very blue jeans and a blast.