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Technology Stocks : Trimble Navigation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SKIP PAUL who wrote (2062)	1/1/1998 3:26:00 AM
From: Yin Shih	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3506

All, Speaking of long term investments ... I just discovered this site and stock discussion thread and spent the last day or so going over the message archives with great interest. Let me introduce myself. I'm an engineer in private consulting practice. Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1978, I had a cubicle next to Charlie Trimble when Charlie was IC R&D Manager at HP and I was a summer intern working for him. I spent the summer thoroughly intrigued by his efforts to buy out a cancelled LORAN project at HP called SNAP and start Trimble Navigation. His assistant at the time was Kit Mura-Smith, who has been at Trimble since day 1 with Charlie. While Charlie was starting this journey, I went back to school after the summer but returned to work for Jim Sorden in 1980. Charlie then solicited me to work for his startup about the time that I was employee #12 (or close to that) in 1981 where I worked for a while until I got the urge to go back and get my MS degree. While I was doing this, I became a teaching assistant for a EE class with a student named Roger Helkey. Charlie called me up and asked me if there were any promising students graduating soon and I talked Roger into interviewing and gave him a pitch on Trimble. Roger has been mentioned as someone who later helped get Trimble into the GPS surveying business. This was also at the the same time that I was visiting HP Labs and took a look at the GPS development that Eschenbach and Zvanko-Farinc were working on and that Charlie ended up licensing from HP just as he did the LORAN design. The LORAN business just wasn't making it for Charlie and he hoped that an early investment into GPS would establish a stronger position for Trimble in navigation. I left Trimble having invested a large sum (for a young engineer just starting out) of cash in it based on faith in Charlie. At that time it took a lot of faith as Trimble was struggling at $1M. Nothing much happened until 10 years later when I got a notice that TRMB was going to go IPO. Since then, I have held on to a large part of the Trimble stock I started with and experienced every wild ride up and down since the IPO. I guess this makes me extremely foolish, extremely masochistic, or just plain numb. But after Charlie finally delivered on the IPO after 10 years, I'm willing to give him another 10 years (since IPO) to deliver on being Fortune 500 and a stock price pushing $100 per share. Yin Shih