[G4] Buying your own work computer

[Robert H. Baucom]

BILL,
Enjoyed your letter.
Before I went to ElectroCom, I was General Manager of an Electronics  
Factory in Everman, TX.
Actuator Control  Technology.We built the first solid state Actuator  
Control Box for the actuators (Screw jacks)  that moved the TV  
satellite dishes.
The Millionaire that was putting up the money for all this gave us  
his (it was a German Clone of the Mac II)

I sat around there with the sales manager at the  controls running  
Critical Path until 2:00 AM and the sorry
outfit would crash.

We bought an Apple IIe, an epson printer and I forget the software.  
Anyhow, we'd get four hours into
that one and it would crash. I had hired a Pretty little 19 year old  
Married gal that had taught Apple II computer operation
  to take control of the computer and do  the books. That went on for  
about eight months when I found out that she  hadn't paid the pay  
roll taxes
for the last two quarters. I scurried around like a ground squirrel  
getting the taxes paid before the padlocks
appeared on the  front doors.

Said to H ... eck with  computers and hired me a mean, bull dike,  
double entry, Bookkeeper.
Finally after 3-1/2 years of all that ... said this is more hassle  
than I contracted for and went to work for ElectroCom.

My No. 2 son took Basic Programing in high school. He went to work in  
computers for SouthWestern Bell
in Saint Louis right out of high school. He was going to Missouri  
State columbia as they had the best computer school
we could afford at that time. But then, he paid his own way. He  
started writing programs to cheat on computer games. Pretty soon he had
kids writing the code for him and he was marketing them. He was a  
supervisor in computee billing at SWB at 19.
By the time he was 25 he was running the Silver Pages for the East  
Coast. He had the software running two and
a half times faster than it was designed for. They sent their  
engineers down to talk with him.
At 30 he was put into a group that was working special projects for  
future software. He was on the team that came to
Dallas and programed the new dial system. He had invested his money  
and made so much ... he  retired at 42.
Now he just works the stock market. It's hell when your son's that  
much smarter than you.

His older brother, the menza member, also worked at Bell in St.  
Louis. He called me when he was 27
and said, "I just got a promotion. I have the job Burt had when he  
was 19."

RHB


On Feb 19, 2009, at 4:29 PM, Skygram wrote:

> Robert,
>
> Your email was delightful. I bought my first Mac when I could get  
> either of
> the two Steve's on the phone. This was because every so often we  
> would hit a
> dead end and since there wasn't an operating manual to go with our  
> Apple II,
> we had to call Calf. from Montreal to get answers. I still have the  
> manual
> they sent to me later. This was very early in the personal computer  
> game. I
> could be wrong but I think we received the first machine in late  
> 1976 and we
> received the manual for it in early 1977. The book is presently in  
> storage
> or I would get the specifics,  because it came with a form letter  
> from Apple
> explaining why the manual had not been ready when they shipped the  
> Apple
> IIs.
>
> My partner at the time and I were ostensibly writing a book on Basic
> language using these machines.  At least that is what I thought.  
> What I
> didn't know was that my partner was stealing small basic programs  
> from DEC.
> I didn't find that out until many years later. We sold the book to a
> publisher who it seems went on to make a lot of money with it. We  
> put the
> book together for about $2500.00 in cash and no royalties. The book  
> went on
> to sell close to a million copies according to the U.S. Library of  
> Congress.
> That is a long and bizarre story. Ultimately we had cashed in our pop
> bottles and sold the Altair 8800 we had keeping the front door open  
> as a
> door stop. At the time the Altair could do very little but the  
> "cool factor"
> of owning it was huge. Asking beautiful young ladies if they wanted  
> to come
> over to our office to see our computer... It was a technological up  
> date on
> the etchings query. To get the new Apples, we sold the Altair  
> computer for
> quite a bit of money for that time. After pooling our resources we  
> had two
> Apple II with various peripherals. We used Panasonic cassette decks  
> for
> storage and two 12inch B&W televisions as monitors.
>
> We had an amazing amount of fun during those years. It was a great  
> way to
> learn about computers.
>
> Bill
>
>
>
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