Beginning Production

Late in 1978 I was on my way to Europe. I stopped off in Boston to talk to some customers. I didn't have time to see Bill McDonald, but talked with him by phone. He was my classmate and had worked for me for five years in the 1950s. While we talked I found out that he was involved in microprocessors attached to milling machines. Before I could ask him if he would come and work for me again, he asked if I had anything for him to do, and I said by all means. He moved west and was onboard by the spring of 1979.

We began to look at what was being developed in microcomputers. We bought some, tore them apart, and I asked, "Can we build these things?" Bill said, "Yeah we can build computers, but where would we sell them?" And that scared me enough that I put this on the back burner. Then in the spring of 1981, I read in Time Magazine that Radio Shack sold 120,000 computers in their first year out. And I said, what have I been waiting two years for? In the meantime, since Bill started working for me again, we had put microprocessors into some of our instrumentation, so we had developed the engineering expertise to build our own computers. I said go.

We had our first unit ready the following year, which we introduced at the West Coast Computer Faire, in San Francisco, in April of 1982. Although we were taking orders, I decided to hold up production for one month while we re--engineered the floppy controller logic to support the double-density format instead of the single-density format. Our engineers said it was simple to implement. I'm referring, of course, to single-sided drives. The availability of double-sided drives was still a year away. It was a good move because it gave us a competitive advantage over the Osborne computer that had just been released, which also was a transportable. Osborne never was able to do this successfully.

While we held up production, we also decided to put both floppy drives on the right side of the case, instead of having one on either side of the CRT. A visiting customer from Switzerland told us that computers don't seem to work too well when you did that. The EMI emanating from the flyback transformer and the cathode display created a powerful magnetic field that resulted in erratic disk read/writes. We scrapped the first 20 chassis, moved the drives to one side, and the system worked just great.

(Andrew Kay, Computer Shopper, Aug 1989, pg 412)