Profiles
From my Interview with Marshall Mosley
(July 18, 2025 - Cave Creek, Arizona)
Famous writers from Profiles
Profiles was this weird intersection. Don't know why it happened, but a lot of later famous writers wrote there. David Gerrold was established before he wrote for profiles [Profiles, July 1984]. He wrote the screenplay for Trouble with Tribbles, for the original Star Trek. He wrote [the novel] The Man Who Folded Himself. He wrote the Chtorr series.
Robert J. Sawyer, at the time, wrote for us.
Jack Nimershine. Ted Chiang. He wrote The Story of Your Life, and it was made into that movie [Arrival], with [Amy Adams].
Marshall getting hired at Kaypro
First night there, it's December, and I'm like, it's California, it's December (1983), it's 75 degrees. Yeah. So I went to the hot tub, the apartment had a hot tub, and sat in the hot tub, and this woman comes and sits in the hot tub, and she's mid to late-40s. And we're chatting, and she says, what are you doing? And I explain, I just arrived, and she said, so you're looking for work? And I said, yeah. And she goes, well, I'm an employment counselor. And I was like, oh, that's wonderful. She said, what can you do? And I explained, at my most recent job was in a warehouse driving a forklift. And she said, well, not 200 yards from here is this new company, Kaypro Computers.
And if you go in there the first day and ask to apply, they'll turn you down. Go in the second day, ask to apply, they'll turn you down. Go in the third day, they'll hire you. And it was like, I don't know why she knew this magic formula, but it was exactly as she said. And so I became what at Kaypro was called a material handler.
The guy who came down and talked to me was a guy named Alan Ogden. He was the head of material handling. I'm sure he must be passed away by now because he was almost 60 then. But he was just a sweet guy, a former hippie. Really thoughtful, really quiet, but very decisive.
Myself and another guy named Kai Sorenson were the only two Americans in material handling. There were like 12 people. And none of the Mexicans spoke English. And Kai was like right out of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. He was like "dude". They must have videotaped him or something. Assembly would just order stuff. And I'd go down and get the pallet and drive it up for a couple months.
The warehouse doesn't exist. They're assembling, I believe, in three separate areas [of the original buildings].
But there's board manufacturing, which is what was next to [the] profiles [office], where they had the vats and the dip and the whole thing. Then they had what I believe was called ICs, where they populated the boards with all the integrated circuits. Then they had assembly, which is where they put the computers together.
I was driving hard drives, sheet metal, and everything up. Andy Kay hired a guy named Gene. I wish I could remember Gene's last name. Gene was like 75 years old, and he wore, in hot Southern California, gray wool slacks, a plaid shirt, bow tie, the jacket with the patches on the elbows, you know, and seemed very patrician.
Inventory Department
He hired Gene to create and run an inventory department, because they were losing inventory, they couldn't keep track of it, and so he came down to material handling, because I handled inventory all day long, and he interviewed me and Kai, and he pulled me out of material handling to be in the inventory department.
It was basically a method of inventory called cycle. Cycle counting. The goal was, you count 5% of your total inventory every day. It's a different 5% each day. So, as time goes by, like after three to four months, you have a very accurate view of your inventory.
I did inventory with like three other people, and very quickly, Gene said, well, Marshall, we're going to make you the department head. And I said, I thought you were the department head. He goes, no, I'm the supervisor. Because he would just love to sit at his desk and look out the window. But he was a very bright guy, and he would take all the information, and he had these big ledger books, like you see in the old West movies. After a few weeks, I was like, Gene, we're a computer company, why are we using ledgers? He said, because I know how to use ledgers. Here, I'll tell you what. You come in at 8, instead of 9, and you work from 8 till noon, teaching yourself how to computerize our inventory. And then you do your counting. I'll talk to you in a few months. That was the single thing made my life, made my career.
To computerized the inventory I used Dbase II on a Kaypro 10. The way it worked out is Andy Kay wanted the inventory reports every morning so the whole inventory department was oriented around producing those reports for him so that's what I did for over a year.
I taught myself programming, I went to UCSD, I took a Pascal course, I also learned a little electronics in high School, but I went down to the repair department, and I learned how to do repair, because I thought it was something I needed to know.
Andy Kay calls me up one day, and he's like, why don't you come down to my office, you're going to meet with me. He was there with a woman who was the head of accounting, she was big, she was mean, and she didn't like anybody, so I come and I sit down in his office, and he's says, "We're missing $10 million." Your inventory is showing 10 million less than accounting is showing and I said I'll go over it with you and I went over it with him and she was very challenging she was very aggressive and I said look I'll break it down the point if you want to look at the programming I'll break it down for you and she was like no.
They figured out someone had stolen a truck full of Kaypro 10s. On the south of the Kaypro campus was just a hillside right where they had cut into the hillside and they forming a semi-circular bands of 4 trailers and that's where they stored integrated circuits, sheet metal, and finished computers. And they figured out that what happened is one night someone pulled up, hooked up the truck and drove out.
At the time I had just turned 24 and I was like, I had that experience, I was like, I'm so out of my league. You know, it's like, my software was right, she was wrong, but I was like, I'm punching way above my weight. And I never had any interest in being a corporate, inventory guy.
Profiles
So I went down to the woman who ran publications, her name is Paula White and she was four foot nothing, and she was like in her late thirties, and she was very cheerful, very chipper, very nice woman, tough as nails.
I said, "Can I come and work and be a technical writer?" She said, "Yes". So I transferred, I handed over the inventory department to the woman who ran accounting. And I went and became a technical writer. I went to UCSD, took technical writing classes. That's was what I did for like another year.
Diane Ingalls was the co-editor, came to me and said, we need an assistant technical editor because Tom Enright doesn't like work. And she didn't mean that in any kind of insulting way. He was a great guy and she loved the heck out of him, and so did I. But the actual kind of detailed work where he knew how to write technical articles really well and he knew how to edit them to see if someone was BSing or incorrect. But he wasn't a writer. He wasn't an editor. So they hired me and they taught me. And again, this is just a blessing I'll never forget.
Because Diane used to be a reporter with (an uncertain San Diego Newspaper). She sat me down and she taught me how to copy edit. And at the time, the way you copy edited was you had a piece of paper in front of you and you put a ruler down on the line you were copy editing, I'll never forget this, and you read it right to left. Because if you read it left to right, your brain skips over [a's, an's, and the's].
I mean, it was just an interesting process. But she taught me how to be an editor. You know, she taught me about the things, like, she said, you have to put on a different "suit". Like, when you're writing, you're the writer, and just write and let it happen and everything. Then take off the writing suit and put on the editing suit and become a complete jerk relative to the written page.
Like, "this is wrong", "you don't need that comma", "too many adjectives". And taught me how to edit. Now, my father was a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. He did not teach me as much as Diane Ingalls did. And so I became assistant technical editor, right? And then I became a good enough editor after a while.
I was there for a half a year. And then I started to write my own articles. And they gave me the Q&A column. In early 88, Tom Enright left. He got another job somewhere. And I became the technical editor.
Post Kaypro
But at that time, the writing was on the wall. In terms of every, everybody could see that Kaypro had not transitioned to the PC compatibles fast enough. The company that would become Dell Computers at the time was called PC's Limited. PC's Limited and Compaq were just kicking off. So, summer of 88, I started looking for work.
I went to be a technical writer for Computer Associates in Sorrento Valley. It all comes back to that experience at Kaypro and the opportunity I got.
Material Handling Problems
FR: "Why do we sometimes see such wild swings in the serial numbers?"
It's because it was whoever was working the line that day. The assembly was run by a Mexican woman in her mid-50s, and she ran it like a military unit, and she was very good, but when she was not there, they would make stuff up. It was whoever happened to be in that day.
And you had complaints about that because when they came back to repair, repair was like, what is this? And it turned out that they figured out that they were making up serial numbers in assembly. And they did something to solve it. But by that time, I was in publications, and it wasn't really my concern.
FR: And with the inventory that they had, how well did they do it first in, first out? Did the pallets stack up or did they have a system to keep pallets rotating?
No. When I was a material handler, they didn't. When that came up and I was told to mind my own business. You actually wanted the pallets in the back to be the first out because they were the oldest. So you would have things where you would, let's say in a self-storage unit, it would be 12 feet wide and maybe 24 feet. So it would fit six pallets. You would have the three pallets in the back that were made three months ago.
And then the three up front that were made three days ago because you're constantly putting in the first three, taking out the first three, putting in the first three, taking out the first three. And the back three never moved. Yeah. I remember saying to Alan [Kay] that it should be like groceries. So you rotate and bring him to the front. And he basically said, you're right, but I don't have the people. I would need to hire two or three more people and I don't have permission to do that.
Some parts names
You had hoods and chassis. The hoods were the three-sided sort of thing that went over that had Kaypro painted on the side. Yeah. Then the chassis was the the base with the vertical face in the front with the gap for the CRT and then the back with the gaps for the DB9 and the RS232 with a little sticker, there's always a little sticker on the back for assembly line so it would be like there would be a one or a two or a three and you would know which assembly line did it, because when it came back to repair, they wanted to know which group was more frequent, who was building things poorly.
Kaycomp machines on Campus
And I remember the Kaycomp. It predated the Kaypro 2. When I went to work there in 84, there were only 3 of them on campus. There was one in repair. I think there might have been one in David Kay's office, that was sort of on display. I know there was another one somewhere, but I don't remember where.
If you went to the Ford Motor Company and they had the official Ford Motor Company museum, they'd have the Model T as the first one. That was the Kaycomp.
Tandem Drive Problems
The Tandem [disk] drives suck. Excuse my language. But 40 years later, the amount of pain they caused still reverberates. They were not well-made. The guys in support spent a lot of time with dealers, like a technician in Boise, explaining how to adjust the armature. And that was not their skill set. They were there mainly for how to use WordStar, how to use Perfect Filer.
Profiles Q&A Column
I had a column called Q&A. Which was completely made up. You know, it was supposedly questions from customers. I made up the question, I wrote the answer. I tried to come up with things that I thought people should know. It was things that weren't immediately obvious, like a lot of people who bought CPM machines didn't know CPM had a command processor. It was basically batch files that CPM versioned, or how to use PIP, because PIP was counterintuitive. It was PIP then target then source instead of PIP then source then target.
I would write up what I had run into, or what support had told me about. I would make up a name, Joe Cochrane from Akron, Ohio wants to know blah blah. And that was how I did that. But the articles were very different because the articles were ferociously factual. The column, that was just an excuse to be able to impart information.
But Diane Ingalls would not tolerate for one moment being loosey goosey with the facts. She'd walk in and hit me in the back of the head.
Early Profiles avoided talking about Kaypro
FR: The earlier profiles appeared to almost avoid talking about Kaypro products.
Well, the original (actually the second) editor, and I never worked for him, I think I met him once before he left. His name was Tyler Sperry. He was about 5'5". He was a careerist.
He had a vision for how profiles would help him in his career. And it wasn't to impart information to Kaypro users. It wasn't to give good work in return for employment to the Kaypro. It was about Tyler and how Tyler was going to use this to climb to the next step. He wasn't real involved with it.
When he left and Gwyn Price took over, she was a very impressive woman. Hard charging, good humored, just nice. Didn't take anything from anyone, but a very, very positive person. And that's when the magazine changed. More about technical detail, more about what customers needed, more about what they were interested in. It was like, probably four months before I started working at the magazine.
The juice bar
One of his things was he [David Kay] was a super health-conscious, he subsidized the juice bar and this is like years like 20 years before Jamba Juice. It was on the third level [of original buildings]. You could just go up there and they would make you fresh carrot juice and they would make you a fresh smoothie and it was, 75 cents, it was delicious and that was him he insisted on it.
Andy was even-keeled
I've met people in my career who would have called the 22-year-old high school graduate in there, blamed him, pinned him, you know, tore him a new one. Andy was just even-keeled, very thoughtful, gave each person equal credence, and went about solving the problem. And so, you know, I had a lot of respect for Andy Kay.
The Warehouse
''FR: When the warehouse was built you were already with profiles at that point or were you still working with inventory?
I was still in inventory when the warehouse opened. Because I had an office on the second floor on the south end. You would walk into the warehouse at the loading dock and walk right into asha's (sp?) office. Osha was not federal OSHA. It was a really nice African-American girl named Osha. You would walk into Osha's office and she was there to direct people. She was also secretary for the head of sales, Reed Hastings(sp?), and she sat right next to this steel staircase and you went up the steel staircase to the second floor and that was me and there was like four other desks, then you opened the door and you went into assembly, which was the entire western band on the top floor.
First Building
The first section of the campus, row one on the campus, I knew backward and forwards because it was the lobby and then accounting purchasing, but not the head of accounting, the accounting minions who worked right next to purchasing, which is understandable. Then our section was Tom and my office, which was large because we had a big table for disassembling computers and stuff. It was Tom and me and Suzanne Kessling(sp?).
And then across the hall was, I believe, networking. And then down the hall was publications, publications manager, and then the technical writers. And across from that, I believe, was people who dealt with foreign sales. And then came the vats for making the boards and you really wanted to not be down there. It was not pleasant being down there.
That's the only part of the campus that I could list. I think support was on level three in the middle. I know that prior to the warehouse opening assembly was on multiple levels. I think there were three big assembly rooms.
Grandpa Kay
Two on one level, one on the other. And then you had on level three or four you had Grandpa Kay's workshop. He was a menace because the Cement walkways that went between the buildings were not much wider than this table. And he drove a forklift as fast as it would go. And he didn't care. He would just, he would shout in Polish, because Kay was their shortened name. He'd be going, shouting in Polish, and he wore this fishing hat, pulled down over his eyes.
He was like nine million years old. He was a real hazard. You had to be aware, because at any other company he would have been not given the keys to anything. But those forklifts would get up to like 20 miles an hour and you just you would hear them and they were electric so what you would hear is the tires on the cement and and usually at the same time shouting in polish. Alan or David would have to handle it when people would complain "He almost killed me" and "What kind of place are you running here?"
David would try to handle it professionally which he did at the same time he answered to his father and his family and it was like, doing anything about it was a non-starter no one would even talk to him (Grandpa).