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| Graduation picture 1977 Tolleson Union High |
In 1977 I started at Glendale Community College as a 16-year-old Freshman. I wanted to be an electronics engineer, so my first classes, other than general education basics, were Intro to Electronics, Intro to Engineering, and I needed another engineering elective, so I took Intro to Fortran.
Maricopa Community College group had a Univac Mainframe computer and an HP minicomputer. Access to Univac was done via punch cards. Access to the HP was done with a teletype. The Fortran class was taught using the Univac, so my first semester was spent writing code in a notebook, then going to the computer lab to find a free punch card machine and typing the code in. If you made a mistake, there was no way to fill a punched hole back in, so you threw the card away and started a new one. I'd taken typing in high school so I could type pretty fast. The hardest part was keeping your stack of punch cards in order and in a stack. If you wrapped it in a rubber band that was too tight, it could deform the cards and prevent them going through the machine.
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| Punch Card |
My first class assignment was to write a program to calculate the area of a triangle. I didn't understand what was going on because I'd barely listened in class. I didn't take this class because I wanted it, I only took it to fill a requirement. I opened the textbook and just typed the lines of code exactly as they appeared in the book. There were only about 20 lines of text in the program so I wound up with 20 punch cards. Then I took the punch cards to the big room where the card reader was.
There was a half door into the room with the bottom half closed and the top half open. The operators were just other students who knew what they were doing. I had to get someone's attention and hand them my stack of cards. He (or she) took the cards to the big card reader/printer in the center of the room, set them in a big hopper and placed a weight on top, then pushed a big button. There was a rapid fit-fit-fit-fit sound as my cards were sucked in, read, then stacked in the outbound hopper. After a few seconds there was a different sound as the printer rapidly ejected big fanfold sheets of paper. The operator tore off my output, grabbed my cards, and handed both to me.
I'm pretty sure I had errors that I had to read through the output to find. I had to re-punch the offending card with the correct text and do the whole "run" again. I do remember being very frustrated with those first few programs because if every line wasn't perfect, it wouldn't run. If I missed a parenthesis, do it again. Mis-spell something, do it again. Put in the wrong number, do it again. Eventually you'd get everything perfect and the run would come out with the calculated area of a triangle. Then I could write my name on the printout and hand it in. Then I could throw the punch cards away. Sometimes, throwing the punch cards away too quick was a BIG mistake.
It took 3 or 4 such projects before it occurred to me that I could put in other instructions besides what was in the book and that the computer would do them. It was eye opening. It was a major point of change in my life. The only limitation to what I could do was my knowledge and imagination. If I could picture the steps in my head, I could figure out the instructions to give the computer to do it. Knowledge and imagination, those became the limits to what I could do.
Within a couple days I had written a program to generate a massive maze and print it out. Next, I wrote a program to solve the maze and print out the path the "mouse" used to solve the maze. All of it was done on punch cards. I wrote many other off-the-books programs but the maze and the mouse are the 2 I really remember. I got As in all my classes that semester except English.
The second semester I took more engineering classes, more electronics classes, and an advanced Fortran class. I became friends with a girl in a punch card typing class. She was also in an entry programming class. I helped her with her programming class and she keyed in my programs for me. I also became one of the "operators" who had the god like ability to stack cards in the reader and push a button. That was when I also realized that the massive hunk of machinery in the "computer" room was NOT the computer, but just a reader and printer. I never did visit the Univac so I have no idea what it looked like.
I got a copy of a famous program called "Colossal Cave". It was a text based adventure program written entirely in Fortran. Studying how it ran taught me far more than any class I've ever taken. It captivated my imagination with the potential to expand it. I enhanced Colossal Cave by adding hundreds of rooms and other adventures to it. I know some of my classmates loved playing my version but storing 10 boxes of punch cards at home got problematic and eventually one of the boxes broke, spilling all the cards.
When I returned for the fall semester, the punch card machines and reader were all gone. They'd been removed over the summer break and the computer department was moved to another building. Everything was now done via modem and teletype machine. Teletypes aren't like terminals with displays, teletypes had a big roll of paper. You'd dial the phone to the computer and stick the handset into a 2 cups on a modem that made noises into the microphone and listened to noises coming out of the ear piece. Everything typed on the keyboard was printed on the paper and everything from the computer was also printed on the paper. A long programming session could wipe out many many yards of paper down the backside of the teletype. You had to remember to tear up and throw away the paper after your session because there were always people who wanted to grab the paper and steal your homework rather than doing their own.
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| Teletype Machine with a Punch Tape Printer/Reader |
If you needed to save anything, you would turn on a little tape punch, then instructed the computer to print out your program. A long strip of paper tape would come out with holes in it. It took tens of meters of paper tape to hold a program but still much smaller than punch cards. When you needed to put your program back in, you'd feed it into the teletype and it would read the tape and punch the buttons as if your were typing it.
In the fall of 1979 I didn't go to college because I would soon turn 19. I would be going on a 2 year mission for the LDS church. I was dying to work on computers though and snuck into the computer lab at college several times. I'd help other people do their homework and debug their programs for them. I think I got kicked out when one of the real lab assistants asked for my class info and I couldn't produce any. My mission call came eventually, I went to England and returned at the end of 1981.
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| The One Sunny day in Yate England on my Mission |
After my mission I started classes at Glendale Community College again, but this time I had computer engineering as my major. I have no idea why I didn't switch majors from electronics to programming before my mission. I think I told so many people I wanted to be an electronics engineer that I couldn't face the questions about changing my mind. Computers back then seemed silly while electronics was real.
I don't even remember what computer courses I took because the classes were beside the point. Having access to the computer lab was what I really wanted. I didn't recognize anyone, even the professors had changed. I felt very much like a fish out of water for the first few weeks. Gone were the teletypes and printed terminals. Everything was done on a CRT (cathode ray tube). It was kind of like a black and white tv with a keyboard attached. I quickly found a group of like minded friends and we'd sit in the computer lab for hours fiddling with different programs. We would also help anyone who needed it. The quicker they got done and out of there, the more time we had on the terminals.
I'd shown enough skill that one professor got me a special account on the DEC computer so I could experiment with multi-user software. I wrote a Star Trek space simulation game where you could pilot a star-ship, either a Federation a Romulan, a Klingon, or a Gorn. Each ship had its advantages and disadvantages. It was a multi user game so many people could run the program at the same time and fight each other. Sensors would report relative direction and distance to other ships, you could turn, speed up, energize shields, and fire weapons. Within 2 months the game was dominating the computer time across the whole community college system. It had been copied to many other campuses around the US. The college finally put limits on the number of people who could play at the same time so there was enough compute power left for students to do their class assignments.
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| The original IBM PC |
Some time in the spring my father bought one of the new IBM Personal Computers or PCs. I had a great time playing with it and learning what it could do. My dad was a veterinarian and my mom did the accounting for the business via a computer with Valley National Bank. Even more basic than the old teletypes, the system required my mom to dial the computer then put the handset into an amplifier. It just let her hear the computer without holding the handset to her ear. The computer would read out a prompt and my mom would punch the buttons on the front of the phone to enter accounts, charge codes, values, payments, expenses, etc for the accounting. It was a laborious process with very painful error corrections.
I remember many evenings where I could hear my mom in her bedroom. She'd sit on the floor with the papers spread all around her. She'd punch buttons and we could hear the musical tones the phone would make, then the computer would read the numbers back and ask her to verify, then it would prompt for more input. Hours upon hours she'd spend doing that.
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| Touch Tone Phone |
My mom and dad told me they paid a lot of money to the bank to use the accounting system but it would cost even more if they paid an accountant to manage the books. So they asked me if I would write them an accounting system Being the young, stupid, arrogant kid, I was, I said yes. So my mom described exactly what she did with the bank computer. Then we went to their accountant and said "This is my son, he's going to write us an accounting program, tell him what he needs to do". Can you imagine being that naive??? But the accountant did print out the ledger and the accounts receivable as well as a sample of a bill that was sent to the customers.
I set to work. My computer classes at GCC were so easy that in about 3 weeks, I wrote an accounting program. We had a friend with a printing business who helped me design billing slips and matching envelopes. Within 2 months, my mom had stopped using the bank and was using my accounts receivable. I also wrote a general ledger and account payables, but their needs were so simple that they eventually just had the accountant do it. But the accounts receivable was the most important and it's what they used for the next 12+ years. It worked flawlessly until my dad retired.
While attending GCC I was also going to LDS Institute, that's where I met my future wife, Nannette. But that's a story that deserves its own telling. I'll just tell how we met because it fits the theme.
I was a computer major which meant I carried around computer printouts. The paper was 15 by 11 inches fanfold paper with green stripes across the page, and holes punched down the sides. Trying to fold a thick printout in half to put it in a backpack would cause the pages to split apart and the crease would make it impossible to lay flat so I could study it. So I instead of a cool backpack, I carried a briefcase.
I was coming out of an institute class with my nerdy briefcase when a girl I knew, named Terry, called to me. Terry was sitting on the couch with a cute girl I didn't know. They both kind of looked at me with a "what kind of geek are you" look, then Terry said "Clay, this is Nannette. She just moved here from Show Low, you should take her out".
So I walked over to the couch, took Nannette's hand, pulled her up and walked to the front door. I opened it and led her out, then turned around and walked her back to the couch and said "There, I took her out".
Much of the rest of the semester was about programming on the IBM PC. In my English class, I had to write a research paper. I wrote it about the famous stunt where IBM patented the rectangular hole in a punch card. There were no good programs for writing things like English papers, so I wrote one, then wrote my paper using that. I added the ability to put little foot note numbers on quotes and statistics, then put a whole foot note section at the end of the paper. That's the only A I've ever had in an English class. The teacher asked me how I'd done it and if other students could use it. I had to say no, but I was sure that such things would be common in the near future.
That summer was mostly about dating Nannette and programming on the PC.
I started ASU in the fall while Nannette worked at a place called Commerce Clearing House. We were married in November and lived in a house owned by my parents in Tolleson.
In that next summer of 1983 I was attending summer classes at ASU and needed to upgrade the IBM-PC with more memory so I could compile and run my class work instead of driving all the way to ASU in Tempe every time I had to do something. I checked in magazines to find a local store that sold RAM chips for the PC. I found AZ Software over near I-17 and Glendale Avenue.
I drove over to AZ Software and went in to buy the ram chips I needed. The owner's name was Jack Abbott and somehow we got to talking about his store, PCs, inventory, and how much they were struggling with doing all the inventory and accounting by hand. At some point Jack said something like "What I really need is a programmer that could write me a database program in DBASE-II." I talked a bit more, then took my ram and headed home.
Once I got home I started calling friends asking if anyone had a DBASE-II manual and eventually found one. I drove over, got the manual and went to a copy store. I copied the entire manual then took the original back to the owner and went home. I spent the entire night reading the DBASE manual. The next day, after school I drove back over to AZ Software, walked in and said "I can write you an inventory program in DBASE-II". Jack offered me about double whatever minimum wage was, gave me a copy of DBASE-II to run on my PC and I headed home to write. I also came in for about 3 hours each day to help at the store so I was being paid for roughly 6 hours a day. But I was spending about 10 to 15 hours a day really learning DBASE and writing the basics of the inventory system.
The tricky part was that Jack wanted multiple point of sale terminals, not just 1. So I had to figure a way to let multiple terminals access a single database without squashing each other. I figured it out and within a month the entire store was being run on my point of sale and inventory system. This time I didn't bother trying to do a general ledger but I did also write him an accounts payable. I got several raises throughout the summer as customers started actively coming into the store to ask me questions because I kept on top of all the latest PC and CPM innovations. I eventually dropped my summer classes and worked full time at the store.
Jack was always wheeling and dealing. The mail order side of the business operated as Warehouse Software or Warehouse Data Product. I also found out he operated as "AZ Software Consultants" and that he had a "CP/M swami" who would consult with customers to solve their business problems. I'm not sure, but I think that was me. I know I consulted a lot about dbase and other CP/M programs solving problems.
Byte Magazine ad for the store
We sold a lot of CPM software, IBM PC software, and a bit of hardware. Our biggest sales were all mail order or phone sales. Jack advertised in many magazines like Byte and Dr Dobbs. We had 5 sales people, an order manager, Jack, his wife, and me. I became the assistant manager and in charge of tech support. But the end of the summer was coming and I'd be going to school full time. I told Jack that I'd be leaving and asked if I could work part time.
The week before I was due to "quit" Jack came to me and made an offer. If I'd stay, he'd double my current pay but I'd switch to salary instead of hours. In addition he would pay me 1/2 of 1 percent of the gross sales of the store. It was a lot of money and after Nan and I talked it over, I didn't go back to school. I'm still torn on whether that was a good idea or not. It limited the places I could work (with no degree) but it super charged my career in other ways.
I worked for about 2 years at AZ Software. Sales went from the 10 thousands up into the hundreds of thousands. We doubled the physical size of the store, then had to move to yet a bigger store. We hired about 4 more sales people and a couple of technicians to work with me. It was a pretty good life.
My departure started when Jack said that he wanted to remove the percentage of sales bonus because he thought it was getting too high. He set my salary to what my total earnings were that month, but it removed a large part of my incentives to help grow the store.
Then one day I took a 45 minute lunch rather than a 30 minute lunch. When I came back, he started yelling that we'd lost a sale because of my tardiness. When I pointed out that I'd been spending nearly 12 hours a day at work, he said that was my own stupid fault for working so much and that he expected me to be there during store hours or else.
So when 5:00 came around that night, I turned everything off and said goodbye. When he yelled that I needed to stay to do inventory and finish the accounting, I told him if I stayed to work after store hours it would be my stupid fault. He looked a bit sheepish at that and I walked out.
For weeks, a man named Ron Tanner had been trying to get me to come to work for the Tanner Companies and that night I called him and said I was interested. Over the next week I slipped away to do a few interviews and when they made me a good job offer I accepted.
About 3 weeks after the lunch incident I gave Jack my notice. He wanted a month's notice but I was only willing to do 1 week. I had already started shifting responsibility to other employees, and I'd stopped the crazy hours so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.
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| A good luck letter and my old business card. I remember no one. |
The Tanner Companies had several division and the one Ron wanted me to work in was the road construction division. The parent company had an IBM mainframe that did their job estimates. It was an old and clunky system that they wanted to upgrade. They had no equipment control or job scheduling system. Ron wanted to get off of the mainframe and put everything onto networked IBM PCs. There was no internet, but local area networking was just getting started and Ron had set one up in the construction division.
I was hired in October of 1984 as a Micro Computer Programmer/Analyst. I was a rogue hire because I didn't report to the corporate computer department. I reported directly to Jim Todd, the accounting manager in the construction division. I had no idea how much the corporate people hated me being there.
My first job was getting Ron's hack job of a network fixed. It had never run well and was constantly dying. Ron had chosen the "IBM token ring" network with Novell Netware as the server. I had to re-splice all the cables and patch cords to get it running reliably. Once it was running dependably, I had to convince the 4 secretaries to use word processors instead of manual typewriters. At first they wouldn't even touch a computer. So I put a computer in the lunch room facing the TV - they were allowed to watch soap operas so long as they were using the word processor. It worked, within a couple months all the old typewriters were gone and all letters were done with word processors.
One day I found a silver drinking cup with a screw on top and a small hole for a straw. I taped the cup to the side of the computer monitor and when the girls asked what it was, I said I was trying to save money by recycling all the letters that scrolled off the top of the screen and into the cup. Then I could take it to be sorted and reloaded back into the computer. They bought it for a couple days.
While at Tanner, I hired several people that became good friends while I was there. We got the estimating system off the mainframe. It took Wayne nearly a year to do it. At the same time I wrote an asset control system and project scheduling system.
Another part of getting people to use the computers was a good messaging system. RadioShack had a clearance sale on some small printers. I convinced my manager to let me buy a hundred of those and I put a small printer on every desk in the building. Then I wrote a program that allowed the receptionist to print on any of those printers. So instead of people walking up to the receptionist or calling to get their messages, Their messages would just be printed at their desk. People loved it.
I also wrote a program that would popup a messaging window on their screen. Just touch a special combination of keys, type your message, then go back to what you were doing. It was fast, easy to learn, and easy to use. It became the standard throughout the entire company. I didn't realize it at the time, but the company claimed ownership of the messaging system. I had written most of it at home and on my own time, but I'd also stored the source code on company computers and occasionally tweaked it at work. When they told me they wanted the copyright changed to the company I was angry, but not enough to jeopardize my job over it.
After that I wrote a program to control the printing. It was hard in the early days of networking, when you sent a "printout" to the network printer, you then had to exit the word processor and run a command to say "I'm Done" which would release the document to be printed. I wrote a little program that sat in memory and watched for a special key sequence which would then release the print job. This time I wrote the program at home and on my own time and never took any source code to the office.
The print release software was a great success in the company. After a few months, Ron came to me with the idea of selling the program to other Novell Netware users. I had a good friend named Larry who had his own computer software company, but it was his full time thing and he had employees. Between the 3 of us, we formed an agreement to sell the software. I called the company HotWare and I called the software HotPrint. I have no idea where the name came from, probably either from Ron or from my cousin Tom who designed our initial logos.
I was the actual owner of both the company and software, Ron was a minor partner, and Larry's RTA Software was a subcontractor that copied disks, produced the manual, took sales orders, and shipped the product..
After we'd been selling for a few months, Novell contacted us and said that if we printed some brochures that they would send them to their customers with other material they were already shipping. So Tom designed us a brochure. Ron printed a thousand and sent them to Provo, Utah. Sales went absolutely nuts. There were so many calls and sales that none of us could hardly get our normal jobs done. So us being engineers, we said to ourselves "We better not do that again."
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| Our First HotPrint Brochure |
We spent a month getting better prepared and Larry hired 2 people just to deal with HotPrint. Then we started advertising again. Sales again went through the roof. Novell eventually stopped shipping things. They created a magazine called "LAN Times" and allowed us to put a quarter page advertisement in it for free. Again, Tom designed it with Ron's help and sales went nuts.
In the meantime I started working on another program. In Netware you had to attach a printer directly to the file server in order to share it. But that meant all printers had to be within a few feet of the server and if you had a large building, people had to walk all the way over to the server to get their printouts. Plus you could only have a limited number of printers.
I wrote a new program that I called HotServer (terrible name). It allowed anyone to take a printer connected to their local computer, and allow anyone on the network to send print jobs to it. It was another great success and started selling hundreds of copies a month.
About this time Ron Tanner left the Tanner Companies. He took the message system I'd written and formed a company around it. They did the message printers but also adapted it to pagers so you could have a popup window to put a message to anyone's pager. Ron also stopped helping with HotWare but insisted he should still get paid even though he was doing nothing and, sure enough, since he'd written the original agreement, it said he got paid forever so long as HotWare was sellingHotPrint.
We let that go on for a while, then I agreed to sell HotPrint to Larry for $1.00. We did send Ron his 20 cents. Larry then hired me back to maintain the software. Larry's own company was getting pretty big. He'd used the HotWare money to seed his own business and after another year, he was ready to let it go.
In the summer of 1987, Tanner Companies was sold to Ashland Oil. A lot of changes happened very quickly. My boss, Jim Todd, was let go and a new Accounting Manager was hired. We never got along much and I don't even remember his name.
I wrote a 4th program that I called HotControl (even more terrible name). It allowed one user to see and control another computer, much like Remote Desktop does now. Before I could even think of selling it, I was approached by a company called Fresh Technologies about taking over the sales of HotPrint and HotServer. I told them about HotControl and they got really excited. They offered a really good royalty if I sold the software through them. Larry sold HotPrint back to me and I signed a deal with Fresh Technologies to sell all 3 programs but with better names.
The new control program changed from HotControl to LanAssist. HotPrint became Q-Assist. And HotServer became PrinterAssist.
Fresh started selling all 3 programs and soon my side job royalties were paying about 3 times my real job salary.
One morning I walked into my forgotten name - boss's office to talk. I told him I didn't really see a future for me at Tanner and he agreed. He offered me a few months extra salary and continued use of the company car while I looked for a new one, then said there was no need to work even the rest of the day. I walked back to my office and said goodbye to the 8 people I managed, cleared out my desk and left. ***POOF***
It was a very weird feeling. I'd been employed by a big multi million dollar company for quite a while and to suddenly be on my own with no safety net left me feeling very vulnerable. I had a small office at home, but everything I had was based on Novell Netware and I no longer had access to a server to test my changes.
Fresh Technologies offered me free office space in their offices and I took them up on it. I had to buy computers, printers, network cards, a desk, a chair and a whole bunch of other stuff. It only took a couple months for Fresh to realize that I was too much of a disruption in their office, and I realized the same about them. They offered to pay the rent on a separate office just a few doors down from theirs.
I started writing another program to control a Novell File Server so you didn't have to get into the server room every time you had to check something or make a change. It sold well but nothing like the other products.
Next I started writing a program that allowed one computer to use the hard drive of another computer. Windows 3.1 had something called Windows for Workgroups, but it never worked. Another company called Artisoft had a program called LANTastic but I didn't know about it at the time
This was the most successful software so far. It was sold under the name MapAssist and it went nuts. Somehow it was adopted by a big banking company and became the backbone of a banking clearing house that managed transactions between banks. It was a hit from the very beginning and quickly paid more royalties than all the others ever had.
Fresh started to think they were paying way too much in royalties and asked to either re-negotiate the royalties or to just buy the programs from me. Things kind of got a little tense for a while. They were making a lot of money and couldn't afford to stop selling my products but they kept threatening to just stop. I eventually sold both MapAssist and LanAssist to them. PrinterAssist and Q-Assist were dying off and we let those run their course although they still sold for 2 or 3 more years without Fresh paying me royalties.
I wrote another program that never went anywhere. In spy thriller movies, you see where someone gets notified "someone is accessing our special file" and they go on to hunt down the culprits. I wrote a program to give NetWare that ability. You could tag portions of a filesystem so that you were notified of anyone who accessed it, or you could lock it down so no one, not even administrators could access files without the right password. I finished a proof of concept but no one thought it was really a viable feature. It just makes a good plot point in a movie or book.
In the mean time, I had come in contact with a company called MicroTest. They had a hardware product that competed with HotServer/PrinterAssist. A couple years ago they had trouble with their software and it kept loosing print jobs. They contracted me to help find the problem and fix it. Coming in as an outside contractor really endeared me to their engineering team. I found the bug in a couple hours, but the company founder, David Bowles, really seemed to like me and kept finding reasons to bring me in to help with other things.
MicroTest sold their print server to Intel. David Bowles asked me to come in to help them write other similar products.
Before I go on, let me explain how bizarre this whole "Novell Print Server" thing is, because it's very weird.
- I wrote HotServer/PrinterAssist a Novell printer sharing software
- My cousin Tom and my friend Mike worked for NetLine that made a Novell printer sharing software called ManyLink
- My good friend Steve's mission companion Alan worked for Intel and developed a Novell printer sharing software called NetPort
- MicroTest, a company in Phoenix, developed hardware that was a Novell printer sharing device called LANPort.
- I helped MicroTest fix LANPort
- MicroTest sold LANPort to Intel who changed the name to NetPort II which was then worked on by Alan
How on earth did all this Novell printer sharing software come about independently and yet somehow all have connections back to me?
After I sold the programs to Fresh, they stopped paying for my office space. I found new office space to share/split with several friends. I was trying to think of new programs to write, but in the meantime, I contracted with MicroTest to help write products for them.
The first product I was contracted to help with at MicroTest was a hardware product that shared modems. This was just at the time that high speed internet was coming around so it didn't last long and I don't even remember it's name.
The next product I helped with was a hardware/software combination to share CD-ROMs. At the time, CD-ROM drives were expensive and business CD-ROM media, like reference books, were also expensive. If you could buy just 1 copy of the US Legal code on CD-ROM drive and share it with an office full of lawyers you'd save thousands.
It took about a year to develop the combination. The CD-ROM sharing software was good but it was horribly slow. Reading from a local drive might take 10 seconds, but reading from DiscPort could take 30 seconds or more. A week before it was to be released, I made an offhand comment that if we could read the data off the cd-drive into memory at just the right location, then we could transmit it out the network without having to copy the data around and it would make the product more than twice as fast. The lead engineer at MicroTest said that such nuanced tweaking was impossible and even if we could do it, it wouldn't make much difference. He said he'd eat his hat if anyone could do that.
Two days before release, David called me and asked if I was serious about the speed increase. I said I was and he offered me a big bonus if I could get it done before the product shipped.
I spent those 2 long days going through code with a big machete and hacked a path through all the layers so it would allow DMA (direct memory access) from the cd-drive into memory so it was perfectly aligned to throw headers on it and in turn be perfectly aligned to DMA right back out to the ethernet adapter. It sped up the program by a factor of 4. It still wasn't as fast as a cd-drive directly attached to the server, but now it was only about 10% slower. I never did ask that guy to eat his hat.
DiscPort was great but I only got paid for the hours I worked on it plus bonuses. There were no continuing royalties or commissions and I'd gotten very used to those. The other really bad part of DiscPort was how slow to setup and how much memory it took to run. We had to read the entire directory structure off the disk and that took about 10 minutes. Then we had to create a fake hard disk so that Netware would think it was reading it's native filesystem. All that setup time and memory made it feel very clunky.
On my own, I began writing an "installable file system" for Netware. It's a computerey term that means it will let Netware see fileystems that it wasn't originally written to understand. All modern operating systems now have installable file systems, but back then it was unusual, and Netware didn't have one.
Next I wrote a very fast CD-ROM filesystem. No more disk image, no more massive ram footprint. No more time consuming scanning. It was so much better than the previous version. I put together a proof of concept demonstration to show to MicroTest
I demoed the technology one morning to about 5 people at MicroTest. I answered a few questions and talked about possibilities, then went home. My thought was that we could incorporate my new software into DiscPort and I would be able to receive a small royalty on the sales. But MicroTest had a different idea. They wanted to buy it, but not just the installable filesystem, they wanted to buy my whole company and me along with it. The offer was for sole ownership of HotWare and all copyrights for $320,000. In addition I was offered a job a "Principal Software Engineer" with the highest salary they were allowed to offer. After thinking about it for a few days and talking with Nan and other friends, I accepted and got my 3rd job of my life, working for MicroTest.
One of the first things I did after selling was to move offices yet again. Sharing an office with friends can lead to them no longer being friends. I think we caught it in time, but it was a near thing. I don't remember any lingering bad feelings, but I'm not sure everyone else feels the same. My new office was much closer to my home which made my life a lot better.
One interesting part of this time period was the internet. I had seen the potential the very first time I logged on. I had an ISDN line from my office to MicroTest's main office so we could share data. I got another ISDN line installed to get a full time connection to the internet. But the IT people at MicroTest couldn't fathom what the internet was. So on my own, I figured out how to arrange an intenet pipe through my office and into the MicroTest offices. Today that would be inviting hackers and viruses straight into the main company, but back then it just gave all my co-workers internet access.
I spent weeks showing co-workers how to setup email, search FTP sites, use Gopher, and access chat boards . Finally after 3 months, David asked me to give a presentation on the internet to the company leaders. Shortly after that, we had a high speed internet link installed in the office. I think the web came about a year after that but I can't remember for sure.
I worked for MicroTest from August 8, 1995 until August of 2001. The whole time I worked there and through all subsequent companies, I had the same job and job description that I started with, Principal Software Engineer. I did figure out one serious reason behind MicroTest wanting to own the installable file system, and that was software patents. In the world of publicly traded companies, having a software patent can make a large difference in stock price. Besides writing new software for DiscPort II, I spent my first few months working with lawyers to patent my technique for putting an installable filesystem into Netware. The lawyers did a pretty thorough search and could find no pre-existing art preventing the patent.
So after 6 months, the patent was filed and granted. MicroTest also nominated me for "Arizona Innovator of the Year". I guess it's an annual award granted for technical innovations. The lady that came to interview me was pretty knowledgeable about software and knew who and what Novel and Netware are. She sounded genuinely impressed with what I'd done and that I'd done it by myself.
I won that year for the Individual award. But the Kitt Peak Telescope near Tucson had just gone through some major enhancements and they won for the Team award.
Trying to describe daily work at MicroTest would be pointless so instead, I'll talk about the products I helped to develop and release.
DiscPort is the product I helped develop while contracting. It was hardware and software. A cd-rom drive was attached then over the network it was connected to a Netware file server so the cd-rom drive could be out near the users instead of in with the file server.
DiscPortII was a new software product using my installable file system. It was the first application I participated in that was written in C++.
Around 1990, Netware was rapidly declining so I switched from being a Netware Expert and learned how to work with the Linux operating system Most products after this point were Linux based.
WebZerver was a linux based stand alone server that shared files, printouts, web pages, etc.
DiscZerver was a linux based stand alone server that shared cd-rom,
FileZerver was a linux based stand alone server that shard hard disks, what would now be called a NAS, but we did it in the mid 90s.
Micro Scanner was a ethernet tester that could validate cables and networks.
Micro Scanner 2 was a new version of the micro scanner
Penta Scanner was an ethernet test that could validate cat 5 cables
Compas was an ethernet test tool
Around April of 2001, MicroTest was sold to Fluke Networks, one of their main competitors. Fluke was owned by Danaher Corp. The story we at MicroTest were told was that Danaher and Fluke wanted to form a new company around handheld network testers. The Fluke Networks part of Fluke would be merged into MicroTest. MicroTest already had everything needed to be a stand alone company, like human resources, purchasing, shipping, manufacturing, test labs, etc. Once we were all merged, there would be an IPO and we would be back to doing what we had been doing before but now with a lot more engineers and more world class products.
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| Magnifier commemorating Fnet merger |
As a part of the merger/acquisition announcement, all employees were given a magnifier. The round magnifying glass fitted on top of another metal base with Fluke Networks and Microtest - August 2001. I guess it was to say we could closely examine the merger? I don't know why I've kept it all these years, except that there was no specific need to throw it away. I'm not sure if I'll toss it or keep it, but with how lazy I am at cleaning, it will probably stay.
Over the summer, much of the peripheral sharing part of the company was sold off to other companies for almost nothing except that they take some employees and accept liability and support for the products. Most of our product testers were either let go or moved to the cable test side of the company.
Our small team of 5 kept working on the things that we were keeping but we needed to come up with a new product, something that would be worth them keeping us.
Eventually we decided to try to do something with wifi. This was still the very early days of wifi and it still was not very reliable. We no longer had a hardware team to create a custom handheld device, so we decided to use some off the shelf hardware. Compaq computer company had a good PDA (personal digital assistant) and someone had figured out how to put generic linux onto it and we had a lot of experience with linux. There was also a backpack that would allow a PC card to slide in. So we had a workable product.
We spent much of the summer working on a prototype of the new product. I got linux working, got the driver for the wifi card working and figured out how to put the card in "monitor mode" so we could see all of the wifi packets. We built a simple database and a user interface to display the results of our efforts.
In August of 2001, the sale of MicroTest to Danaher was finalized. In September I was scheduled to go to a computer show in Atlanta to test our new wifi product and show it to a few potential customers and partners. I was standing in a booth, showing someone all of the access points and clients when we both looked up to see a replay of the first plane hitting one of the twin towers.
We both stood there in shock, what a terrible accident. Had the plane lost power? Were the pilots both ill? It was such a shock and no one could comprehend the massive failure of safety precautions that must have happened to allow something like that.
For about 20 minutes people kind of mulled around. Do you keep giving sales pitches with something like that on your mind? More and more monitors were switched over to news reports. We were across the street from CNN headquarters, so their news feed was the cleanest.
I remember the absolute shock when the 2nd plane hit. Could that just be a replay of the first plane from a different angle? No, the headline suddenly read "2nd plane strikes the 2nd world trade center". I think that other than the news feed, there was 20,000 stunned and silent people in the massive convention hall. Then the reality struck. THIS WAS NO ACCIDENT.
Instantly people turned and headed for the exits. I was walking past the IBM booth and could hear the bosses saying "take nothing, leave everything, get outside", and I felt the same way.
I went back to our hotel, but it had been evacuated. The government had ordered all high rises throughout the country closed. I called Nannette and she had gone to the home of some friends so I got on the transit train and went to join her. We sat on their couch throughout the afternoon and evening, watching as people evacuated and eventually watching the towers both collapse. There was such a feeling of disbelief and despair.
I got a phone call in the afternoon. It was the secretary to the president of Danaher Companies. She asked if I was alright. She was calling every Danaher employee that was travelling to check on them. Then she told me I was authorized to spend whatever I needed in order to get home safely. I was impressed.
The next morning, Nannette and I took my rental car and drove back to Arizona. It took 2 16 hour days of driving. A large part of those days I spent on the phone with my team designing the wifi tester. It suddenly seemed more important than ever to have a product and a reason to be employed.
I continued as a Principal Software Engineer for Fluke Networks. For about 4 months, things continued as normal. We were working on the wifi tester. Then in early November, a company wide email went out. A mandatory meeting would be held at 9:00 the next morning, no exceptions. That was odd but not too scary.
Then a few minutes later I received another email. There was no to or from address, just a subject line for an 8:00 meeting. The body of the email said that I was not to discuss the 8:00 meeting with anyone else and that like the 9:00 meeting, it was mandatory. I felt like calling a few other co-workers to see if they could meet at 8:00 tomorrow but I held off.
At 8:00 I found myself in a conference room with about 20 other people. Most were from the cable testing side of the company and the 5 of us from the hand held network tester side. To summarize, the company was no longer going to work toward an IPO. The economy had tanked enough that it was no longer a viable option. the new plan was to fire the vast majority of MicroTest employees and only keep those in the room. We didn't have to accept the offer right now, but we were told to go home and not to come back for a couple days while the rest of the company terminated.
I didn't know how to feel. Good that I still had a job, horrible because many of my friends were being fired, scared because I didn't know what I'd be doing in the future, shocked because it was all so unexpected. I went home hugged my wife and kids, that was the most stable thing I had in my life right then.
After the shock, it turned out that most people were given a 2 month notice. They could stay through the new year and help finish any ongoing tasks or document work. . The rest of the employees kept showing up for a few days, then most just quit coming and started looking for jobs.
Someone erected a shrine on the first floor where people could leave memorabilia to the products and people who had worked here. They put a life preserver with "The Castaways" written on it, kind of like Gilligan's Island. I wish I'd taken a picture of it. Kind of gallows humor but some of the items were really funny.
A small group of employees was tasked with cleaning out the building, either by selling, shipping to Fluke's offices, or just trashing things. It soon became hard to get much work done because the networking infrastructure was being torn apart. I had a large garage that was converted to a living room and I offered to let the team work there. So we grabbed a bunch of computers, routers, cables, desks, chairs and everything else we needed to set up an office. Everyone came to my house except Eugene who had moved to Oregon. There was MikeP, MikeM, Eugene, a test engineer (whose name I forget), and me. Over time we got the hang of working remotely and fewer people would come in.
I think it was around May when the company gave us an ultimatum. One of us would have to commit to moving to Colorado, or the project would be cancelled and the whole team would be fired. MikeP gave a flat out no. MikeM wouldn't give an answer. So Eugene and I both flew with families to Colorado Springs to see what we thought of the city and whether we wanted to live there.
I had done a little checking to see what the job market was like around Phoenix, and it wasn't good. The economy following 9/11 was bad, and my lack of a college degree really hurt me.
I invited 2 buddies to dinner to get some advice. John and Jeff both said kind of the same thing. The economy is tough and Colorado Springs would be an awesome place to live.
After a lot more thinking, I told my boss yes, I'd move to Colorado.
By the early summer, WaveRunner (that's what we named it) was released. I made more trips to Colorado Springs and we found a house. The move wasn't a mistake, but trying to rent my AZ house in case I wanted to come back was a HUGE mistake.
I'm not going to give daily details about working at Fluke Networks, so here is a rundown of the product I helped to develop and release.
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| Wave Runner |
WaveRunner was a handheld wifi analyzer based on linux and running on a Compaq iPAQ handheld personal organizer. We overwrite the built in software with linux, then used a backpack to add a wifi card.
EtherScope was a custom built ARM based tablet with built in ethernet and a socket to insert a wifi card. It tested both ether and wifi using much of the software from WaveRunner.
OptiviewXG was a custom built Windows tablet with a secondary processor and a custom 10gig ethernet FPGA. It tested both ethernet and wifi.
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OneTouch AT was a custom handheld tester with a wifi backpack for testing wifi.
OneTouch AT 10G was a custom handheld test with a 10gig ethernet network
In 2016 Danaher sold off their network monitoring software to NetScout. I wasn't a part of that group, but our handheld network tool group was in the same building so Danaher threw us in as part of the sale to NetScout rather than deal with splitting the building and rent. We became a part of a company that didn't want us and didn't know what to do with us. Worse still, we kept winning awards at shows. After winning a "Best of Show" award, one NetScout VP once said "Great, now there's another thousand customers who think we just do stupid testers".
For a couple years, NetScout let us continue developing Optivew XG and OneTouch, but there was no way we could keep those products selling enough to justify our existence. We had lost our identity as a team so we called ourselves HNT which stands for Handheld Network Test. The managers decided it was time to begin a new product and we code named it Andromeda.
Andromeda was going to be a replacement for both Optiview and OneTouch. We were going to switch from a pure custom Linux environment to Android which would give us a ready made operating system and environment. We worked on it for about a year and had developed a good working prototype. In December of 2017 our offices were being updated and they sent almost everyone home, but our team just setup shop in a conference room and kept churning. I remember the president of the division coming in and telling us all to go home, but we (like dummies) didn't take the hint and kept working through December.
On January 1 of 2018, the NetScout president came for a visit and told us our division was being split off and they were looking for a buyer. We were to stop all work on Andromeda which was cancelled.
We were sold to a Private Equity group named Stone Calibre on September 15, 2018. Half of our team stayed with NetScout, reducing our engineering team from 30 down to about 12. For a while, our company was named OneTouch, but eventually it took on the name NetAlly. At least I didn't have to move this time.
At NetAlly we had to create all new products since Optiview stayed with NetScout and the main component of OneTouch was no longer available to us. We took the work that we started for Andromeda and scaled it way back because we no longer had deep pockets funding us, nor a large software team.
Not to toot our horn too much, but we put out EtherScope nXG in less than 10 months with our tiny engineering team. We used every trick we knew to deliver a working product before the seed money ran out. It felt very much like being in a small startup company again, probably because that's exactly what we were.
In February of 2020, NetAlly laid off another 5 engineers, leaving us with an even smaller team. I should probably have left, but Covid hit a month later and that was a very bad time to be without a job.
Here are the products I helped create while at NetAlly.
EtherScope nXG was a custom handheld tester based on linux/android. It had a 10gig ethernet interface and a high end wifi-5 chipset.
EtherScope 10G was like nXG but no wifi
CyberScope was a high security EtherScope nXG with the ability to disable many of the features and to scan networks for compromised computers.
AirCheck g3 was a custom handheld test based on linux/android. It was cost reduced and had no ethernet interface.
CyberScope air was an AirCheck with many of the features of CyberScope
LinkRunner was a custom handheld test based on linux/android. It was cost reduced and had no wifi interface. It only had 1gig ethernet
We created all of these products with only about 6 software engineers and 2 hardware engineers. When we did the original Etherscope with Fluke back in 2002, we had 20 software engineers and 5 hardware engineers. The ability to turn out so many products in 6 years, as well as constant software updates came down to the "common core" that we developed during the first year of NetAlly. All of the products use the same code base with compile time and runtime switches turning things on and off to produce custom features for each product.
It's now April of 2026 and I'm about to retire. I have a lot of reasons for deciding to retire, but mostly I'm kind of burned out by the constant pressure of producing so much code with so few people. It's like constantly being in a brand new startup company, and my position as principal engineer means I'm always at the heart of it. I'm just ready to stop.
