When my Ventura Publisher and the associated vertical market collapsed, the next step was to cater to a new market. We chose the market for vinyl sign designing and cutting. We established dealerships for cutters with Roland, Summagraphics and a few smaller companies. We also became a dealer for the expensive Amiable Flexisign software. […]

Great family that camped, hunted, fished, learned to swim well. My family was supportive in everything! Dad bought a canoe when I was three. It was the center of our family recreation. Mom and dad set a great example. They were together for 55 years. I built lots of things (Dad was a cabinet maker […]

Around 1987 I started Laserworks. We were an authorized dealer for Xerox Ventura Publisher. We were also an Authorized Dealer for LaserMaster. We developed this position as a vertical market serving printshops, book publishers and self-publishers. LaserMaster made custom hardware for computer typesetting users who wanted better quality than the industry-leading 300 dpi laser printers […]

  I still had my SouthWare Dealership but we had not sold any new installations for a long time. After the burglary in 1995, Darin and both started learning HTML, making websites and survived doing that for a couple of years. The name Excelco, was chosen because SouthWare’s full name was the SouthWare Excellence Series […]

McDonnel Aircraft [before Douglas bought it] After getting my BS in Aerospace Engineering, I went to work in the Propulsion Department and was assigned to NASA’s Project Gemini for which McDonnel had the contract for. This was a two-person space vehicle. I did a lot of “busy work” proofreading and correcting test reports for propulsion […]

Drill Stem Test (DST) Transmission System The FreightMaster Section was part of the Mechanical Research and Development Department (MRD) of Haliburton Services. One of the guys [Doug] in MRD had recently received company funding for an important new Drill Stem Test (DST) computer project. He went to our Department Manager to ask for personnel to […]

George and I moved to Tulsa in June 1982 and opened Woodland store at 71st and Memorial in September 1982. We formed a corporation as The Computer Professionals Inc with me owning two-thirds of the stock and my Partner, George, having one-third. We were well-capitalized as I had cashed in my Halliburton profit sharing and […]

There was a guy who came to our store every Saturday morning to read computer magazines we had there. His name is Corey. I don’t remember him buying the magazines but he would typically stay there two or three hours. He had the closest thing to a photographic memory of anyone I had ever met. […]

We carefully located a building that would hold our second store. I took the lease for the second store to our lawyer to review. He looked over the lease but did not find anything wrong with it. He recommended we set up a second corporation for the second store. I did not follow his recommendation […]

As I mentioned, I had “pounded on the table” at several Franchise Advisory Council meetings asking for the standard accounting system which was promised in our franchise agreements. Jeff McKeever, one of the Co-Founders of MicroAge offered me a consulting position at headquarters. My project there would be to choose the system that would be […]