Not many people can say that there were present at the beginning of an entire industry. Or perhaps more importantly, not many people when they are in the middle of the invention of a new industry KNOW that it is the beginning of a new industry.
I will readily admit that while I was there, I did not really recognize the truly mind altering aspects of what I was living through.
I am talking, of course, of the PC revolution. As I have mentioned earlier in this monolog, I have been in the software business for a very long time. When it started, it was all mainframes and dumb terminals. The company I was with at the time would ultimately have its legs cut out from under it by PCs, but none of us really realized that was going to happen.
Moving from dumb terminals to PCs seemed harmless enough until you did the math. We would g et about $10,000 a month from a good client in our timesharing business. We would sell the software we used (think of it as a very specialized, very complicated spreadsheet) for $10,000 + 15% annual maintenance. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that we were eating our young.
And yet, the company survives to this day.
It happened in the midst of a bust and a boom. The bust was the oil industry, with hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs, at the same time that the start of the PC boom was taking root. Many were swept up with both sides. I was one.
I will save the sad and happy, sorry and lucky tales for later, but the facts of the matter was that the seeds of the oil bust were sewn in the computer boom.
But that is a story for another time.
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