Monday, March 2, 2015

One-man company

Wang was a good computer and revolutionized secretaries' jobs. It replaced at least one secretary with a Wang, not too good looking but function wise it worked. EMail and other office software (meeting, etc.) replaced more.

There were many today's applications migrated from Wang to PCs forming many companies. When you talked to Wang or Ken Olsen of DEC to use PCs, you got fired!

Writing software for a 4K PC using BASIC is fun. I wrote a spreadsheet and a text formatter. All the magazines took my press releases happily (free advertising). DOS was licensed from an unknown company in Seattle. CP/M officials were busy in keeping their tee times when IBM tried to license it. The rest is history.

I licensed and ported a complete accounting software from CP/M to DOS using my customized RS232, very high tech at the time. I sold it for $900 per package (compared to other's $500 per module). I wrote an interactive data (file more appropriate) manager (IDM). Both were my best sellers. Dream big but you have to face reality. 20 packages written by one cannot compete with 20 programmers working on one package.

Running a company is fun. I was the CEO and also the janitor.

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