iamnor

I received a LinkedIn message out of the blue this week from an old friend and former business partner and it got me thinking about the “good old days”.  Many years ago, at almost the beginning of my professional career, and right after a couple of retail computer jobs (Radio Shack and CompUSA), some friends and I left our company and started our own computer store because we were certain that we could do it better.  My master plan was to put college on hold, make a ton of money and then sell my piece of the company, start a software company doing multi-player game integrations (I’ll write about that a bit later), make my millions and then go back to school to finish my degree.  I’m still waiting to make my millions so I can go back to school and get that degree.  I think law school would be fun, and I enjoy watching congressional testimony and LAW & CRIME video streams.  But enough about how this story ends, lets get back to the early 1990’s.

Last Stop Computers (LSC) was doing well for us, we hired more people and sales were good!  While pestering my friends about buying bespoke computers from LSC, hand crafted by the author including wire wrapped cable harnesses and hot glued connectors, I happened to call a good friend from the BBS days at his Pac Tel Cellular office down the street.  He graciously agreed to try out LSC and that kicked off a fun part of my career.  I sold him a bunch of computers, and he asked if we could install them.  I grabbed my bag of zip-ties and headed down the street.  After installing a whole call centers worth of workstations, he took the time to thank me for the good prices, and great work.  It turned out that the engineers loved the way that I installed computers with everything zip tied nice and snug and clean.  He asked LSC and me specifically to come over and do computer support.

That is when it happened, the day that my sarcastic whit got me another point in the win column.  You see, I was working on a computer install while my friend was on a conference call with corporate.  They were demanding that he switch all his call center computers to UNIX workstations, and he was patiently trying to explain to them that the software he used to pull credit reports was written for DOS and a single-user application that was pushed to be multi-user with some serious hacks and that it crashed a couple times a day, requiring everyone in the call-center to be kicked out of the application so that manual datafile rebuilding could take place.  He was about 90 decibels into explaining that running this tool in a PC DOC emulator on a UNIX workstation was not going to work and I interrupted.  He put the corporate people on hold and slowly turned around to face me.

“What you need is a real C programmer to write a UNIX native multi-user credit reporting application.” – Sarcastic, witty, foolish twenty something who really should have known better

Without skipping a beat, my good friend smiled and said, “I’ll give you $25k, can you have in done in six weeks?”

I did not know any better, and with more ego than brains, I said sure, how hard can it be?

As this is all getting a bit long winded, I’ll cut to the chase and say that I did it in five weeks.  I did not have any experience programming or even using a UNIX workstation, and I made all kinds of silly single-user OS to multi-user OS mistakes like not knowing the importance of sleep(), I/O blocking function calls and so many more.  But the experience started me on the path to loving all flavors of UNIX and I have never looked back except to marvel at some of my choices and mistakes.

The company ended up using my credit reporting application for years even though it was only supposed to be a stopgap for a few months, and it ran reasonably well.  I looked at the code a couple of years ago and could not believe how bad a programmer I was and still am.

That relationship, the computer sales, installations, consulting, and writing the credit reporting system ended up getting me my next two jobs (thanks Garry Boswell!).

That was my biggest success during the LSC phase of my career, the biggest mistake turned out to be a missed opportunity.

You see, I was doing a bunch of consulting work for multiple companies supporting networks, servers, UNIX, Novell, and programming and I had an idea that I pitched to my partners at LSC.  I wanted to stand up a consulting arm of the business focused on the types of highly technical issues that I had been helping our customers with informally.  I made the pitch, and my partners did not want to take the risk.  They were all happy with our sales and profits and did not want to upset the apple cart.  I tried several times and got nowhere with them.  That turned out to be the first lesson I learned about partnerships.  It is important to understand the motivations and long-term goals of each of the partners.  I was in it to make enough money to start a software company, one of my partners was working on starting a family, another was looking for a safe place to keep his nest-egg with a nice rate of return.  None of us had the same core motivations and that caused friction.

A couple weeks after my last failed attempt to get the partners on board with my plan, I got an out-of-the-blue dinner request from one of my partners good (and rich) friends.  It turned out that my partner had mentioned my idea to this friend.  Keep in mind, this was the early 90’s and there just were not very many high-end computer consultancies out there and this rich friend sat across his dinning room table in his very large and fancy house tucked away in a gated community in La Jolla, California and as I recall, said something to the effect of “I really like this idea of yours, it is exactly what is needed and I want to fund it and I want you to run it, lets put together a business plan and get this going”.

And here is the mistake I made, I ended up turning him down because I had already committed to LSC and did not want to leave my partners in a lurch.  Yeah, I walked away from a potentially amazing opportunity that day.  What is worse is that I ended up leaving the partnership later that year because of the motivational friction at LSC and not getting me where I wanted to be with a software company, so I went to work at Pac Tel Cellular as a Sr. UNIX Administrator with no experience, after all, how hard could it possibly be.

All that said, I want to give a shout out to my LSC partners who really were the ones that helped set the trajectory as well as being the catalysts that caused the chemical reaction that shot me up and out into the world of IT and eventually, Cyber Security (Thank you Mike Stevenson, Brian Schwartz, and Jim Melrod who is the guy behind the camera on that photo of a very young Cyber Security curmudgeon in training).