Techno Bob hard at work The MSM Consulting Group
We are... Your MIS department!
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Techno Bob hard at work The MSM Consulting Group We are... Your MIS department!
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Company Background and a little PC history... Our founders digital experience started with the birth of the first commercially successful integrated circuits circa 1967. In 1968, as a member of the design team developing the first computer controlled radio station automation system, he was responsible for design support and test of all proto-type hardware. As the lead Engineering Technician, he was additionally responsible for implementation and assembly of many of the critical circuits and components, including the actual computer at the chip level and peripheral equipment interfaces required. In late 1969, he founded his own design and manufacturing firm. They designed and built many industrial commercial products from sprinkler system controllers to the first electronic clocks. His first commercially successful Micro-Computer design was for a small parts transporter called "The Auto Arm". This product was the brain child of Mr. Art Gillman, a visionary and the president of Unique Industries. Mr. Gillman currently had a design for a "Hard Wired" "Auto Arm" product that was un-reliable, hard to program, had very long lead times, and was very costly to produce and maintain. This product was used in the Printed Circuit Board assembly process to remove people from toxic cleaning environments while improving the cleaning process and greatly reducing toxic cleaning chemical emissions. A great idea, just no way to commercially produce one. When asked if Marcus and Associates could produce the current product, Mr. Marcus suggested a new design using a "Micro Computer" to control the motors and other components. The "Auto Arm" was not a simple product. It was the first time a "Micro Computer" was used to replace existing "Hard Wired" logic boards. This would give Unique Industries the ability to offer a standardized mechanical package with a "Customized Program" at greatly reduced costs and lead times. Not to mention the great reduction in field service requirements. We needed to combine current technology with inventing technology as the project was developed. Suffice it to say that we had our fair share of design issues to over come. However, in the end, the "Auto Arm" produced successfully by Marcus and Associates for approximately 4 years followed by in house production by Unique Industries into the early 1990's without major re-design. This product is not only a testament to the forward thinking and vision of our founder and Mr. Gillman, but a testament to the enduring quality of the state of the art products we have designed and built. Unlike many other computer companies, we bring this experience, understanding and tenacity for "doing it right" to all of our products. Current systems included. About 1976 a band new industry was born... The Personal Computer Industry. Based on a simple home built computer - The Altair 8800a, a home hobbyist could build his own computer and program it to do amazing things. Until this "PC" computers were the sole prevue of large corporations with air conditioning systems the size of the Space Shuttle and a electricity budget the size of New Jersey. Of course one of the first things on the hobbyist's mind was "Computer Games". This the Altair did well. When it ran. The graphics were not great, but the frustration was well worth it. After all, it was your own "Personal Computer". The demand for these first "PC's" grew like wild fire. Because many of the peripherals we take for granted today (the Floppy Drive, the Hard Drive, the Monitor, etc.) did not exist, we needed to use components readily available to the hobbyist. The TV set became the Monitor. An inexpensive portable cassette machine became "The Mass Storage System". Despite the fact that these machines had the uptime of a East European Yugo, they became enormously popular. Imagine, in your own home, having a computer that required the power of a small state and actually did very little. Of course people wanted them. But they didn't want to build them! Hence the beginnings of "Retail Computer Store". A number of retail stores including "The Byte Shop" were springing up all over the place. But even these stores lacked the ability to assemble the poorly packaged and documented kits put out by the now numerous independent computer kit and board manufacturers. Just imagine, you could buy a memory board with 4000 bytes (yes that is 4000 not 4,000,000), un-assembled, without the actual memory chips for just about $450. What a deal!! Then you needed to assemble it and stuff it with memory and you were easily $600 lighter in the wallet. Now if it only worked! A little known fact.... This new PC needed a program to operate the computer. A young programmer came up with a core program to run on this machine. This program was written to be loaded thru the "Mass Storage System" (cassette tape) and could actually save to the same device. The program that performed this miracle was called "Altair Basic" and was written by Bill Gates. "Altair Basic" is the forefather of today's Visual Basic. The computer standard for the period became know as the S100 Buss. This was named after the Altair's 100 pin data, address, and control buss. Soon, the floppy drive was invented and another guy, Gary Kindal and his team at Digital Research, saw the future and created a "Control Program for Micro Computers" or CPM. Soon this first "Operating System" was the first commercially available and the first commercially successful operating system that addressed the different hardware configurations of all these companies loosly complying to the "S100" buss structure. This enabled computers with similar but different hardware configurations to all run the same programs. Exchange of information between computers was now born. Unfortunately the only computers that did not read or write to this new "Standard" was the Apple. While CPM was an "OS" that could be run on virtually any S100 PC, Apple had developed a product that took a different approach and established itself as a user friendly, be it non-compatible with everybody else, computer system. Even then there were the Apple guys and everybody else. Eventually IBM saw the writing on the wall and embarked on a PC design project. Once introduced, the IBM PC was an immediate hit. You could choose the "Microsoft" approach or the "Digital Research" approach to a operating system. This was because, IBM knew that the money would be made in the hardware, not the software. The one right decision IBM did make was to charge a very low licensing fee for use of their buss structure. The S100 world quickly died and a whole new IBM Compatible world opened up. The IBM PC and the PC Clones had many features that advanced the state of the art. One however really impressed me. The computer could play a song on its built in speaker. Eventually, software took over as the market driving source. Bill Gates now has enough money to buy Vermont or one of the flat states in the middle of our union. This is a true David over Goliath story. The only problem is that Bill Gates is now the "Goliath" and occasionally forgets he was once "David". |
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