from my early career, we dazzled engineers with new electronic machinery automation that made their production magically improve. “Abracadabra!” Hmmm… a little long. (But the first letter ‘A’ would be the top of the phone book) And I want ‘Tech’ implied somehow. My specialty after all. In hindsight, Abratech probably should have evolved, but ‘Abiteq’ it became. My business name for all things computer and tech that would interest me enough to dabble commercially. (continued below…)
Ok, the real story was that my early partner referred to our innovative products as “F…ing Magic!”
George graduated from the university in the mid-70s after taking a Fortran programming class with card-punched program steps where you handed your resulting card stack (100+) to the desk and supposedly they fed it to a giant, room-size computer that I never saw. You would return in half a day to get a printout of your program results, or of your program fail, in which case you would return to the punch card machine to find your mistake and re-punch the particular card, before resubmitting the stack.
And our engineering program included learning the slide rule to perform all of your math needs. We had speed tests, so you could solve the hardest math problems quickly. But before I graduated, the engineering school had embraced the new scientific calculators from Texas Instruments and Hewlitt Packard. And I changed my major to Business Marketing anyway.
In the early 80s, Bill Gates and Paul Allen introduced what would be the Windows PC, and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak presented their new Apple computer. Coincidentally, I had taken an electronics class to understand transistors for my short-lived Hi-Fi Stereo sales job. Before you could blink, I was now considered the “tech and computer” guy. My destiny was ordained.
My first twenty years of tech was working as ‘Control Components Northwest’, helping automate machinery for manufacturing companies around the Northwest, and the later twenty years (and still going) is working as ‘Abiteq’, automating business marketing on the web.
I hope our paths cross and cheers to technology! …George
