Recollections of My Life: Part 3

The Computer Company, Intelligent Data Entry Systems (IDES)

It was sometime shortly after the beginning of the year 1975, and I had a fairly new copy of this issue of Popular Electronics magazine from January. I took the magazine as prima facie evidence of my belief that microprocessors were going to become mainstream.

I was also a student in Electronics Engineering at Georgia Tech with a particular interest in digital logic and microprocessors which was reflected in my coursework. Must have been a senior by purport, and I was also employed at an entertainment electronics repair facility here in Atlanta, an outfit called Henco Electronics, and I worked there at night. I lived in downtown Atlanta, 5th and Durand, just a short hop across the freeway (Interstate 75/85) from Tech with my wife, a girl named Stephanie. She had suggested I meet one of her fellow employees at an outfit named Data Systems Corporation (Data Systems), the fellow’s name was Chester P. Quinn. She said that he was their programmer guru and that he was really smart, and she persisted in a way, so one day near the start of the year I stopped in to Data Systems to visit. It was located on Spring Street just north of 14th Street.

So this fellow’s office was on the second floor of the place and we were introduced. Told him I was interested in digital logic and microprocessors, and showed him that magazine and some Intel 8080 manuals, all of these from a bookbag gifted by my parents while I was in high school. When he looked at the magazine it was obvious that he was visually challenged, or to use that era’s phrasing, blind as a bat. In fact he was legally blind. But he asked me if I smoked pot, and when I said oh yeah, he said push the door to. We toked some herb while he looked the magazine over, and then he asked me if I could assemble one of them for him if he bought it. Oh yeah sure enough!

A few days later I had one of the MITS Altair kits and was assembling it. I recall that I showed it to my fellow techs at Henco, but I was essentially done with Henco by that time. Some places are strange, and Henco was of that sort.

At about the same time Stephanie and I moved to a more modern apartmet near Rockbridge and Piedmont Ave. Still close to Data Systems and Georgia Tech.

Meanwhile I delivered the computer to Chester. We showed the Altair and some little bit of a UART and some LEDs to Data Systems and we pitched the owner, James (Jim) Watson, that we should design and build these data terminals to eliminate most of the data entry issues faced by Data Systems. At this time the accountants filled out forms that were then keypunched onto 80 column punch cards. The general ledger and accounts receivables/payables ran on a Honeywell mainframe that used vacuum tape drives and transistor logic. A data entry terminal was obviously the future. Chester and I knew that the terminal solution we pitched was only near term, that the terminal would quickly “evolve” to become a stand alone machine capable of doing all the processing in house, and Data Systems would lose all of its business rationale. Going from terminal to stand alone computer was primarily dependent on code, and it did not take long to realize that Chester was a true master of that. So I started doing a hardware design and Chester began playing with some code.

Chester and I became very good friends in short order. Stephanie had been correct, he was one smart cookie. But even more he was a genuinely decent fellow. He also liked science fiction.

Stephanie was extremely unhappy that Watson and IDES were paying me more to play at home than they were paying her. But then she had also been unhappy that I could pass courses with little study. We bought an ASR-33 teletype machine and shortly after rented an office space in Atlanta’s Buckhead area with the name of Intelligent Data Entry Systems (IDES) and we were incorporated. It was no small coincidence that we did this about the middle of March and that played into the Ides of March.

It wasn’t very long before I had designed and built some protoype boards like these shown here next in the old laboratory setup. Our system boards were the same physical size as the S-100 bus cards used in the Altair, but our electrical bus structure was different. I also designed the physical bus circuit board in two styles one with I think 8 slots and another with 22 slots. The connectors were nice 100 pin card edge connectors, and we let the owner of H&L Electronics, our PCB manufacturer, Ed Lewis, use and duplicate the bus circuit board.

We had a decent amount of test equipment, I had tons of tools and a bunch of test equipment and parts already, so there was no panic about needing this or that. We bought a Tektronix 475 scope with a DVM on top and lots of PC board layout tapes and shapes. One time a fellow came to the office/lab and he asked how we had gotten this designed and built so quickly, and I said see the clear area under the light table? That is where I sleep. I actually did spend a huge amount of time there. Late one evening a janitor observed that I must be an owner. How so? Well you are still here now working.

Here are two PC board artwork samples from our design. I did the original pc artwork manually with tape and shapes on .5 mil mylar film at twice actual size on that light table shown above, which I also designed and built. 1/4 inch thick tempered glass.

This guy shown here next is Chubb, and he was our logo. So he ended up gracing lots of drawings and artwork. In a Vaughn Bode Deadbone Erotica cartoon there are two lizard characters. One of them has a rock which the other covets, and he offers the moon and the stars and the sky and everything for possession of the rock. So the rock is given to him, and poof, everything but the lone lizard and his rock disappear. The chip is a metaphor for that rock.

Somewhere in this timeframe I bought this house here in Atlanta just off Ponce De Leon Avenue behind the Cator Woolford Gardens. Lovely place really. My GI Bill benefits helped a lot with this. I had great hopes. Sometimes our hopes are realized, and some times they are not. Unfortuately my wife at the time, Stephanie, did not embrace the concept of marital fidelity. There were other issues as well and I did not wish to have my activities directed by someone who was not my full partnerr.

So yes it was a nice little house. The previous owner called the back room of the house her blue heaven. One thing of note, the boundary of my back yard was also the boundary of DeKalb County and the front yard boundary was City of Atlanta. Highest property tax rate in Georgia.

I had built and we were using a cassette tape player running the Kansas City Standard tape format and we also had our lovely ASR teletype which of course ran punched paper tape. But we determined that we really wanted something faster, so along with Chester I designed a floppy disk controller for our computer. The issue was that a two megaHertz 8080A could not poll the data requests from an eight inch floppy fast enough to get or send the data. So we hit upon the idea of using the availability of data flag to trigger an interrupt which we jammed onto the bus. Once you have the idea the implementaion details become easier. Bingo, that worked well! That project also became a magazine article in Interface Age Magazine which is written up here in Hackernoon. Really proud of that little invention.

This next image is the front panel of my prototype unit. We didn’t need all the “blinken lights” on production units. so they lacked this display addition. But this panel allowed me to step through instruction cycles or their composite machine cycles.

I designed this simple fold up box from sheet aluminum. The sides and buttom were a single “U” shape foldup and the ends mounted to that. There was a flip-top lid hinged at the top of one end. We put one of these in a nifty commercial “computer terminal case” we bought made of noryl plastic that was our intended enclosure. The interior of the case had the circuit boards mounted vertically into a motherboard with edge connectors that sat horizontally in the box. The power supplies were mounted in the box below the motherboard that so the fan blew through the cards then down and through the power supplies to the air exit right below the fan. The interior of the box was basically a duct for the fan. The clip on the fan in the photos held a filter against the fan. If need be memory could be loaded from the switch panel.

Besides the switches, this end panel also sported the connectors for a floppy disk drive, a keyboard, and a serial printer as well as a composite video output for the display and a connector for the AC power.

While we were in Buckhead I designed a video card by the simple expedient of borrowing the core counter chain and RAM and character generator circuitry from a commercial design and adding connections to our bus to that. Our video board also added support for a printer and a keyboard. Quick and dirty but it fit our needs for a video display and I/O card very nicely. We used a commercial nine inch composite video display for our 64 character by 16 lines display. That along with the machine so far done gave us a complete system design to demo and we sat a lovely blonde in front of it for publicity photos. The picture of her and the machine is this article’s header image above, which was regenerated from a rather aged xerox of the photo. The photo and text copy were sent out to Data Systems clients pitching the terminal. There was a VERY nice stack of reply cards from Atlanta accountants who wanted one of these as soon as we could deliver them. I would guess there were at least 150 to 200 reply cards. Data Systems had a lot of accountants as customers. No way we could put all these together in a two room Buckhead office suite. So it became necessary for us to relocate.

These next two images are of the CPU board front and back. We hired a fellow Chester knew whose name was Teaberry and I taught him how to assemble the boards.

I designed a ROM/EPROM card shown here next.

This next below is my dynamic RAM card design for a 64K RAM install. This is a prototype that I built on a scavenged 8K static RAM card. There are no schematics for this design except the one built into this wired up example. The circuit looks exactly like static RAM to the host bus which allows the use of my front panel display. The technique I used for this and other circuits was to use a clip art card of the integrated circuit pin-outs and lay them out on a surface as my map and then wire the integrated circuits accordingly. I also cheated here by labelling the board.

My friend Tommy is quite the machinist and he worked over a Dremel Tool drill press so that it could be used to easily drill up a proto board like this one. Grateful for his help. Carbide bits as are used fror drilling fiberglass boards do not tolerate wobble, they break easily. ☺

These next two images are of the prototype floppy disk controller board which was built on a prototyping board from a commercial vendor. Their market was the S-100 bus, but the board form factor met our needs handily.

These following images are of the wire wrapped video controller board which also supported a printer and a keyboard. This was also built on a commercial prototyping board.

It was very soon after we had relocated IDES to a suite in an office park in Chamblee close to the perimeter that my marriage with Stephanie disintegrated entirely in a rather traumatic episode. I knew a psychiatrist and he spoke with her and then told me that what she meant by love was not what most people meant and certainly not what I meant. She had a lawyer contact me and he said that he would not sell me out. She gave me a quitclaim which surrendered any interest she may have had in the house and I gave her her maiden name back. And I was single again. If you are looking for the full blown salacious story you can find such on the tubes. It is of no benefit to flail the other person after an argument is done.

We hired this guy I worked with at Electromagnetic Sciences (EMS) named Don Osborne to manage production. Paid him a couple thousand dollars more annual salary than I took, and gave him a company car. Pretty soon after that we had a staff meeting and I was told I was no longer employed, and not only that but I wouldn't even get my last paycheck until I gave them the design of the video card. Not gave but finished. Well that was exciting.

So the owner of Data Systems Corp was Jim Watson, and the production manager, Don Osborne was present as well. Jim went off about how I should be grateful for the money they paid me, how well I had been paid. That was exciting too. Lols.

So I said ok thats cool. You and I are different. First I am honest and you are not. My end is done, the schematics are right there on the shelf where they are supposed to be. So you can give me my final week’s check now, and it better be good or I will kill you. Got their attention because they figured I was psycho.

Then I said there is another difference between us too, I am a fucking genius and you are not. Before next week is over I will have another job paying more money, and you will still be stupid. That was true, I got a job that following Monday. Chester kept quiet, kept going in while he got his ass covered. About 3 weeks later Jim asked him how the code was going. Fatman said it's not, I haven't touched it since you ran Bob off. In fact I meant to give you notice, but I took my old job back so I am gone too.

That Sunday the Atlanta paper listed an electronics engineering position which was a contractor digital design position with Sperry Space Support Services. I recall the interviewer asking if I knew what ASCII stood for. Then he asked where I had learned this. So I told him I learned it at Georgia Tech. The major issue with the job was that it was in Huntsville Alabama and I lived in Atlanta Georgia.

About same time, maybe two weeks after I left, Don called me, left a message saying the video card design doen't work. Asked him what it did, he told me. Sure enough I had somehow swapped two connections. Lols. So I told him what two wires to swap and told him I frankly think you have bit off more than you can chew. That was the last time I spoke with Don. Meanwhile I got a release from Watson to sell the design. I did sell it to Sperry Space Support Services for $5000.00 Jim asked if I'd be into hiring on to maintain his old Honeywell mainframe. Transistors. It gave me great pleasure to suggest he call Don. Thst was the last time I talked to him.

For a quick backstory, Data Systems Corp ran general ledgers on the Honeywell. Chester, aka the Fatman, coded it. At this time, which I did not know, Jim got the opportunity to sell the business to another accounting firm that already had their own terminal, Z80 based. They did not want to buy or pay for Jim’s terminal. I thought perhaps Don had wangled Watson into the idea of him replacing me. Maybe so, he did not run Don off when he ran me off. After he sold the Data Systems business Jim played some at the general ledger thing, but was unable to gain support for the hardware and he had no Chester to write amazing code. so he ended up going to retire on Amelia Island, Florida, a nice little estate at a rich man’s resort.

But After the IDES business fell through I ended up travelling to Huntsville Alabama to work and returning to my home every weekend. I had become friends with another fellow from school while I was at Georgia Tech, and he lived right down the street from my house. He was very much into loudspeaker design and set about building them as well. So I let him set up his radial arm saw in my basement to do his thing, in exchange for watering the plants and feeding the cats. Fellow’s name was Michael Rosen and that was a disappointment. Came home could not find a cat. Turns out he had let it get out and it was in a tree where it had been for days. The plants did not get watered and they died, and the basement and other spaces filled with sawdust from particle board. He ended up going to work for Bose Corporation and did well for himself at that. To be honest I did not like Huntsville Alabama either.

I had been at Sperry a short time and I had met this fellow named George Roof, who identified himself as the designated scapegoat. Interesting title. He said that the idea was that when deadlines were not met someone would have to be blamed. That would be him, so he would be without a job for a couple of weeks and then he’d be hired back. Roof was an OK guy, he gave me some Alabama native ferns.

I also spoke with my boss at Sperry, the fellow who hired me, and told him I had serious doubts about the project that talking with Roof had not mitigated. So he asked me if I had talked with anyone else about this and suggested we should go outside to continue our conversation. This was at a time when NASA had major problems with staffing and most of the “employees” actually worked for NASA through private sector outfits like Sperry. The real NASA employees went on strike to discontinue the use of contract workers, and they won. Suddenly all these contractors working for NASA were without a job! Now my boss, Mike Casciolo, said the Sperry’s Huntsville management asked the company to continue the employees for a time while they located other work for them. So Sperry had responded to a Request for Quotation (RFQ) which is government device to offer work to potential bidders. The premise was that Sperry could leverage their experience at staffing to quickly build out an organization to satisfy a contract.

This RFQ was for the design and build of some Infantry Remote Target Systems that were to be installed as live fire training systems at a number of military bases, I n fact one was installed on Ft. Benning at my hometown of Columbus Georgia.The concept was to have berms that would conceal the presence of pop up targets that included hit detection, and there were hostile fire simulators as well. The system was to be run by a microprocessor computer. It required mil-spec components and design parameters.

So Mike said that he was rather surprised that I figured this out, but I needed to consider that this work gave a lot of people employment, and those people had house payments and families to be concerned about. Sperry would present a “dog and pony show” which would show the government that progress had been made and that the project could be completed, and then the government would grant an add-on contract to continue the work, and this too was important to the Sperry employees. I replied by asking him about his name, it was Italian right? He said that it was, why did I ask? I said are you Catholic? He replied that he was, so I asked him what do you tell the priest? Mike left Sperry about the same time I did, returned to his former job with an inspection cameras outfit.

I had to write up a request for variation and submitted modifications to the mil-spec printed circuits manual which was really fun, and then I sold the design of the printed circuit boards to Sperry and the government for $5000.00. Besides the boards in the photos above I also had designed a parallel I/O card which was part of the sale.

Sperry also used the computer design on a system that went to the US Army Aberdeen Proving Grounds to evaluate small arms and shooters. For this system they wanted the computer connected to a Hewlett Packard Basic Computer, a sort of a calculator device that ran the Basic Language. Of course the Intel 8080A processor could have done that but my piece of the project was defined. This system used the parallel I/O card. Intel 8212 8 bit latches. The pop up targets were silhouette cutouts on a spring load arm that had a solenoid to unlatch the spring and pop the target up. M31A1 was the designation. I used an SCR connected by optical devices to trip the latch. A fairly simple comparator served to detect the instant a bullet connected the foil on the traget front to the foil on the target back.

Finally I had had more than my fair share of Huntsville Alabama. Being fair about it, not being a real resident but nstead a transient in a barebones apartment just up the street from the ABC state liquor store was much of the situation. Sperry offered me a substantial raise and even offered to pay for the apartment if I would stay but I simply could not. Likely the situation with my cats and my house being less than well kept entered into the dystopia.

So it ended up that there were a few of my machines on military bases, the IRETS target ranges for live fire training, and one at Aberdeen Proving Grounds that I cistom designed to evaluate small arms weapons and shooters. So remember Chubb the lizard logo shown above? The contract for the sale of the design specified that Chubb would be included on the circuit boards, so our boy ended up on a few military sites. I find that humorous.

I returned to Atlanta Georgia and settled into the house. Found work and went to it.

I heard from Stephanie after a number of years. In fact she came by to visit. I recall she reached out to pet Theopolous my cat where he sat on my car and he recoiled and went into attack mode claws open and raised. Surprising but a nonetheless profound statement. She was quite proud of having become a proficient programmer and left me this card. That was quite some time ago, before 1990. I was thinking about all of this recently and decided I would Google her name. I was very disappointed to find her obituary, she passed in the first part of 2023. I had to cry. I pray she found her happiness before she left. The last thing she said to me was on the telephone, that I was the smartest one. Such a pitfully sad accolade that was. God rest you easy girl.

So that was how it went down

So that concludes Part 3 of my autobiography.

I hope you dear reader found this entertaining and somewhat informative. As always Comments, Criticisms, and Suggestions are welcome. God bless all!