No. of Recommendations: 10
Every quantum leap in technology breeds euphoria with investors (speculators) pouring money into everything that sounds remotely like the "cool stuff". While I lived through the original dot-com period with its manic stock market driven by companies who didn't make a dime, followed by the crash which developed when they couldn't justify the money invested in them and they went belly up, it wasn't the first mass extinction I lived through.
Just for fun, I looked up what I think was my first ad in Byte Magazine (a nationally distributed technology magazine popular enough that they ran over 500 pages long) found on the right-hand page here:
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-11/...Out of the dozens of manufacturers listed, Xerox is still around (though diminished) as are the Japanese printer manufactures (Epson, Okidata, NEC and C.Itoh - which doesn't sell printers and is now known as Itachu) as well as Texas Instrument (manufacturer of the "TI"-810). The rest bit the bullet long ago - victims of the next wave of competitors. And Microsoft has a cameo mention.
The average annual rate of inflation in the U.S. from 1981 to 2025 is approximately 2.93%, based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI). This resulted in a cumulative price increase of about 256.41% over 44 years, meaning that prices in 2025 are roughly 3.56 times higher than they were in 1981. Taking that into account, prices take for granted back then, like a 10mb hard disk for $5,000 would be over 15 grand in todays bucks. Daisy wheel printers were over $1,500 dollars in 1981 dollars.
A fully expanded computer (the term PC or personal computer was not used yet) would use an 8 bit processor. The Zilog Z-80 was designed to compete with the Intel 8080. The Z-80 was created by some of the same designers who had worked on the 8080 and was designed to be backward-compatible with it, while also offering more features and improved performance, making it a dominant force in the early personal computer market. It would come with 64 kilobytes of ram (that's kilo, not mega not giga), a couple of RS-32 serial ports (one for a terminal consisting of a video screen and attached keyboard, the other to communicate with - if only there was someone you could reach as this was pre-internet) and a parallel printer port. The usual operating system was known as CP/M (developed by Gary Kildall, which makes an interesting story regarding the original release of the IBM PC years later). Most of these computers shared a common bus known by the S-100 edge connector (originally adopted because it was cheap and available as a military surplus item).
While this was pre-PC, pre-internet and (in general) pre-graphics capable output, these systems were far from privative. One of the boxes mentioned (IMS 1000-DT) was able to accommodate multiple computer boards plugged into its bus, each of which supported a different user sharing the main system's disk drives and printers and running a multi-user operating system - creating what we would call a blade-server today.
But I digress. That was an exciting time when anyone who could fog a mirror, regardless of whether they knew how to run a business, whether their product worked on not or whether they paid their bills or not, could start a business and be successful - until one or another of those factors caught up with them and forced them out of business. I was not the first to enter the business of reselling microcomputers (technically, that started in the second half of the 1970's and I started in 1981, nor did I have the most locations (I kept it to one (in NYC) with a few years of a small office in Albany, NY). While my business changed dramatically over the years, it not only survived, but prospered to the point that, when I sold it, 30 years later, in 2011, it was the oldest IT value-added reseller (after spending time calling myself a dealer, an OEM, a distributor, a contractor, an installer, a designer - basically anything which would get me the best price on material and equipment, the name which stuck) still owned by its founder.
So, what was the secret formula for longevity?
I always paid my bills on time (giving the firm virtually unlimited credit as well as beneficial pricing)
I was never frightened to change the direction of the company into new fields, reinventing our marketing and technical direction every few years.
I pioneered a business plan which allowed us to, for the first few years, to create a high margin, cash up-front business creating a positive cash flow from the beginning.
I created a procurement database which allowed price comparisons between dozens of sources throughout the country (as well as in other countries) and in numerous channels of hundreds of thousands of different items - and then an effective way of converting that into profitable government contracts.
I always made it a point to hire the best people I could find for each position - pretty much regardless of cost. In a field where personnel were hired away on an unbelievable scale, the average tenure with my company exceeded ten years and, in many cases, exceeded 20 years. I'd like to think it was because they loved me as their boss, but in reality, they couldn't afford take a chance of leaving because my competitors would never match what I paid. This allowed me to provide the best service to my customers, provide coverage when I went on vacation and actually keep my headcount lower than other firms because there was no "shrinkage". Salespeople made a salary plus a commission based on net (after cost) profit (rather than sales) and had, within boundaries, flexibility on the sales price, putting their interests in line with the firm's. It was a win-win.
I got into the business as a kid and left a retiree - and along the way lost a number of tranches of competitors and acquiring whole new groups of customers.
Jeff
