The road onward from Ski-U-Mah went through Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, coincidentally my birthplace, but a stop in 1973 because it was the world headquarters of the Aluminum Company of America, aka ALCOA. My BS in Marketing was going to make me a salesman – an interesting turn of phrase.
Later in the year, after training and orientation that took me all over the country to ALCOA fastener, sheet, primary (ingot), extrusion, and forging plants, I landed in the Bettendorf, Iowa sales office. The following years weren’t really the best, but there were moments. First child Heather came along in 1974, while I was unselling aluminum. Unselling? Yup, that was a time of “commodity shortages” including aluminum, and my job was literally to make ALCOA’s customers as miserable as possible. Turns out that’s a pretty good way to make a salesman miserable, too. Raising prices? Not the half of it. Changing the product mix; dropping simple extrusions for complex ones. Winnebago wants to extrude its own parts from ingot? Forgetaboutit!
Anyway, back on topic. Not much computer stuff going on. Typewriters. Calculators. Green bar computer paper mailed out periodically with numbers printed on it. A big mainframe was spewing out nunbers showing me I wasn’t making life hard enough on my customers. They weren’t taking their low-margin business over to Reynold or Alcan fast enough. It finally got me fired.
So I went home. Ok, they say you can’t, and maybe they are right, but the next four years weren’t in rural western Minnesota weren’t so bac. Courtney’s birth interrupted a golf game in 1977, I was a Jaycee, in a bowling league, a golf league, a softball league, and Co-chair of the Republican Party in the Sixth Congressional District. I was also selling real estate and managing farms, which is where computing came in. Renting land, cash or share, sometimes managing a “custom farming” operation. Negotiation, buying, selling – and contracting to sell – grain, keeping records. Periodically reporting to owners. The limit to income was the record keeping and reporting one person could do with an electric typewriter, carbon paper, a calculator, and a pencil. I was maxed out.
That’s when I found the IMSAI 8080. S-100 buss, Intel 8080 processor. Later Mathew Broderick’s home computer in War Games (1983). I’m not sure where I saw it. Perhaps an ad in Popular Electronics? Anyway, all that led to my first report dealing with computing, productivity, and business processes – a proposal to the Klein National Bank to finance a small business computer. It didn’t fly. Though they never said so, I’m pretty sure they thought I was “round the bend.” Little computers? In small businesses? Print letters and reports? Nonsense. Certainly nothing on which to risk the bank’s money. It was a green eyeshade era.
That little roadblock eventually took me back to the big city, but not before a campaign for the State Senate.
That, as they say, is another story. But not part of these computer tales.
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