In 1981 Business Application Systems was making a version of the BASPort portable operating system (private labeled VOS) for SCI Systems, a corporation based in Huntsville Alabama. That spring BAS agreed to sell the portion of BAS developing VOS to SCI.
Flash back to the 1960s when the integration of components for the Saturn V Instrument Unit was taking place in an IBM facility in Huntsville Alabama. SCI, then called Space Craft Incorporated, had created two of the boxes to be bolted into the IU. My father was the engineer responsible for determining that those boxes worked properly (backed up at a less technical level by NASA engineers). In the course of working with SCI employees my dad got a good feel for the SCI corporate culture as strongly formed by the asshole who ran it by the name of Olin King. Dad’s reports left me with a crystal clear judgement about whether I’d jump off a bridge or work for SCI.
So when news of SCI acquiring us was sprung I started shopping for a new job. By what I now consider to be one of the biggest coincidences that I’ve never experienced, a month or two after the acquisition Bob Nichols and Steve Schleimer approached me about joining their new startup Network Products that was chartered to make data communications equipment. I jumped at it. Working with Steve again was going to be simply sublime, as he’d been my mentor at Data General (he authored the virtual machine of the commercial language system I worked on). And Bob and I had got along pretty well at BAS (Bob wrote the commercial system’s compiler). Steve had left Data General where he was a software architect and developer of Data General’s Fountainhead project while Bob had already left BAS. Also joining us were Steve Hafele, a hardware design engineer also from Fountainhead and Steve Chewning, an ex-HP hardware design engineer.
Babymux
To be continued.