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How I Got Into Computers - Greg Allen In 1981 I
was fat and happy selling copy machines in the Charleston SC area. The Monroe
Plain paper, dry toner copiers was THE new hot technology and I sold the fool
out of them, worked 8-5, 5 days a week and brought home 3k per month. Nice gig
for ‘81. Later that
year Monroe gave each branch office a Monroe OC 8820 computer (manufactured in
Lexington, SC) for training purposes as they planned to begin selling this new
product the following year. Personal
computers were new. IBM PC, Apple I and Tandy TRS-80s played games like pong
but I figured
out how to use the computer and wrote a contact management package to keep
track of sales suspect, prospects, to-do lists, direct mail, telephone
marketing, kind of like ACT or Goldmine programs today. My personal sales
income climbed to 5k per month whilst retaining my 8-5 regiment; sweet deal! At Monroe’s
yearly sales awards ceremony I attributed my success to the new Monroe computer,
whereby I was plucked out of copier sales bliss and whisked away to the newly
formed computer division. Though I initially went ‘kicking and screaming’, the
training was excellent, and soon I found myself earning a good living. Some of
my early sales included an F&I system to Bilton Ford, an income tax
preparation program to Pinnacle One, and various loan / mortgage programs to South
Carolina National Bank (now Wachovia). In ’84
Monroe came out with a 80186 computer and a package called Open Access that
worked much like Microsoft Office works today. This package should have
dominated the market as it was the best thing going at the time. However, after
Monroe’s hefty investment in 80186 technology, IBM introduced the PC-AT with an
80286 processor, thereby rendering Monroe’s offering obsolete, and thus ending Monroe’s
foray into the computer market. So I took
what I learned from Monroe and parlayed it into a business. I wrote accounting,
point-of-sale, and loan / mortgage software and bundled these with AT&T and
Victor computers, and offered high-value business solutions and service at
reasonable prices. Also, in’92 I wrote and integrate a shop-floor manufacturing
system for Williams Technologies (now Catapillar). This system integrated
inexpensive off-the-shelf personal computers and software to control workflow
and quality on a massive scale. The project was so successful that it halved
production time, doubled profits, and greatly improved quality. In addition, the
technology resulted in sales to Ford, Chrysler, Mazda, Nissan, Honda, and
Hyundai., and a nice write-up in Computerworld and AME Target Magazine
(Association For Manufacturing Excellence. And that’s how I got into computers!
The Monroe
OC-8820 was an all-in one Z80a based system featuring 128 to 256 KB of RAM, a
9” square amber monochrome CRT and a dual 5.25" 320 KB floppy disk drive. It used its
own multitask operating system developed by Litton Industries called OS8MT, but
a CP/M OS could be acquired separately along with a specific Monroe BASIC
interpreter, Dbase II database, Wordstar word processing, and a SuperCalc
spreadsheet. Even under CP/M, You could run a Spreadsheet report and still run
Wordstar. A 5 or 10
MB full height hard-disk drive unit was also available.
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