Business owners wear many hats
It’s 9:00 AM on a Sunday morning and George; my partner, his two sons and I are at the Standard Brands Paint Company in El Segundo CA. We unlock the barbed wire gate to the empty parking lot and drive George’s Ford station wagon to the rear of the building where it cannot be seen and where the secure entrance is located. George slips the security card into the slot and enters the security code. We enter the building. A quick check ensures us that no one else is in the facility. One of the guys gets the handcart out of the wagon and we head up to the computer room. The room is large, and the NCR Century 201 computer sets on a raised and airconditioned floor. Except for the control console and large line printer, the computer is a collection of refrigerator size cabinets that house tape and disc drives, controllers and a 128k byte core memory system; the object of our attention. We load the memory onto the handcart and take it to the wagon. The four of us wrestle with the very heavy memory and slide it into the wagon. It barely fits, and it protrudes out the rear open door. We secure the facility, lock the gate and head for Electronic Memories a few miles away where we have someone waiting for us. We take one of the four memory drawers out of the cabinet and package it for shipment. It looks like we got away with stealing the computer’s main memory and shipping our first billable item, $20,000 worth, to a bank in Illinois.
Months earlier;
Jim, the data processing manager for Standard Brands had provided George and I with access to the facility and their NCR computer to debug a compatible 256k byte memory system I had developed. He gave us free reign to the facility, but we could only use the computer after its normal use; in the wee hours of the morning. After weeks of testing and redesign we finally got it to work. We overlooked one thing however, we had no customer for it. However, Jim had become so attached to it he refused to let it go. He wanted it for Standard Brands, but he had no money in the budget to buy it. Jim said he never knows which memory is being used at any time and if the NCR memory was no longer there, he probably wouldn’t notice it missing. Hence the Sunday heist and the beginning of CECORP; the company I ran for 35 years.Business owners wear many hats
CECORP
Perhaps my professional experience is best illustrated by excerpting a webpage from my CECORP website highlighting some of the innovative industry first inventions I pioneered and brought to the market.
A Heritage of Innovation
My company, CECORP, with my ideas, system designs, and leadership developed innovative, industry first systems, the successors of which are in widespread use today. Perhaps the most representative system is CEMOS described in brief and excerpted from the now closed CECORP website.
The first Mainframe to microcomputer distributed processing system
Before personal computers [PCs] and the world wide web [WWW] there was CEMOS
1981- With CECORP core and semiconductor memory at the very center of mainframe computers and advanced CRTs at the very extremities, it was natural for CECORP to bridge the gap between its products. In 1981 CECORP developed the first ever mainframe to microcomputer distributed processing system later coined Client/Server systems years later by followers. Marketed under several names including CEMOS, Starstream, lnfoTrak and Maxmicro, CEMOS enabled mainframes and microcomputers to access and process data from each other’s database with existing unmodified mainframe and microcomputer software applications.
For the first time in history, thousands of microcomputer users could, through a menu driven, lead through process, define, select, extract, sort and format the exact information they wanted from mainframe files and download that information to microcomputers for processing by off-the-shelf microcomputer applications. In addition, CEMOS is bi-directional, meaning data extracted from microcomputer files could be uploaded for processing by existing mainframe applications.
Whereas CEMOS itself was a major industry first, several CEMOS components were significant firsts. They include, the first microcomputer terminal emulation, the first on-line query language and the first file transfer program.
NOTE: In subsequent years when PCs and the internet came along, CEMOS took full advantage of them.
Other industry first products followed CEMOS
The first PC based teller terminal
1985 – The first PC based teller terminal, the first PC based customer service terminal, the first signature verification system and the first wide area network (WAN) were developed by CECORP. These innovations enabled us to develop and market the first integrated bank workstation. A workstation that allowed a single person at a single terminal to process teller and customer service transactions, and, to display signatures.
The wide area network was developed to provide all signatures to all branches without having to replicate the entire signature database for each location.
The first PC based teller terminal
The first PC based workstation designed specifically for bank tellers
1991 – Banks wanted a fast, compact, dedicated workstation for the teller line
What it does not have
Conspicuously missing are disk drives, fan, card slots, plug-in printed circuit boards, cables and game ports because they are not needed. In fact, not wanted. These glaring omissions make TELLER PCx small, fast, secure, reliable, and low cost
What it does have
The design incorporates exactly the capabilities required to optimize a workstation for tellers. Solid-state, non-volatile virtual disk, host port, Ethernet port, CENET port, Non-Volatile RAM, data communications hardware, graphics support, and a real-time application that knocks the socks off the competition.
Speed – TELLER PCx is the fastest teller workstation ever produced. That’ s important if you want to provide prompt, efficient service to your customers, and improve teller productivity
PC Compatibility – TELLER PCx can run PC compatible programs, but the real reason for PC compatibility is that all enhancements made to our TELLER PC will run on TELLER PCx.
The first integrated telephone and internet banking system
1997 – CECORP integrated its CEVOICE telephone banking system introduced in 1986 with its PC banking system introduced in 1994 under the name CEBANK. This real time customer service system provided access via telephone and computers.
Gaetano Cimo – a think “outside the box” innovator