Ah, the pleasures of being on the cc-tech digest! Kind of like retro-tivo... I'm not clear on the pre-history of USRobotics but I can tell you some of the early history. In the late '70s a group of UofC students (and near-students?) got together to do some computer stuff. When the name actually appeared and what the first "product" might have been I don't know, but apparently the group went from 7 to 5 to 3 members. I became aware of the company in 1982; at that time the principals were Casey Cowell, Paul Collard and Steve Muka and the only product was modems. A Hyde Park neighbor of mine, Stan Metcalf, had been a member of the earlier group(s) but we never really talked about what the group was doing when he was involved with them. The story told at that time was that the company had been formed to produce a home terminal based on Don Lancaster's TV typewriter which they would sell to UofC users for dial-up access to the campus mainframe. When the modem was finished, they realized they would do better selling it as a standalone product to be used with a standard terminal (eg the Bantams and Teleltypes) and stopped short of designing their own terminal. I never knew anyone named Terry who was involved with the company or knew of any other products. When I first learned of the company, they were in the process of moving Skokie. First location had been in Casey's apartment on Lincoln Avenue near the Biograph theater. I started with them in 1984; I don't think Bill Donzelli joined the company until a good bit after the move to Skokie. When _I_ cleaned out the basement on Eagle Street, I found a couple ASR-33s and some Perkin-Elmer Bantam terminals along with a fair number of bogarted doobies left by the shipping crew. The Bantams were still in use internally by the company and had been resold by them at one point when they were still selling the black, vacuum-molded "bathtub" modems. By the early 80s, the current product was the aluminum-cased (Hayes look-alike?) AutoDial series. The company ran on a couple of MP/M based Dynacomp systems with attached terminals (the Bantams and/or Televideos, later Wyse50s). My first job was to convert the single-user BASIC inventory program (a legacy of the first system, a TRS-80 Model III) to dBaseII and then multiuser DataFlex. When we moved to Skokie we also moved to a couple of Godbout-based S100 systems, running MP/M then MP/M II and finally the Gifford version of ConcurrentDOS. Skokie was a lot bigger and I installed DR-NET to link a couple remote systems; not long after we moved to an HP3000 and the ASK MANMAN (manufacturing management) system. ASK was FORTRAN based and used HP IMAGE for data management. Lots of hard work and good times. Jack Message: 1 Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 18:12:25 -0500 From: "Bob Bradlee" <Bob at BRADLEE.ORG> Subject: Re: US Robotics PC? To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Message-ID: <200602232323.k1NNNoZ1070982 at keith.ezwind.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Back in the late 70's the guy who started US robotics was building modem kits and systems with a guy names Terry who had a computer shop Midwest Micro Computer in lombard Il. It was second only to Itty Bitty Machine Company just off the Northwestern campus in Evenston as the first computer store in the Chicago area. Terry wanted me to help him fix a bunch of modem kits that were being solid the US Robotics name, I was shocked at the choice of name, and was told he went out of his way to secure the name and trademark, that was why we had to fix the kits he could not get working ASAP. Wish I could think of Terry's last name That one will bug me a while :( Any Old time Windy City hackers remember Terry ? Here is one for the crowd, Does any one else at the founding meeting of the Chicago Computer Society met for the first time at Devry and Ward C of CBBS and Modem1 through 7 fame asked everyone to stand up and sit down in response to what universal question ? BTW: the computer you are thinking about was z-80 ran cpm and wordstar and an early spread sheet and a hack of what became eventually Xmodem because that was about all there was then. I think the printer was the first used of the epxon FX80 not to be confused with the MX80 that came along a few years later. The FX printer was very popular in early Point of Sale systems. Thanks for bringing up a fresh batch of old memories. Bob Bradlee On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:08:21 -0800, Chuck Guzis wrote: -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 268.1.0/269 - Release Date: 2/24/2006