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At 08:51 AM 7/2/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>Congratulations Ted on maintaining Vedit for so long! I use it still every day and couldn't work without it.
I've been so busy lately working on 5.20 and training a new programmer
(George Christman), that I forgot to celebrate 20 years of VEDIT. The first
sale was around May 2, 1980. Hopefully I will have time later this year to
write a history of VEDIT, the original company CompuView Products, Inc. and
the successor Greenview Data, Inc.
Certainly the early days of CompuView were the most colorful with about
20 employees, most 20 to 25 years old. I can still remember coming in on
a Saturday morning and finding most of them still at the office following
a wild party from the night before. The new stereo speakers were blown,
the whole place was trashed and all the carpets were sticky with beer. All
Saturday was spent cleaning up and shampooing the carpets. Friday was
always Hawaiian shirt day and we all had identical bright green Hawaiian
shirts. Most of the employees went to a bar Friday night in their bright
shirts; it was quite a sight.
This was also a time when the S-100 bus, CP/M, CP/M-86, the IBM PC, DOS,
Tandy, Heath/Zenith, DEC Rainbow, Basic, C, Fortran, Pascal and everything
else was battling for market share. We distributed VEDIT on over 40
different disk formats! We also has a dozen other products. Tech support
was a pain due to the many different hardware platforms. Our internal
joke was "If its in stock, we probably support it.". A big part of
our business was media conversion software and hardware.
The CompuView days came to an end when our daughter Jodi was diagnosed
with cancer in 1989. Although she survived, her treatment involved
six surgeries, 40+ blood transfusions and over 120 days in the hospital.
I didn't work much for a year and has to close Compuview. Jodi is now
doing well and is off to the Univ. of Wisconsin this fall.
In 1990 I started Greenview Data with just Tom Burt and Tim McClean.
More on all this some other time.
Ted.
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