Chapter 44

I returned to the data center, and Dee told me they had ten more subscribers. Then Sue called me to the back and pointed to the display. Ten of the thirty-two lines were in use! Now I knew one would be active almost all the time, and that was the casino. But that was still a much higher use ratio than that in LA. I sent off a message to Sing to have her set up a similar monitor on her desk, and if it peaks at 50% lines for more than an hour at a time to get ahold of Dee and get another 32 lines ordered.

Dee and Sue asked me what it meant, and I said I was not sure. “If I have to guess, at this time most are likely the IT students. They are like the four of us, all into computers and seeing what they can do. There are already enough systems hooked up and wired in for over a hundred lines, all they need are the phone connections.”

Rob asked me if the faster processors would help, and I shook my head. “We ran some tests on the 486-33 processors already, they can handle 48 lines, but the problem is that all the cards I have already are in blocks of 16. Now if I got some Digi 8 boards cheap I could add one of those to each, but then it becomes an issue of diminishing returns. Any future systems may be 48 line ones, but I still have 25 MHz processors to use. But once we are putting the 33 into all of them, it becomes other things. The Digi cases can only handle a single input, so unless Digi comes out with a card that can handle more than 16 modems, we are stuck with that as the cap.”

“Then there is the issue of bandwidth crunch,” Sue added. “We are already seeing that with 32 lines in a single box, the buffers have had to be increased. The company that makes the boxes for the modems is already trying to work on that. The next generation will likely be different, as the data for 32 lines through the bus is already bottlenecking the datapath. They say the next generation will have 32 ports, but the motherboard will basically be two motherboards in one, with two cables so the data no longer has to funnel through a single bus.”

I nodded and said that was an issue none of us expected. “When they designed these, they were thinking for BBS use, where people log on and off all the time. Not constant use at the volume these see. But we are also limited with the 16 bit ISA bus. Micro-Channel might have relieved that, as it’s 32 bit. But that was a still-birth by IBM, and nobody supports it. EISA had the same problem. It’s so expensive and so few cards are made for it that almost nobody uses it. VESA Local Bus and PCI are coming out, but it’s going to be a long time before those replace ISA. Those will likely be the ultimate solution though. 32 bit ports, and PCI is looking a lot faster in addition to being wider.”

Dee said she had a good handle on what all she needed to do, so we all headed on home at 5 and had a dinner of leftovers from the night before. Sue and Rob said they were heading back when I did on Sunday, and Dave asked me if I had brought back the ice chests. I told him I had, and he said he would have a chest of meat for them to take home with them. They both thanked him, and I made it a note to let them know that they were actually getting around $300 each of prime beef. They did not seem to understand what good angus was worth.

In the living room, we discussed the logistics of how to handle the truck swap. Several ideas were tossed around, including having me drive back with Sue and Rob and Dave flying home, and even my flying home, and Dave doing the same when he brought the truck. I just laughed and said what was wrong with the original plan?

“I drive the Scout, when Dave brings back the truck, he drives the Scout back. Plus I’m borrowing the trailer. He might as well bring that back, as I will need it at first, and you all will need it after.”

Sue asked what I meant about “at first”, and I told her I was already planning on getting another truck. “Sue, we are already seeing problems with the truck out there only having a loading ramp. It’s great for a lot of things, but we can’t move pallets from the data center to the shop without unloading them first, and things like loading desks are a nightmare. I’m going to start shopping for a second truck, this time with a lift at the back. That we will keep with us, as we can use it to deliver pallets to and from the other shop, and also runs to get other things like those desks we use. The shop rarely works in moving around pallets, so they can keep that one for when they need to move bulk that is better for hand trucks. But they can still grab it if they need it.”

Dave grinned and said that there was already a blueprint I needed to see. Dad went and got it out of the office and laid it out on the coffee table. Then I saw the complete plan, the building there now was less than a third of its final potential. “This is what I told them when we ordered the plans. If you see, the electrical, plumbing, and HVAC all end in connections against the south and north walls. If you need to expand, you add it on there and knock a hole in the wall there now. The connections for them all are already in place. Then there are three alternatives for continuing on. Either long and straight like an LA strip mall, or with a 90 degree bend to make an L shape. Or like a horseshoe. Just decide which one you want to continue with afterward.”

I thanked my dad and gave him a big hug. This kind of expansion was his idea I know, it was just how he thought. Such as how the bedrooms in all the houses here all connected together with just a single sheet of plywood between them inside the closets. Knock out that plywood, and the two closets became a passage so that bedrooms could be easily combined into a bedroom and sitting room configuration.

I was surprised when on Saturday morning I had a visit from Doug Sharp. I introduced him to Dee, Sue and Rob, and he handed me a tape from the station. He said it was a report we had all missed on the convention, including my presentation. “I have a feeling that next year there will be even more people there. I made sure to include the chess tournament as well as backgammon and cribbage, so I bet there will be more of them next time than the ones you see down in LA.” We all laughed, and he told me Kent already had a copy.

“But the reason I’m here is that I wanted to interview you about this. I used ARPANET in college, and I was surprised to learn that somebody was setting it up a connection for people here in Pocatello. But then I did some digging and found out what you have been doing the last seven years. And I think this would be good for you, and the area. Show them a local boy that left but is still trying to improve the area. And to show we are not as backwoods as some people think we are. I doubt Boise or Salt Lake have anything better than this, and you have been able to throw it up in a single weekend.”

I told him to hold on, and we set up in the office I had for me with his cameraman. And then we started the interview. Doug once again repeated what he had said a few minutes earlier, and this time I shook my head. “Oh no, this was not overnight. I have actually been planning this for about six months. When I was given the initial agreement to continue with the Bulletin Board System for the Casino, I was going to put it up at the family ranch. That was when I discovered that there were not enough phone lines available there to support the number of lines I would need. But we already owned this land down here, and the phone trunk supporting Pocatello runs less than a hundred yards away. This let me put in the infrastructure to do what I am doing now.”

I then had to explain what a T-1 line was, and how it basically gave me a permanent connection to an international computer network. “In fact, it lets me access the computers in this building from Los Angeles, as if they were all in the same room. My step-mother Dee is running the day to day operations here, while I can still manage it all from LA. The system I made for the casino is already connected to it, and we are even have a way that people can see what concert is playing in June from their home in say New York, and make a hotel reservation. All sitting at home, and without having to make a phone call.”

Doug had me fire up my computer, and I spent 30 minutes showing him what all it could do and taking him to various sites, including the casino, my own local BBS, and the one I ran for Pavel and his office clusters. “Now imagine this, somebody sells tractor equipment here, and needs to go to LA to do business for a week. They hear about Pavel, so go to his site, and can reserve an office or just a desk for a week. Printers, fax machines, and the capability to send messages and documents both ways without the need for long-distance charges. No working out of a hotel room. Working in a real office, complete with a conference room and all the comforts of a real office, but on the road.”

I showed him pictures of Pavel’s offices, and he was impressed. “And somebody up here can do the reverse. So if salesmen come up from Salt Lake or Portland, it is just like they are in their home office. That is what the Internet can bring. It is small now, but I have a feeling that within a decade, it will start to change how a lot of companies do business. No more long-distance conference calls, but people typing into terminals, and even having a document to show exactly what was discussed.”

I showed him IRC and pulled up a room where people were discussing cars. “This way after a meeting you have an exact copy of everything discussed. If your idiot boss insists he told you to do something, you can bring up proof that he in fact told you to not do it. Or the reverse, if your boss tells you to do something and you blow them off, he can sack you and he has all the proof he needs.”

“That sounds a bit Orwellian, does it not Peter?”

“Why? It keeps people on both sides honest. Hard to pass the blame around if everything said is recorded. Plus it would be a lot cheaper. A company here in Pocatello with five regional salespeople in five different states could have a weekly meeting, and for each of them, it is a local call so long as there is a service like mine. Saves everybody money.”

Doug then interviewed Dee and Sue, and he was surprised that both worked for me in LA. “I thought that was a field mostly for men?” Sue laughed and said she was one of my first employees. That three years before she was just a computer tech with no degree, working at a convenience store and dreaming of working in the industry. And now she was working at the cutting edge of the IT industry. “He asked for volunteers to come up here for the weekend, and I jumped at it. And he’s right, this was a long time in development. Almost a year in total, but most of it in the last month and a half. Plus this is the second time he made such an operation, so he already knew how to do it and what to avoid.”

Dee talked about moving here with my dad the year before, and how she could never live in LA ever again. And that she had also worked for me in LA, and when I proposed this she had no doubt she wanted to be involved. “Pete has this ability to grasp things in a different way. You have companies starting this in the big cities, but he is expanding here. And I think he sees not the money it can bring in now, but the future growth. In fact, we were discussing earlier that we will likely have to double from 32 to 64 lines. We have only officially been open a day, and are already seeing almost 50% of our lines in use.”

At that George came out of Dee’s office and walked over and crawled in her lap, which surprised Doug. “You have your son here with you?”

“Of course! George here has spent half his life growing up in computer stores. Pete, how many kids are in them now?”

“There are two. Blake and Bunny’s child, and also the young couple that took over running the game store have a 2 year old.”

“Yes, Pete also supports mothers and letting the kids be at work. In fact, I bet half of his workers are women and all are fiercely loyal to him. He hires for abilities, nothing else matters. And he loved having his baby brother at work, it made them even closer. Even if he was not my step-son, I could not imagine working for a better boss. Plus this lets me learn an entirely new field, and I find it fascinating.”

He even interviewed Rob, who described how we met. And how I helped get him a dream job, and expanded their system. “They came to him wanting one thing, and he helped sell them something even better. And even though we are not connecting to the Internet through him, he is helping us get ready for that transition. One of the reasons I came up here is to learn, like an apprenticeship. He gets a cheap worker for the weekend, I learned how to set up a professional data center on the Internet. We both benefit.”

I showed them the banks of computers, and explained how they were placed, for future expansion. I even pointed out the server that was running the Casino and showed that I hoped to have all of those racks filled with similar systems. And in the end, he had to ask about the desks. Doug was talking with Sue a final time, and she laughed. “The space desks? Pete gets those surplus, they are old military RADAR stations. But they are cheap, and fit our needs perfectly.” Then he asked about the table in the front with the computer and modem on it.

I told him how the modem was something we were offering for free if somebody paid for a six month subscription to our service, and the computer was one of a bunch I had leftover from my store in LA. “I still have a lot of those, and as I had room in the truck when I came up I brought a dozen of them up with me. It’s an older system, but the price is low and I wanted to see how it sells. And I am not just doing this to make a buck, my dream is in the next ten to fifteen years to leave LA and move back here to live. This you might say is a test, to see if I can repeat my business model in LA up here. Selling older computers cheap was how I got my start, and maybe I can repeat it up here.”

He thanked us all for the interview and did not miss that eight more people had come in during the last hour and a half and signed up for service. Three of them even getting six months of service and taking a modem with them. The last one was about to leave and Doug asked her for an interview.

She was an architecture student at the college and said she used it at the college, but that it was hard to move the work back and forth. “The files I use are huge, and I really can’t take them home and work on them very easily. I have a computer at home but only use it to call BBS systems really. Now, I can connect at home, copy my design from the college to my home computer. Then work on it at home, then copy it back to the college so I can work at it in class.” She then explained how before she had to use a program to split a design onto several floppy disks. “And if a single disk is bad, everything is lost. I stopped doing that when tone of the disks I made at home three months ago would not load at the college. I lost six hours of work I had done at home. Because I had to work on it and only had the copy from the day before on the college computer. That will never again be a problem.”

He asked her why she did not just call the computer at the college directly, and she shook her head. “Not enough lines. The college only has a limited number of lines they can use, and that is mostly for those taking IT classes involved in special projects or working on a thesis. Us in other departments can never get one, but with this I can now do it and not have to worry about that.

Once Doug left, I called up Kim and asked her if she could draw up a logo for us. She was a good illustrator, although not as good as Mandy was. And when we got home that night, she showed us three she had made. But my eyes immediately went to the one in the center.

It was round, and at the bottom was a bison head. And above it was an eagle. In the talons under it was both a branch with leaves and a single broken arrow. But unlike the US National Symbol, both the branch and arrow were held in both talons. I pointed to that and asked for other opinions. Kim asked me why I liked that one.

“Well, the bison head should be obvious, it’s for the tribe. And also our family. The eagle with the arrows and olive branch, that is for Dave, my dad, myself, and all who are veterans. We hope for peace and prepare for war. The broken arrow to me symbolized that I hope that war is never again ever needed. And in this area, that none of us will ever feel the need to fight ever again. The arrow shows our past conflict, but it’s broken, the branch is the peace we are now in. Slight change, make sure it can be seen the arrow is behind the branch. The arrow is the past, and the branch showing the future.”

Kim nodded, and said she would get on it right away, and try to have a sign by the time I return. And nobody on the board dissented in any way. Dave and I went and got the trailer, and I laughed when I saw three ice chests in the garage. Two with my name on it, the other with Sue’s. We all exchanged hugs and kisses, and Sue and Rob both thanked them for having them up there for the holidays as well as the meat. And they were indeed shocked when I told them how much that single ice chest was worth earlier in the day. And Dave all said they were more than welcome, and to return at any time.

I was up at 4, and after a shower, I loaded up my luggage and added more dry ice to the chests. I saw Sue and Rob getting out of the RV. I had Rob help me load the ice chest into the back of Sue’s car, and warned him to not handle the dry ice without gloves. Then I hit the road home.

There was a little snow in the mountains, but it was not a bad trip. But it was getting colder, no doubt it was almost winter. The chest freezer was now stuffed, and I put some steaks and a roast in the fridge for sometime that week. I then got caught up on the messages that had stacked up, including several messages from businesses wanting to hire my services.

The next week I hired the two working as field techs and brought them to the data center. Julie and Abe fussed, and I laughed and told them to hire more field techs. “Julie, you are basically in charge of that operation now. If you need more techs, hire them. This is almost getting to be so much that I can barely do it all.”

The bright part quite often was at night flirting and having fun with AppleBabe. Sure the business was growing almost faster than I could expand with it, with 128 lines now at the call center just for OrbitNet, and 32 for Hainji Net. But the surprise was at the start of December, when Dave and Darla both arrived in the truck. They said they had seen the house when they had come down for a week when I was in Japan, but they had not been back since.

They were both blown away at the shop, not only the size but how much I had there, and all the people working there. I told them I had five full-time workers there now, and around twenty-five that were called in as needed to work in the field. The game shop impressed them also, as both had seen Kent’s store. Mine was about half as big, and I said it made a profit, but not a big one. “But it lets me employ three other people, and I still spend at least one night a week playing games. Helps keep me sane. Plus they are in the process of buying it from me. We are splitting the profits, and they are paying me an additional $500 a month for the next two years.”

I noticed when I moved the truck to the usual parking spot that it had Idaho plates on it. I asked Dave, and he said that was a company decision. “Like your truck, it just makes sense to register it up there since it is company property. Especially since ‘ Hainji Net’ is a subsidiary of Orbit. If you look at the legal paperwork, we have it reflecting that on the title.”

We went to the data center next, and that really blew them away. Over thirty racks full of computers, and another dozen spread around doing other things. And the five pallets of computers and monitors in the holding area. And when I told Dave they were all ready to go, he grinned. “OK, that brings up the other question. How many can I take back up with me?”

Every computer I had brought up there was gone, and people were asking for more. I looked at the inventory sheet on top, and told him two pallets. “There are some 286 systems in there, we were holding that for a swap meet. Take them all, we can fill the rest with 386 systems. And take one pallet of printers also, I am starting to have dot matrix printers coming out of my ears.” When he asked me how much to sell them for, I shrugged. “Let Dee set the price, and she can talk with Bunny and Julie how much to send between accounts. Blake, can you go through and grab all the 2400 modems we have laying around? We are sending them all to Idaho.”

Darla asked if I had any more of the 9600 ones, and I shook my head. “No, that was a one time purchase, are those gone too?”

“Are you kidding? Those were gone the first week! The day after that report aired, Dee had a stream of people coming in to sign up and get their free modem. She finally hung a sign in the front window saying that there were no more modems, but if somebody signed up for six months they would get one month for free. She also wanted me to ask if she could hire somebody to help her out.”

“Well, tell her the same thing I told Julie when she wanted more techs. She is the one in charge up there, if she needs help and can afford it, hire them. And I know that we could use a good person up there to take some of the load off my people here. Tell her to go ahead and look for a college kid, somebody that took IT, and wants to stay local and not leave the area. There should be somebody like that she can grab. We can even pay to have them come down here for a week for training, then send them back. That would help a lot I think.”

The next week I went to my favorite Korean car salesman, but he did not have a truck like I wanted. I ended up at a print shop in Burbank that was replacing their trucks, and got a 16 foot truck with a lift in the back. It went to the same painter as the last time and soon had “Or’bit Communications” emblazoned on the side. Blake said it was great, and it would make things a lot easier.

I then got a call and grabbed Blake as we drove about two miles away. It was actually my dad’s old company, and we were met there by Josh. It seems that the building he had us meet him at was in the process of being sold, and everything in it had to go. It was about 40,000 square feet, and I laughed and said it was far larger than I would ever need.

“Oh no Pete, it’s already sold. But I gotta put this bad boy to bed, and that is where you come in I hope. Everything left inside has been written off as surplus, which means it is part of my department. Go ahead and look through, see if we can determine a price for anything left in here you might want. As I said, everything must go.”

I was staggered, as there were over fifty offices in there, and another two dozen or so meeting rooms, large work areas, and other spaces. Blake and I started walking through it, and he counted over two hundred computers, some of them less than a year old. The wiring closet had four racks of equipment, and one work area had over twenty lab tables. Once again, I was going to be stuffing my garage if I took all of the stuff I wanted. And in the back, thirty more SGI systems. We even found the IT office, and it was crammed full of parts. I told him I had an idea, and he handed me two spools of red tape and told us to put some on everything we wanted.

We spent another two hours doing that, hitting all the computers, printers, and other such equipment. The best lab benches, a few nice desks, and in a meeting room what looked like a large screen TV that said “Projectavision” on it. In the office with the SGI systems was some audio and video equipment, we taped all of that as well. We had no idea what most of that was, but I figured I could get somebody that did. I also selected three conference tables, figuring we could put those in the two shops, and send the ones there now to the game store. The third would go to Becky, as she was also just using a kitchen table in her conference room.

Finally, Josh looked through it all and asked me for a price. I just said “$35,000” off the top of my head, and he said to get him a check in the next two days, and we had two weeks to get it all out. “Oh, and if you find anything else you want, just set it aside. I might be able to just throw it in, or we can make another agreement for that. We have to have this empty by the end of the month.”

Well, this was a big haul! I made an arrangement to be back on Monday, and he said he would be there. I then drove to the data center and had Sue hop in and I drove to the shop. She went to get the gal that ran the game store and I told everybody the news at once.

“This is a huge haul, and a lot is furniture. Julie, go ahead between now and then and put all the desks in here for sale. Price them to sell, all of them. That large kitchen table in the back there and the one I have now, those are going to the game shop. On Monday we will have skeleton crews at both shops, we are going to start hauling things out. We are putting everything on pallets. We will sort what goes here from what goes to the data center. And hire as many grunts as you can. It is going to be at least five or six loads I think.” Abe asked if we should use both trucks, and I nodded. “We can load up things to come here that would be hard to put on pallets like the furniture in that truck. You will need to stay here though Abe, as well as a skeleton crew of two or three. Push off for a day any jobs you can.”

Julie told me she would do all I had asked, as did Abe. And that night I spent an hour moving things around in the garage to make as much room as I could. It was like 1988 all over again.

That night I got into the AdultNET IRC and saw Apple was in the #20-30Something room again, and when I went in they were talking about the skate meet that weekend. I joked that they could drive to skate with me and they laughed. “Sorry IdahoMan, I would love to meet you, but I ain’t driving to the middle of Idaho to do it!” I teased Apple, saying that maybe I would have to crash their meet instead. A bit later Apple and I went into a private room and spent about an hour pleasing each other as we pleased ourselves. I had gotten her to upgrade to the same program I was using, and a new feature let me send files on IRC. Direct Client-to-Client was still new, and I sent her a picture of me I had taken at the convention with Holly. I scanned it and sent it to her with Holly blocked off, and she said I looked handsome. And that she had never scanned one of her, but gave me a good idea what she looked like.

The night before, I said I was going to go skating anyways. And several commented to enjoy Hank Williams and Garth Brooks. Apple was not there so I went to ValleyNet IRC, and found a bunch of people in #CyberWorld talking about it also. Even MissNemo was there, and said she was attending. I sent her an IM with my name, and saying I looked forward to seeing her again. She responded that she thought I hated her.

“No Heather, I do not hate you. Disappointed and a little hurt, but I do not hate you.” I asked if Stacey and Amber were going to be there, and she said no. “They broke up again. Don’t worry, they do this every few months, never lasts more than a week or two. Amber will be there, but not Stacey.”

We talked for a bit, and I made her promise that I got at least one skate with her, and asked that she pass along to Amber that I respectfully requested the same. She said she would pass that along, and thought that Amber would accept.

“She really likes you,” she typed back. “Even Stacey was surprised that you dumped me because of my age, and admitted you were not what she had initially thought. Amber just thinks you are cute and nice. And I am looking forward to seeing you again this weekend.”

We talked for a bit more, then I got a drink and turned on the news. The UN had finally passed a resolution demanding that Iraq leave Kuwait, or face military action in January. And at least the madman had gotten smart enough to release most of his foreign hostages. But his delay in doing to had angered a great many countries, most of which supported the UN call for action.

The next day I got in and saw Sue was there, while Blake and Bunny were taking the day off. I checked the stats for the week, and Hainji Net now had over two hundred subscribers and was averaging around 20 lines in use during peak hours. I told Sing to keep an eye on that and notify me if it started to trend over 75% of lines in use.

She also brought up a request from one of the subscribers for file storage capability. Now, this was something I had considered offering all users, but the cost of storage was so high that I would have to drastically raise prices in order to accomplish that. I had Sue join us and we talked if over for about an hour, and I put Sing into researching the possible solutions for an increased service offering this. “Go ahead and set up a 10 megabyte space for her on the server, and say it is part of a test project and no charge. But also warn her that may change in the future, but she will have a warning before any changes are made.”