Chapter 72: Microsoft

July 1982

Being a gentleman of leisure turned out to be more work than I thought it would! First off, after we got back from the Bahamas, I had found a gym and a dojo. I had joined, and just as I had threatened my wife, I signed us up for a family plan. I just didn’t tell her about that until after I got home.

Marilyn’s response wasn’t all that bad. After all, how could she complain about something so healthy, right? No, the complaint came the next morning when I woke at 7:00 and smacked her on the ass. “Time to get up and go to the gym!”

Marilyn struggled to focus on me, “Wha ... what?”

I tapped her butt again. “Time to get up! You need to get up and get ready.”

Marilyn rolled over and told me, “Go away.”

“Come on, lazy bones, time to work out. You promised, remember?” I pushed her shoulder until she rolled over and swatted at me.

My wife grumbled and opened her eyes. “You were serious? Do you know what time it is?”

“It’s time to get up and go work out!” I pulled on her arm and got her to sitting upright.

“We can’t leave Charlie here.”

“We’ll take him with us. He’ll be fine! Come on, we’ll get him used to exercise.”

“I hate you.” Marilyn rolled out of bed and took another blind swing at me. “I need a shower.”

I pushed her towards our closet instead. “Shower afterwards. You’re going to exercise remember? Shower at the gym. Now toss some clothing in a bag.” I chivvied her into dressing in a sports bra and t-shirt, and some plain panties and an old pair of shorts. I dressed for a workout and then pointed her towards the door. I tossed some clothing and my toilet kit into a gym bag and then got her to do the same. Charlie was already awake, but he was a happy fellow in the morning. Momma changed his diaper and dressed him in some clean clothes, and we bundled him up and drove to the gym.

Marilyn never really took to working out like I had. She had never been a really physical person and had always relied on her youthful metabolism to stay in shape. Eventually she hit her 30s and they hit back, especially after our third child really caused her to ‘blossom’. She never lost the baby fat that time. For me, I knew just what would happen to me, and how bad that was, and I was not about to let that happen again.

We made a compromise, to go three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, in the early morning. We did an hour workout, although they ended up pretty much separate. Marilyn liked walking on the treadmills, which I just couldn’t do anymore. I spent most of my workouts on the Nautilus machines. Aside from the upper body workout from pumping the iron, I could also use my leg muscles on some of the combinations, without the impact of running on my right knee. If I kept the impact down, it didn’t bother me too much, but it was kind of sensitive. I always started each workout with a long kata session before any other exercise, to warm up and loosen everything up.

Charlie found this all quite amusing. He was a happy child. Parker had been much more reserved and sober, even as a little boy. I still thought about Parker, how he had been and what he had grown into. He was a son any father could be proud of, but now he was gone, off in a time and a place I couldn’t fathom. I occasionally felt the pain of a loss that never existed in the here and now.

Which did not mean that I wasn’t very happy with Charlie. If nothing else, he was hilarious to be around. All kids get into everything, but Charlie outdid them all. Even worse, he was impossibly clumsy and ungainly, not in any kind of neurological sense, but in the sense that you could trust him to be a disaster! He would crawl everywhere, and if he brushed against a pile of books or magazines or Marilyn’s knitting, he would just go through, spreading chaos all around. Once he figured out standing and walking, the entire town house would be at risk!

By July, he had figured out how to squirm his way out of his seat. This was discovered one morning at the gym. It was the first Wednesday in July, the week after we set up the Buckman Group. I was over in the section with the Nautilus machines while Marilyn was around the corner on the treadmills. Suddenly, around the corner, came Charlie, crawling for all he was worth, with one of the gym attendants, smiling, in semi-hot pursuit. He saw me and came over, in high-speed four-wheel drive. I sat upright and laughed as he got closer, and then scrambled after him myself. The little bastard had closed on me and then scooted off in another direction! I grabbed him and tucked him under my arm and went in search of his mother.

Marilyn was still churning away on the treadmill, watching a television tuned to the Today Show, the baby seat at her feet and off to the side. She had been totally oblivious! I came around to her front, between her and the television, and held up our son. He was gurgling and happy, and grinning at the world. “Lose something?”

Marilyn stared at us, so startled she stopped walking. The treadmill was still running, so her feet slid out from underneath her, and she had to grab the rails and hold herself up. She slammed the STOP button. “Where did you find him? How did he get loose?”

“I found him around the corner, making a break for it. As for how he got loose, you’ll need to ask him. He isn’t talking much, but give him some time, maybe you can wear him down.” I thrust him at her, and she took him from me.

“It’s baby handcuffs and manacles for you, Charlie!” she told him. Then she handed him back to me. “Keep him. I’m going to shower and dress, and then it’s your turn.” I took our son and Marilyn headed off to the locker room.

I knelt and strapped Charlie into his seat. “We’re not waiting,” I told my son. I carried him into the men’s locker room. I set his seat on the bench and kept an eye on him as I pulled off my sweaty crap and grabbed my towel and toilet kit. And Charlie in his seat! I set him on a counter across from the showers and left the curtain open as I showered quickly. I managed to shower, shave, and dress, and pack Charlie and me up and get out to the lobby, long before Marilyn did it just for herself!

She started at seeing us. “How did you get out here before I did?”

“I live a clean and efficient life and am filled with a wondrous and righteous need to live better than my fellow man. Or woman, in your case.”

“I think you’re full of shit!”

I covered our son’s ears. “You use that mouth to kiss your son?” I picked him up and smiled at him. “Mommy says bad things!” I told him, earning a happy gurgle.

Mommy took him away. “Daddy’s going to sleep alone tonight!” I grabbed our bags and followed Mommy and Charlie to the car and kept my mouth shut. Daddy preferred sleeping with Mommy.

My trips to the dojo were normally by myself. Marilyn never really cottoned to watching me practicing martial arts. It mostly seemed like weird exercise to her, and then after seeing me in the bar fight, just made her very uncomfortable. It was a part of my makeup at odds with her view of me.

Usually, every other day I would drive out to the property on Mount Carmel Road to check on the progress of the house building. Things had started, but it was a maddeningly slow process building a house using conventional construction techniques.

By the Nineties, Lefleur Homes had begun selling modular homes as well as trailers. The pace is vastly quicker than with conventional ‘stick building’. In a stick-built house, you have to build the basement first. Then you build a floor, and then you build the walls. Only at that point can you build the roof. With modulars, at the same time as the basement is being dug and built, in a factory hundreds of miles away the walls, floor, and roof are all being built at the same time. When the pieces are finished, they are craned into place and bolted together, all inside a closed factory. Bathrooms and kitchens are installed, and then the whole kit and caboodle are freighted away. A house might spend only a week or two in a factory, versus months or more being built in the field.

In 1982, modular construction was still in its infancy. Oh, there were companies that did it, but it was for relatively small and simple rectangular boxes, not for what we were doing. Here, too, the computer revolution would change things. Over the next twenty years technology as applied to design and construction would make modulars a high-end method for building million-dollar mansions.

But that was for the future. No, I didn’t make myself a nuisance. I stayed out of the men’s way and didn’t ask a million damn fool questions. I knew what they were doing, and it was obvious to me that they knew as well. I did make sure the foremen knew my name and number, so if they had any questions, they could call. It seemed obvious that I would be able to move in sometime during the decade. It wouldn’t go beyond that.

I studiously avoided going over to Tusk Cycle. I might have been a part owner, but I wasn’t an employee and didn’t know the business. I did go over once a month to review the books with them, but that was it. Well, that wasn’t exactly all. Right after we closed on the deal with them, Andrea had a crew out to the new site, fixing the roof. The owners wouldn’t reduce their price, but they did agree to pay to have the leak in the back fixed. After that was fixed, they had a big weekend planned. They shut down the old shop and their employees and everybody and their brother pitched in to move everything from one place to the other. We even invited everybody at the Buckman Group in to help. Marilyn, Tessa, and Missy handled baby duties, while the rest of us cleaned and scrubbed and sorted and arranged and then cleaned some more. By Sunday evening they were back in business and the rest of us were wiped out.

There was also work with the new company. We all agreed to meet every Monday morning to discuss the business and plans. The first few weeks were in John’s office, but after that, Jake Junior had us begin visiting some offices to see if we liked them. We were trying to compromise on location. Everybody else lived in the Timonium and Lutherville areas, but Marilyn and I lived in Cockeysville and were going to move west of Hereford. Jake found us a nice office park a few miles south of Hereford on York Road, and we leased half of one floor. Then we divvied up the offices. There was a front lobby area, with four separate and equal offices branching off it, and then a hallway towards the rear. The hallway had a conference room on one side and a fifth office and a storeroom on the other side. I took the fifth office, across from the conference room and the others took the front offices. Jake Junior was then assigned to make the place habitable and get some furniture and office equipment going.

There was one thing I did which surprised the others. I went out and bought the best computer I could buy. While the others had seen them, and Jake Senior had even bought a home computer for his kids to play with or for games, they were still very exotic in 1982. I spent what was a small fortune at the time for an IBM 5150 PC with a CGA video card and color monitor and dual 5¼” floppy drives, with PC-DOS as the operating system. I had been away from math and computing for years and needed to get back to it.

I kept it at the office and went there to study and practice programming in DOS and GW-Basic. I also bought a matching unit for home since I could store stuff on the floppy disks and take them back and forth. That didn’t work out so well. Marilyn balked at putting it on the dining room table and Charlie would see it and want to play with it.

We had a big meeting in my new office once it was livable and I had refamiliarized myself with DOS and Basic. It felt like I was moving back to the dawn of time, but I had done a shitload of DOS and Basic programming back in the day. I looked around the room and then pointed at the computer on a side desk. “That machine there is the future, and I want to invest in it,” I told them.

“You want to buy stock in IBM?” asked Melissa.

I shook my head. “Absolutely not. Remember when I told you about computers a few months ago? There are three parts of any computer system. You have the hardware, the box and the TV screen and the keyboard and all the hard parts.” I reached over and rapped lightly on the metal case to the computer.

“Next you have two types of programs. One is called the operating system. It tells the box what to do, how to make the pieces run and turn on and turn off and do stuff. That’s the second part of the system.”

“And the third part?” asked John.

“Those are the programs that you run, like an accounting program or a typing program.”

“And those aren’t the same as an operating system,” he replied, with a half question and half statement tone.

“No.” I grasped for an analogy. “It’s like a railroad system. The computer is the rails. They go everywhere and you absolutely need them, but without any engines or the cars, they are pretty much useless. The operating system is the locomotive. It drives around on the rails and can-do things, but by itself, it’s pretty useless. What it needs is cargo to haul around, the boxcars and tankers and whatever. Those are the programs, or applications. Following me?”

He nodded slowly. The others were watching the two of us, but not weighing in. “And you can’t do anything without all three pieces, rails, locomotives, and cars.”

“Precisely.”

“Okay, and you don’t want to buy the companies that make the hardware, the rails in your analogy,” he asked.

“Nope. It’s just like with the railroads. Any idiot can make steel rails and lay them out on the ground. The guy who can make the cheapest rails wins. It’s a commodity business and nobody makes any money, at least not for very long. No, you want to be the guy building locomotives and boxcars,” I answered. “I want to invest in the operating systems and the application programs.”

Jake Senior chimed in at that. “For all the types of computers out there, or just that IBM type you bought?”

“IBM. Within a few years almost everything will be an IBM or an IBM compatible anyway. All those others will be gone,” I told him.

“All of them? I just got the kids a Commodore 64!”

I shrugged and gave him an evil grin. “So, if we do this right, in a few years, you’ll be able to afford to buy each of them an IBM computer.”

“Shit!” he said disgustedly.

I explained how the IBM open architecture allowed them to greatly increase the speed of innovation and improvement but made the hardware end of the business a game for suckers. I also explained, like I had done before, how Microsoft and their operating system, was going to be the big deal in all of this.

“So, you want to invest in Microsoft?” asked Missy. I nodded and she continued. “I looked into them a few months ago, when you first mentioned their name. You can’t buy them. The company isn’t publicly traded. By the way, they aren’t in Redmond, but in Bellevue.”

Damn! That was right! They moved to Redmond later! “It’s just a different Seattle suburb. Anyway, that just means I can’t buy them on the stock market. We can offer to invest, however. When they do an IPO, we make a small fortune. That’s if we sell. If we hold our shares, we make an even bigger fortune down the road.”

“So, what’s the plan?” asked Jake Junior.

“The sooner we do this, the better. I promise you all, this is the company to do business with. It will only get more expensive in the future.” I looked at Melissa and said, “I want you to find out as much as possible about Microsoft and the founders of the company. Most of all, I want to get an appointment with Bill Gates as early as possible. I’ll fly out and meet him as soon as he’ll see me. This week or next.”

Next, I turned to Jake Junior. “Okay, Vice President of Operations, I want some cash to buy stock with. Figure out how to raise $5 million in cash by the time I fly out there. If we have to sell some stocks, which ones? Can we free up some cash by using margins or selling options? Can we do this without going broke or going to jail?”

The young man goggled at me. “Five million?”

“More if we can. I don’t want to buy the company, but I want a piece of the action.” I looked at the other two men and said, “And keep an eye on them and help them. If I can do this, I want to do it quick, so figure out the mechanics of doing this and doing the paperwork and the due diligence. The longer this takes, the higher the price will be and the lower the amount of stock we can buy.”

Everybody kind of stared at me and each other for a moment, but then they left. John lingered in the doorway. “You think these things are worth investing five mill?”

“John, if you could have invested $5 million with Thomas Edison a hundred years ago, what would it be worth now?”

He rolled his eyes and left. I thought about what I was doing, and then drove home. As a budding tycoon, I wanted a little afternoon action with Mrs. Tycoon.

And so, I found myself flying out to Seattle-Tacoma on Monday, July 19. Missy had gotten me an appointment to meet with Gates on Tuesday morning. I figured it was a little ostentatious, and reckless with the company money, to charter a flight direct, but I did take one of Lloyd Jarrett’s turboprops to Philly, where I caught a non-stop American flight to Sea-Tac. I did insist on flying first class.

I had offered to take Marilyn, suggesting we could do another little parents-only trip, but she had put me off. “Remember, one trip for us, one trip for the family. You owe us a family trip, first.”

“We can stick Charlie in one of those doggy carriers down in the luggage compartment,” I countered.

“Forget it! Anyway, we still need a real family trip. I was talking to Anna Lee yesterday and she said we hadn’t seen each other since last summer, and she’s right!”

I gave her a wry smile at that. It was true. The last time we had seen our friends was right before I deployed to Honduras. Now, Harlan had gotten his promotion to captain and was assigned to the 25^th Infantry, commanding a mobile artillery battery. “You’re right, we need to visit them. Where are they stationed, anyway?” I knew he was with the 25 ^th, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember where they were based.

Marilyn grinned. “Hawaii!”

I grinned back. “Well, I’m willing to support the troops if you are. Let’s figure two weeks, not just one!”

“You always amaze me with the sacrifices you are willing to make. I’ll call her back later. They are six hours behind us, or something like that.”

We ended up making plans to fly out and visit them at the end of July. In the meantime, though, I had to go meet a man who was probably the smartest businessman in America since the end of the Second World War and try to buy a piece of his baby. A baby he wasn’t overly thrilled about selling a piece of. Melissa had told me that from the sound of things on the phone, I was on a fool’s errand.

I flew out on Monday, so that I would be rested and fresh on Tuesday. I packed light, with just a few days of clothes in my hanging bag and my briefcase. I left my return trip date open. If things worked out, I would stay as long as I needed to make the deal. If Missy was right, I’d be flying home on Wednesday.

I rented a car at the airport and headed out. Bellevue was east of Seattle, and I needed convenient, not fancy. I found a Holiday Inn that would meet my needs just outside of Seattle. I went inside, checked in, dumped my crap in the room, and went down to the restaurant for dinner and a drink. No, I wasn’t going to get lit up, not if I wanted to hold my own with the man who would one day be the richest man in America.

I recalled what I remembered about Gates from reading about him in what would be the future. We had relatively similar backgrounds, in that we grew up in wealthy suburbs. His family was definitely better off than mine. While my father was a successful engineer, his was a very successful lawyer. We had both gone to good schools, although I seemed to recall he went to a private school, but I just wasn’t sure about that. I do remember how he dropped out of college to start Microsoft.