| David Troendle |
Co-Founder |
Roy, Fred and myself were cofounders. That predated the computer hobbyist fad. Originally we did traditional IT work such as consulting and application development. John Souvestre and I were childhood friends and John was active in the Ham Radio community in New Orleans. In those days Ham Radio and hobby computing were closely related. (Byte magazine was started by Wayne Green in September, 1975. Wayne Green was also the editor of 73, a Ham Radio magazine.) John was interested in promoting hobby computing, so the annual New Orleans Ham Fest began to include hobby computing. John encouraged me to contact Byte to see if someone would come down and make a presentation at an upcoming Ham Fest. To our astonishment, Chris Morgan, one of the editors of Byte, agreed to give a presentation based on the feature story of the upcoming September, 1977 issue. The story was about computer generated music.
The technique was surprisingly easy and Chris' presentation inspired us to go further. I am avid Heathkit fan and through a series events I can't now recall, John joined the company and the HA-8-2 music card was born. Our original plan was to market it just in the New Orleans store, but the store manager liked it so much he rallied other stores to sell it and eventually Heathkit picked it up. From there we developed the HA-8-3 card at the request of Barry Watzman, who was the product line manager for Heathkit computers.
Heathkit stopped using outside engineering for the H89 computers, so we developed the HA-89-3 on our own. |
