In 1979, Andrew Stevenson, one of three owners of what several of us called The Dump, convinced the other two to buy a computer. It was a Data General Eclipse C330 that cost $145,000. It had two six-foot towers that housed the computer and a reel-to-reel tape drive. Next to those sat a disk drive the size of a home washing machine that had ten platters spinning. It stored the equivalent of five seconds 4K video and ran programs at roughly one millionth of a percent of the speed of today's typical smart phone. It was "leading edge, high speed" and gave The Dump a distinct advantage over rival engineering firms, once it was operational.

Making it operational was problematic in that the employee who acquired the machine for the firm barely had the expertise to program the amazing HP 35C calculator. He had to learn the Fortran IV programming language and without any formal training, abused it badly. After a few months with no progress, Andrew Stevenson and the other owners grew frustrated.

At the time, Andrew Stevenson lived with his wife and two children within walking distance of The Club. He was a member there and raced a small dinghy. Andrew and I were acquaintances as I had taught his kids to sail.

On an autumn evening, in the bar at The Club, at the height of his computational frustration, Andrew, age forty-nine, saddled up next to me, age twenty-four, saying that he heard that I was involved in computers. At the time, I worked for a large financial corporation that housed two floors of giant IBM mainframes. Andrew explained his problem and I agreed to have a look.