Array Manufacturing - a great idea is not always a great idea!

A great idea is not always a great idea, Array Manufacturing.

Remember when we had continuous feed printers and it was a hassle getting paper to feed to the printer? Well, Bruce Milner and Kevin McAfee and I started a company called Array Manufacturing (around 1983) to solve this problem and make millions. IBM had one and it was a lot like ours but different (see pic below). We actually sold a lot of these, but we also had a lot of left over inventory.

It was fun but, it was a great idea at a great price, for the consumer anyway. I was in the computer industry and saw the need as personal computers were new and dot matrix printers were the cool new thing. Those computers were desktop only and had 8 to 16k memory with floppy drives using cassettes which had 32 to 64k. YEP, that is k as in 1000 bytes. Did you know it takes 8 bits to make a bite? And then there was ASCII and EBCDIC, try that on for size! I was an EBCIDIC person with heavy experience in assembler language and banking programs, but those are another story.

So what do you learn in the Osage?

• Great ideas are great ideas only if you execute on them, but it can still fail.
• Time moves on, so you better seize the day and get it done, NOW
• Profit margins do not mean a thing if you cannot put a little change/cash in your pocket
• * Fun can be expensive

Thanks for listening,

Gary

Golson21@hotmail.com

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Never thought I was a baby boomer

 Growing up in the Osage, I never heard of Baby Boomers, but I am one.  Here is a list of things I never thought about:

• Gay Marriage - well maybe I did think about that, but it was focused on HAPPY Marriage
• Woke - never thought about it other than I needed to Woke up and do my chores, in fact we used the word Wake.
• when would I stop working - 65?  you have to be kidding me, all farmers I knew worked until they passed away
• GPS guided tractors and certainly not pickups or cars that would guide you.  If we got lost, we just had to figure it out and as a boy in the Osage I needed to know North, South, East and West.  I remember Billy Snyder telling dad where to run when going to see Grandma Annie in Oologah, Ok. (yep, that is the real name of a town).  Billy told dad to turn where the chicken was in the road.
• How about a telephone in your pocket?  and you can talk to it, and it will talk back and there was never a twisted cord to hassle with.  Who would have thought?
• I never thought you could not store your gun in the back seat window of the pickup and certainly I never thought you would have to LOCK your pickup.
• An HP calculator?  why would I ever need that?  I knew how to multiply and divide, add and subtract and the rules to do math.  We called it Algebra and my folks thought it looked crazy.
• Online?  what the heck!! The only thing online were the clothes drying in the back yard or maybe a chicken hawk on the telephone wire.
• Smart phones, you gotta be kidding me?  A smart aleck maybe like Jon Tanny or John Murphy, just kidding.  In fact that is what they were always doing, kidding.  I should through in Eddy Harris and he was closer to a smart aleck.
• Work Safety or helmets for riding a bicycle.  Naw!  Parents assumed you had enough sense to not do stupid things, like playing with dynamite (you might want to go read that story), hunting from the back of the pickup while someone was driving or trying to hoist Jim Heath up the flagpole. Naw, never.
• There could ever be anything better than an AM/FM radio with an 8 Track
• That putting a ring in the nose of a hog to stop digging would become common in people's noses.
• maybe people are digging in the dirt, and I just missed that as well.  
  
  
  

Well, what did I learn in the Osage?

• A simple life in a small town is as good as it gets on this earth.
• A good book and The Good Book and the lack of technology is a good thing.
• People are more forgiving of mistakes in a small town.
• Hogs are not the only animal with nose rings.

Thanks for listening,

gary

golson21@hotmail.com