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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