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Michael Betts' bio for the DigiBarn Museum


The Cromemco C10 (foreground) and System 3 (background) donated by Michael Betts.

From Michael Betts:

I grew up on the East Coast just north of New York City and graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a BSEE.

I moved to California and worked at Cromemco from 1978 to 1983, first as customer support and then as head of the software technical support group. Cromemco was one of the first S100 bus (Z80 with a CP/M based OS) computer manufacturers and they had the first color graphics board for S100 (the Dazzler) and were the first to have a Unix based OS (Cromix). They sold kits, so I built several computers from kits. The System 3 had two 8 inch floppy drives and up to 64K of RAM. They had the first computer in a monitor (the C10) also. I transitioned to a software development roll and developed the PlanMaster electronic spreadsheet package.

I worked for VisiCorp as the Team Leader for the VisiOn Calc project from 1983 to 1984. VisiCorp was a great company and the people there were great. The VisiOn project was the first GUI for the IBM PC and it was not easy to do when most PCs in those days were PC1s with a 64K of RAM and did not have a hard disk. The AT was not available until after VisiOn was released.

When VisiCorp closed up shop, I went over to MicroFocus to work on their Integrated Development Environment from '84 to '85.

I was one of the founders of an Artificial Intelligence software development company called Quantum InKnowvations from '85 to '87. We developed a knowledge-based AI system for use in several vertical markets.

I helped develop software for high-resolution graphic display adapters at Wyse Technology from '87 to '88.

I joined Adobe Systems in 1988 and worked there as a Postscript firmware developer until '90. Great corporate culture...

I was offered the opportunity to work in Santa Barbara for leading edge graphics software developer WaveFront (now Alias/Wavefront) so I reluctantly left Adobe and moved to Santa Barbara. In '91 they had a massive layoff and I went to work for a small POS development company InfoGenesis from '91 to '96.

Santa Barbara was hard to leave but I needed to get back to Silicon Valley so I went to work at Centigram Communications on their OneView integrated messaging package. OneView could consolidate all your voice-mail, e-mail, and faxes into one folder on your computers desktop.
I got to work in both Windows and QNX environments.

I got into the network security field by switching over to Axent Technologies in 97 and got to do some serious Linux development for a change. Axent was acquired by Symantec in 2001 and when our group was moved to San Antonio, Texas I came to work for Visx, Inc. which makes
lasers for Refractive Eye Surgery. Robotics is my hobby so the motion control software development is fun.

We would like to thank Michael for introducing us to the world of Cromemco as well as VisiOn.

- Bruce

 
 

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