1983—Bouncing around

Nineteen Eighty-Three…lots of memorable family events and transitions, rather eclipsing the customary photo-album section at the end of this year's piece of this account. Employment, career, vocation—whatever you choose to call it in my anomalous case, finally encountered its first major transition since college. I’d muddled around at Abt Associates for a couple of years, neither giving nor receiving any discernible satisfaction. So, I met Oscar Rodriguez, president and chief pusher of Hayden Software, Inc., at Mac World Expo on Commonwealth Pier. He, perhaps having become aware of SampleCalc, expressed interest in putting his outfit’s resources behind the development of a microcomputer-based Forresterian simulation of a broad class of business-decision problems, and so I proceeded at the end of the year to cut loose from my fifteen-year home base at Abt Associates and to start commuting to historic Lowell, Massachusetts. On balance and particularly in retrospect, probably a bad decision. But predictable, given my state of mind in those days, and the unsettled conditions prevailing on Wheeler Street in Cambridge. Labored in Lowell for a year or so, until the Hayden enterprise went under, and I found myself unemployed and still without the kind of support my ambitions would require. For the next couple of years, I dragged my ever-patient family through the challenges of unemployment to a rather unsatisfactory gig as a project manager for M/A-Com Linkabit, a designer and builder of high-powered communication devices, mainly for military applications. The top-secret clearance I’d obtained while at Abt made me more attractive to them than my actual capabilities justified. Eventually, the Lexington office closed down, and the company didn’t elect to offer me a position at its headquarters in California. Just as well: not at all sure I’d have been willing to uproot us from Timbaloo for the sake of continued employment with them. I frankly don’t remember how I hooked up with a textbook publisher. I’m probably neglecting to give due credit to some deserving benefactor; if so, I’m sorry. However it happened, Addison-Wesley (as they were called then) paid me to write for them two books of a curricular character. The money helped. I’ve preserved a copy of each in my library:

Anderson, Richard B., The Student Edition of MathCAD, (Addison-Wesley, 1987; Release 2.0, 1988) Schaefer, Robert and Richard B. Anderson, The Student Edition of Minitab (Addison-Wesley, 1988). It wasn’t until 1987 that something stable developed. Meanwhile, as they say, life went on.

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