gone to heaven. Why, we asked, would anybody EVER want more RAM than that? But I digress.
My pet project aimed to put into the hands of an entrepreneur (any entrepreneur with the $99.95 we proposed to charge for the 5.75” floppy diskâthey really were still floppy, back then) the “knobs and dials” of a simple Forresterian dynamic model of a start-up company’s competitive marketing problem. Turned out to be very hard to explain to anybody who might find it useful, although we did try.
Clark hated the idea. Besides, if I’ve got the sequences right, the wounds of AVI and ACGC smarted yet.
Oscar Rodriguez, on the other hand, loved my concept and the little demo I’d put together in my copious free time. Oscar was President of Hayden Software, Inc., in Lowell, and he was hot to trot with “Butter,” as he immediately denominated it. Please don’t try to find profound meaning in the name, by the way: its intent was purely obfuscatory. Oscar and I had met at a computer trade show where I’d represented Abt Microcomputer Software, and he saw my project as his key to market success in the business sector. I wasn’t about to disagree. One tends to impute to one’s children all sorts of affirmative qualities, whatever the objective facts of the situation.
|
|
So, in March of 1983, near my fifteenth anniversary as an Abt Associate, I asked Clark for a leave of absence. As manager of Abt Microcomputer Software, I had wanted to build the fledgling outfit’s offerings around this novel product concept. Clark didn’t see it that way. Turns out, he was right. An infuriating habit of Clark’s. See, it was all his fault.
Clark was kind enough to say that he hoped I’d return soon. Nearly twenty years have gone by since then, bringing much success to Abt Associates and a whole new direction to my research life.
As a footnote, you may find it curious that SampleCalc helped me through the door into medical research. Turned out that when Marcia Testa was founding Phase V Technologies, back in 1987, she already knew my name (and that of Abt Microcomputer Software) from the opening credit screen of her unlicensed copy of SampleCalc, which had become a minor classic on the pirate software market and a mainstay of her biostatistics shop at the University of Connecticut. I became Phase V’s first full-time employee and subsequently its first vice president. But that’s another story, for another evening.
|
|
