Harold Koplow (a.k.a. Fearless Leader)
1940-2004
Read Harold's Autobiography
(a Serial, On-line Publication)
Watch Movie of Harold being Interviewed on TV
Read an article about Harold -- "Look Who Shrunk the Computer"
Short Bio
It is great hearing from all of you. Seems like you want a post-Wang brief bio so here goes:My children: two nurses, a lawyer, an engineer, a junior and a freshman at the University of Florida.
Two grandchildren.
Employment post Wang: Mod Comp, CCI, Buyowner.com; the latter is a dot com that actually makes money. CCI was the company that John Cunningham, Dave Moros (who died recently) and I took over.
I live in Gainesville, Florida the home of the University of Florida. We moved to be closer to our children. My wife will complete her second B.A. degree in Fine Arts (Painting) this June. I starting working on a PhD in math.
We recently put a deposit on an Ocean Front Condo in Ft. Pierce. We plan to move there when it is finished next summer. I have always wanted to live on the beach. I am thinking of reviving my pharmacy license some pretty thick books to work my way through in order to pass the licensing exams.
Harold
Stories and Anecdotes
Sometime during late 1973 early 1974, Dr. Wang kicked me out of marketing. I along with Dave Moros was relegated to Long Range Planning "LRPed". This up until then was tantamount to being fired, "here is a temporary job until you find another one in some other company."Our marching orders were to design a word processor. Almost from the beginning I wanted to use microprocessors, one in each device. However, Dave thought that was much too premature and instead said that we should write a users manual of the ideal word processor -- screen shots, key strokes etc. We, working mornings (Dave ran out of gas by noon) wrote a manual which Dr. Wang liked -- said "we build". Dr. Wang then gave us marching orders to use the VS which was still a dream at that point.
We still kept the idea of using intelligent workstations with the VS as a file server -- the intelligence was limited to being able to buffer a complete line. Dr. Wang then allowed us to hire a programmer "Dan Corwin" but since we were still LRPed, Dan didn't report to us but to someone in programming.
After a few months Dr. Wang realized that the wordprocessor could be ready much before the VS so he changed his mind and told us on 928 that we could use microprocessors.
Dave, Don, and I spent a number of weeks fleshing out the architecture -- it was a combined effort. One of the first tasks was to make sure that the 8080 could process a keystroke in under 80ms -- I had the privilege to write the assembly code.
It was Dr. Wang's idea to connect everything via coaxial cable. He and Don Dunning developed the actual coaxial protocol. Dave and I specified with Don's help the way we interfaced to the coaxial cable -- streaming data directly from the disk etc.
So there you have it!