If you’re a struggling young high-tech entrepreneur with a new product design and much more time than money, you might decide not to buy preprinted circuit boards and instead produce your own. “You start with a fiberglass board completely covered with copper,” says Casey Cowell, who spent a good deal of time at this in the late 1970s, “and the object is to remove the copper you don’t want”–sort of like a sculptor removing from a block of marble everything that is not the statue.
It’s been more than a decade since Cowell and his partners (Paul Collard, who is no longer with the company, and Steve Muka, who died in 1985) laboriously created their own circuit boards–as well as practically everything else that went into their product–but he remembers the experience well. It dissolved most of the preconceptions he began with, leaving behind two pieces of advice that he urges on today’s generation of novice entrepreneurs:
Cowell had never seen the professoriat as his only possible future. He’d grown up in Detroit, where his father had been an independent heating and refrigeration contractor. An older friend down the block had started a couple of businesses Cowell worked for. All this may have immunized him against the anticorporate campus climate of the early 70s; at any rate he knew from his own experience that real people did run businesses. “For me, at that age and time, starting a business was a real legitimate, valuable thing to do. That option was open to me.”
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You have to remember that in 1976 a pocket calculator was cause for delight. Legendary Silicon Valley start-ups like Apple Computer did not yet exist. Laughs Cowell, “Back then, if you said ‘robotics’ people couldn’t spell it, and if you spelled it they couldn’t say it. But once you explained it to people, it conveyed technology in general, which was what we wanted.”
An acoustic coupler was a device enabling computers to exchange information over a distance. You’d dial the phone number of another computer and place the handset in a pair of oversize rubber cups wired to your computer. Then the acoustic coupler would translate the computer’s electronic pulses into audio tones, the telephone would translate the audio tones back into electronic pulses for transmission, and then at the other end the reverse process would take place. This was all necessary because it wasn’t until 1976 that the FCC wrote regulations allowing products not made by AT&T to be plugged directly into telephone lines (today’s modems, of course, do just that); this quadruple translation process made communications relatively slow and prone to error.
“We thought it should have a plastic nameplate–so instead of buying one [ready-made], we silk-screened it ourselves. We made our own circuit boards.
Richard Reck of Peat Marwick agrees. “Back then you could afford to make mistakes. They were probably spending twice as much on their product as necessary. But margins were larger then.”
