Discovering Windows

Sometime around 1994-1995, Tim Lavender, Teen Mania's Executive Vice President at the time, asked me to help him create a call center of 8-12 stations, each with their own phone and computer.  However, we were having trouble finding cost-effective software on the Unix platform.  At that time, companies developing for Unix were charging $1000/seat for Call Management software or any kind of customer service database.

However, there was inexpensive software being developed like mad for PCs and the Windows environment.  Personal computers had come down in price to bargain levels of $1800-2000.  Windows 3.0 or 3.1 was around $100 per copy and network cards were down to about $150-200 by this time.  So we purchased 8-10 personal computers and started our Call Center.  I think they were Pentium processors, probably not faster than 50 Mhz with 4-8MB of RAM (still with less processing power and memory than your modern Smartphone or iPod).  I think we got some Windows PC's for our executives as well but most everyone was still using Wyse terminals connected to a more robust PC running Unix.

I had been focused solely on accounting for Teen Mania for the past 5 years.  This opportunity to create the computer infrastructure for a call center plus the move of our Computer Manager, Bob Coleman, to the Christian Broadcasting Network, I left Teen Mania's accounting in the more than capable hands of our Controller, Randy Collins, and moved back into the world of computers.  I had no idea how Windows PCs and the incredible growth of Teen Mania would pull me into the world of computers so deeply.

Unix

Somewhere between 1986 and early 1988, I was attending graduate business school at Oral Roberts University, working full-time for a market research firm (MPSI Systems) and volunteering 15-20 hours a week at Teen Mania Ministries (www.teenmania.org).  I wasn't busy enough so I took a programming class in "C" at the local junior college.  Personal computers were $3000 back then so they weren't very personal so I had to go to the computer lab to do all my programming.  We were programming on a Unix mini-computer.  It was amazingly quick and responsive (character based even made it amazingly faster).

Teen Mania was just getting off the ground.  We were still in Ron Luce's den but we were getting ready to move to an office after the summer trip of 1988.  We were also going to start our internship (when internships were considered insane rather than the thing every ministry or church did) after that summer.  We wanted computers that all of us could work on but we didn't have the money to buy each of us computers, even network cards cost $1000 back then.  The 386 chip was just coming out and I found a version of Unix that would run on it (Santa Cruz Operation Unix).   We bought a 386 computer from PC Designs running at a blazing 20 Mhz with 4 MB of RAM.  This SERVER was $3500 and I paid an extra $500 to get a 40 MB hard drive.  And the RAM was $1000 per MB.  In comparison, a 4 GB memory stick of today would have cost $4 million back then.  We connected 8 $400 character-based terminals into our blazing monster of a server and we could have 9 people working at once out of one computer.   Your phone or iPod is a 40-50 times faster with 250x more memory than our server had.  Unix made us be able to have 9 people working on word processing, databases and spreadsheets all at once.  We could print and no one knew by a drop in performance on their individual terminal.

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/80386/

Within 5-10 years, we had 96 terminals running off one PC Designs 486 computer running at 66 Mhz with 16 MB of memory.  Pretty crazy what you could do when everything was character based running on Unix.

History of Unix

Next, I'll talk about the return to DOS and eventually Windows.