Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. Now it's time for the Aflac BusinessMakers Flashback brought to you by Aflac. Ask about it at work. This morning we're going to share stories from some of our very successful entrepreneurs when they're talking about other notable successful people and I'm going to start off with Episode No. 132 when we had Nolan Bushnell on the show. Nolan Bushnell is the inventor of Pong, the founder of Atari and the founder of Chuck E. Cheese. Nolan was talking about people that worked with him back at Atari and how exciting it was. I got him to head down a specific path so check this out.

Russ: I also understand at Atari you had a couple of guys there that worked for you. Both of them happened to be named Steve and they turned out to be quite successful entrepreneurs themselves.

Nolan: That's correct. Yeah, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did actually the game Breakout for Atari and we really liked what they were able to do and their capability. I just wished I'd invested in Apple.

Russ: Right. Well I think we all wished that. Were you still fairly actively involved when they were there?

Nolan: Yes, I was. In fact, Steve at one point was actually a direct report.

Russ: Okay, can you imagine Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak working for you? Well I got to carry this theme a little bit further because in Episode 141 I had Steve Wozniak on the show and about halfway into the interview I wanted to talk to him about one of his former bosses, none other than Nolan Bushnell. So check this out.

Russ: One of your former bosses has been a guest on this show, Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Pong and the founder of Atari and I believe you and Steve Jobs worked for him at Atari.

Steve: I love Nolan so much for what he did to the world. To think that arcade games, that industry all started with Nolan going out there, taking a big risk, building these machines and discovering the price he could make a reasonable game at, Pong, could sell a lot of them.

Russ: He gave you and Steve credit for a game called Breakout. Would that be accurate as well?

Steve: Well, I give him credit for coming up with the idea. He had the idea of one player Pong where the ball bounces off a brick. So he really should get the main credit. Now, when Steve Jobs came to me, Steve Jobs needed some money quick I think and he said, 'We have to do it in four days.' Back then a game was hardware. It wasn't software. You connected little wires from pins on chips that went up and down in voltage and you got the right voltages out at the end it might show up on a television set as balls and paddles. So four days and nights. That was a six man month job and I said, 'I'll try.' I knew that I was like the best there was at this job and we did it. We turned over a working one in four days and night, no sleep, mononucleosis for both of us, Steve Jobs and I. I designed it all and he bread boarded it. He hooked the wires together for my design.

Russ: Oh that's so cool. Tell me just briefly about meeting up with Steve Jobs. It's obvious you're the engineer and he's the marketer, but –

Steve: When we met we were both partial engineers. I was really a designer. I could design a new piece of equipment. He could understand the chips and build some simple little circuits, but was a step less than an engineer. Good technician, good one for looking at somebody's design even and finding a flaw, but once we met up, if it came to something digital I was so far ahead of him doing such advanced projects. Eventually I built a little TV terminal using my television that could get onto the Arcnet, the forerunner of today's internet. So Steve would see these things and he started becoming more marketing. What can we do this. How can we bring it to people. What are some new great advances we can put in it. You have to understand the technology well to be the melder.

I give him the major credit for everything in life, the reason we have computers. All I want to be known for is as a great designer, but Steve was able to understand the engineering side and meld it with the marketing and the operations and the passion to drive it to have a company that makes money and that sells lots of things to people. He wanted to be one of those great people. I stayed totally in engineering. I said hands off. I'm not going to step on your feet and I know what color to make it better than you do, to anybody who's been doing it for 15 years. But Steve wasn't afraid to step on everybody's toes. 'Let's do it this way instead.'

Russ: Okay. Imagine that. Steve Jobs not afraid to step on anybody's toes. Okay. Well staying in the technology sector, I got a roll all the way back to Episode Number 1. This is when our first chartered guest was on the show. None other than Rod Canion, the founder of Compaq Computer Corporation. We were talking to Rod about the incredible success of his company. He still holds the all first first year of operation sales record. Just an incredible success story. Rod started sharing with us about what was so important. Listen to this.

Rod: I think almost no one remembers that when the PCs first started everybody was different. Apple was different from IBM who was different from Xerox. It was kind of like the mini-computer industry. Everybody knew there would be a lot of 'clones' of IBM, but what nobody really understood was the importance of the absolute ability to run all the software. If you could buy a program off the shelf at a Computer Land Store you needed to be able to plug it into your computer and run it just like it was. If you had to make any changes, then it wasn't compatible and I think we were the only company that understood that. That was our original idea. It turns out that what Microsoft was selling all these other companies was totally incompatible with the IBM PC.

Rod: So one of the first things we had to do and this was a make or break it is we had to convince Microsoft to sell us a version of DOS that was compatible. I had a meeting with Bill Gates in the back room of a party they were giving at the West Coast Computer Conference I think in March of 1982. I explained to him what our vision was, what we were trying to do. I had showed him the little sketch we had put in our business plan, the sketch we had created at the House of Pies. I told him that if it was going to work we were going to do most of the work, but they had to provide us a compatible MS-DOS. He thought about it. I could tell he was kind of studying the issue and I said, 'Are you allowed to by contract with IBM?' He said, 'Yes, we're allowed to by contract, but I'm not sure how they would react. I need to think about this awhile.' Well fortunately he thought about it a couple days and said, 'This is important. We're going to do it.' So we worked with Microsoft that first year to create what became the industry standard operating system.

Russ: I think we all can understand the magnitude of what was decided in that exchange. Man oh man, standardizing on DOS for all manufacturers is so huge to the tremendous success in the micro-computer world. And for our last interview on the BusinessMakers Show talking about another big time character, I go back to our interview with Red McCombs. Red was talking about his friend, James Michener, the famous author and how he and James became friends back in the 1980s when Mr. Michener came down to Texas to interview Red for his big epic novel Texas. Listen to this story.

Red: We became close friends to the point to where we spent a lot of time together. Subsequent to that we were riding one day in my ranch north of San Antonio and he said, 'I'm struggling a little with my book.' I asked him, 'Struggling like how?' He said, 'I'm not sure that I am capturing the mystique of Texas and that's what I want this book to capture.' I honestly asked him, 'Are you sure there is a Mystique of Texas? He was somewhat offended. He said, 'Well of all people you would question.' I said, 'Well I'm not questioning. I'm just saying if you're having trouble capturing the mystique tell me about it. What is the mystique of Texas?' He said, 'Well first, let me tell you that for certain there is one.' He said, 'I've traveled the world. I've written about most of the world and' he said, 'I came to Texas to spend my last years because of the mystique of Texas and I'm trying to capture that in my book.' And he said, 'You ask what it is.'

Red: He said, 'What it is is it's land. It's oil. It's cattle and it is that entrepreneurial spirit of risk taking that created this great mystique of Texas.' He said, 'Even with that entrepreneurial zeal that those settlers had in wanting to win at everything they did and were willing to take risk, they still were mindful of their neighbor who might be in trouble and although they were very competitive, they were very generous in assisting each other.' And he said, 'All of that together creates a mystique in Texas that truly is not evident in the rest of the world.' So I was excited. I was a part of it and didn't even know it. Now I love talking about the mystique of Texas.

Russ: Okay. The mystique of Texas and the mystique of Texas entrepreneurship,,but that wraps up the Aflac BusinessMakers Flashback brought to you by Aflac. Ask about it at work. Now it's time for the advantage point. So let's welcome Katie Laird.

[Advantage Point]

Russ: And you're listening to the BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.