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A Brief Company History
- by Sam C. Chan, January 2005
Bravo Technology Center was founded
by me in Brockport, New York, USA, in 1981 under the name "The PC
Specialist." I was the Overseas Purchasing Agent for
Micron Computers in Hong Kong. Back then, the
newly announced American-made IBM-PCs were being
sold to Hong Kong. The primary means of business
electronic communications was Telex! The two main
international freight forwarders were DHL International &
Flying Tiger. That same year, as an 18-year old
college freshman, I was earning $4.25/hr at the college
tutoring fellow computer science students. I soon
discovered that I could take on students of my own and
get paid $10/hr at the end of session. 3 years later, I
started working as contract programmer at $25/hr
for a collection agency, in a database language called
Sculptor from a British firm called Sage. Computer
dealers at that time were mostly businessmen with
virtually no technical knowledge, making 30% margin on
$3000+ systems. I was frequently called upon to solve
basic problems in setup and operations.
By 1983, the advent of IBM-PC compatible
market gave rise to the likes of CompuAdd and PC
Limited (Dell today). I sold my super deluxe genuine
IBM-PC with a very low serial number to someone in
California through The Source (later acquired by
CompuServe). I upgraded to a "souped up" version of
generic PC. I started helping my clients evaluate &
order PC compatibles. Eventually, it was less
frustrating for all, to just resell to them.
In 1985, I bought my house, started
graduate school at R.I.T. and went on to assemble
my own "no name" custom systems. Few years later,
the business evolved into a full-stocking regional
distributor for dealers from Canandaigua to Buffalo. At
one time we had 40+ dealers, plus a steady stream of
R.I.T. students with rich parents. We were the sole
distributor in New York state for Delta Corporation (#2
world-wide power supplies manufacturer), with their
brief venture into the Socos monitors business.
Many of you no doubt would recall vividly the early days
of BBS debates, "AnnaExpress" and
our gatherings such as D-Day and Operation
Santa, etc.
In 1986, with the then state-of-the-art
386 Micronics motherboards and EISA bus, I
started creating high-end industrial-grade systems to
replace $10,000+ NCR Tower Systems time-shared
hosts (incorrectly referred to as "mainframe" by office
workers) and named them Ultrix System. They would
have Comtrol 32-port RS-232 for terminals,
running SCO UNIX. To print checks with magnetic
info on blue safety paper, we use laser printers with
MICR toner cartridges. I had to buy expensive OCR-B font
cartridges, and write low-level device drivers to
interface with them. That's how we provided
"check-by-phone" payment option to debtors in the 80s. Some of
those very boxes are still running today at factories
and collection agencies! For those of you not familiar
with the Xenix and UNIX scene, that was the era
when mainstream corporations use the "big three":
Novell, 3Com & Banyan, and
small businesses would use LANtastic or
10-Net and numerous other NOSs.
Throughout history, we've been the
behind-the-scene tech support for the resellers, on
networking issues and UNIX projects. There was a 5-year
period where POS installations using
MicroBiz, solenoid-released cash drawers, receipt
printers, display poles and barcode scanners;
represented a big part of our business. By now, my
programming was mostly on Clarion,
Paradox, Access 1.0 and Turbo Pascal. Of
course, there was always Lotus 1-2-3 (and later
Quattro &
Excel) macro programming. Around this time, I was
contracted by TRW Corporation to perform on-site
repairs for Gateway, Swan and many other major national
sellers.
The Internet was always a part of
life for those of us with academic computing
connections. I started that phrase in 1985. The use of
vi (text editor), rn (newsgroup reader)
and uucp (file transfer) was definitely not for
the faint-hearted. The Xerox Viewpoint
workstation (a descendant of the the famous Star)
raised the level of features and introduced me to
high-end publishing. Around 1993, the advent of Internet
on the PC scene converged my UNIX life and Windows life.
Interestingly, back then, I had to purchase the TCP/IP
suite of protocols and crude apps from Spyglass
and Netmanage at significant costs! In 1996, I
jumped on that "home page" bandwagon, thus launched the
web-dev career that continues unabated today.
Web hosting was the next key piece
that we mastered along the way. It all started in 1998
with 2 sub-domains with Netfirms, a Canadian
company. Shortly after, I started reselling hosting and
domain names. In 2002, we launched our own
dedicated servers with full control and redundant
backbone connections. Webcast/streaming services were
added and we've been "live" since.
Our humble web presence began in
1996, with a single amateurish site on AOL. A decade
later, our online enterprise spans across continents,
with 21 of our own active sites, on multiple servers,
with custom programs, and most importantly―over 2000
pages of original documents, plus tens of thousands
of pages of compiled materials, and countless number of
download items. A road map is needed to navigate through
the vast resources of our virtual landscape.
Something called Free Software Foundation
(FSF) started back in my SCO UNIX days (late
80s), and escaped the notice of me and my peers in those
days, as they once represented no significant
impact/benefits. By 1997, I had renewed interests in
FreeBSD, and subsequently the various
Linux distributions. Today, the open
source offerings form a strategic part of our
solutions.
(See
B.O.S.S.) In the last 6 years, my specialties have
been security and collaboration, the 2
primary areas I have identified as most demanded by the
SMB market.
So there you have it... a super condensed
version of our 24-year history.
-SCC |
