From Linkedin Jim B. Surjaatmadja is a Technology Distinguished Engineer with Halliburton’s Technology Center in Duncan, Oklahoma; and has worked for Halliburton for 42 years. Prior to this he was project engineer for the Fluid Power Research Center in Stillwater, Oklahoma for 4 years; and system engineer for IBM in Jakarta, Indonesia. He is author […]
Early Success
George and I moved to Tulsa in June 1982 and opened Woodland store at 71st and Memorial in September 1982. We formed a corporation as The Computer Professionals Inc with me owning two-thirds of the stock and my Partner, George, having one-third. We were well-capitalized as I had cashed in my Halliburton profit sharing and […]
Linux, Xenix etc.
Linus Torvalds, the Mind behind Linux
Growth Period
There was a guy who came to our store every Saturday morning to read computer magazines we had there. His name is Corey. I don’t remember him buying the magazines but he would typically stay there two or three hours. He had the closest thing to a photographic memory of anyone I had ever met. […]
Our Demise
We carefully located a building that would hold our second store. I took the lease for the second store to our lawyer to review. He looked over the lease but did not find anything wrong with it. He recommended we set up a second corporation for the second store. I did not follow his recommendation […]
MicroAge HQ
As I mentioned, I had “pounded on the table” at several Franchise Advisory Council meetings asking for the standard accounting system which was promised in our franchise agreements. Jeff McKeever, one of the Co-Founders of MicroAge offered me a consulting position at headquarters. My project there would be to choose the system that would be […]
Floor Plan Financing
From Investopedia: What is Floor Planning? Floor planning is a form of financing for large ticket items displayed on showroom floors or lots. Automobile dealerships utilize floor plan financing to run their businesses; dealerships for trucks, recreational vehicles and boats, as well as home appliance retailers also turn to floor plan loans to purchase inventory. […]
VISICALC
Dan Bricklin changed the world forever when he codeveloped VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet and grandfather of programs you probably use every day like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. Join the software engineer and computing legend as he explores the tangled web of first jobs, daydreams and homework problems that led to his transformational invention.
Start-MicroAge-Tulsa
Leaving Halliburton I enjoyed the work we did and the dream team working around me but I did not see any evidence that my career at Haliburton was advancing in any way. I began to consider leaving Haliburton to start my own business. The DST System was important enough to Haliburton that we pretty much […]
Roughnecking Job
Roughnecking on a Drilling Rig — Summer of 1964 just before my Senior Year at OU. With the help of my mother’s cousin, I got a job roughnecking on an oil drilling rig, mostly near Prague, Oklahoma. I was 5′ 9″ and 120 pounds at the time. My goal was to prove to myself and […]