ABSTRACT
It was in the early months of Key Systems that we met Dave Layne. Dave was working for his stepfather building custom homes. We happened to meet as a result of an offhand comment I had made to a woman I’d met at church about some difficulty I was having with my computer. She told me to call her grandson who, she claimed, could fix anything. Taking her at her word, I gave him a call. Dave came by and asked what the problem was. He had never seen a TRS80, but I showed him the error message that kept flashing on screen about the motor speed being too slow. Dave took the housing off, studied the machine’s innards awhile, made a few adjustments to a potentiometer, and that was it. It was fixed. When it happened a second time some weeks later, I called him up and asked him to come over and work his magic again. The second visit, he became more curious about what we were doing and began coming around on a regular basis after that. I learned that he was interested in computers, had spent some time while he was recently in Maryland availing himself of the generosity of a local computer store. He said he’d read just about everything on their bookshelf while hanging around the store and had gained sufficient time on the display models to teach himself the rudiments of the technology. I asked if he would translate a payroll system we’d found in the public domain into BASIC for a customer of ours. I showed him the manual, and after pursuing it for a few minutes, he said he’d give it a try. His only caveat was that we furnish him a computer to work on at home. I gave him a machine and agreed to pay him $500. It was quite a job before he was through, Wang BASIC being considerably more robust that Microsoft BASIC at the time, but he managed it with real finesse. I contracted with him to do several other projects for us. He took to it with amazing ease.
