Leaving Mining Behind

When the Colony Oil Shale project was shut down, on May 2, 1982 I knew my days at Exxon were numbered. I had had several run-ins with my boss (he had rules. I didn't like them. Plus, he was Canadian. And we all know what that means) and it was obvious that Exxon was getting out of the mining business. So I started looking for work.

I was lucky. Even in 1982, I was able to find good work. I was offered a job as an engineer with Goldfield Exploration to act as the mine engineer in their heap leach mine in either Lovelock, NV:


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or in Goldfield, NV:


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I have to say that I was not too excited about either prospect.

SO I took a job back in Houston (this is the second time I have moved to Houston) with a small software company called David P. Cook and Associates.

The Company delivered "time shared" software that calculated the economics of oil and gas wells. You told it how much oil or gas you would produce, how long it would be producing, how much it cost to drill, and the software would tell you how much money you would make.

We had a DEC 2060 main frame computer, into which the clients would connect using a dial up modem (originally an "acoustically coupled" modem that would deliver 300 baud, or 300 characters per second data transfer rate).

From Houston 1980

From Houston 1980

I was hired as a Customer Support representative. When clients would call to find out how to address a specific problem, then would talk to me. It gave me great insight to the oil and gas world. And the world of economics. And the world of software.

We mostly used a hardcopy terminal to run these evaluations - usually a TI 820:

From Houston 1980

I was convinced that David could tell the future. He was only 30 years old, but had taken the company public the year I joined. He also refused to use the money he raised to grow the company. He told me that he was sure that oil prices would crash, and the company would fail.

As you can imagine the stock price dropped from $16.00 to about $2.00 but he stuck to his guns. He was sued, and he had to issue additional shares to the original shareholders.

We were talking one day and he said that what the US needed at that moment was a video rental store that always had the video you wanted, didn't have pro, and could remember what you liked. We all laughed - it was obvious that Kroger's, or Walgreen's, or some other retail store would soon own the video rental business. But he went ahead and started Blockbuster Video anyway. Needless to say it was a great success.

In the mean time he spun off the software side the business. We got hit hard by two trends - much lower oil prices and personal computers.

This is a good example of a company not being able to adjust to externalities. The price of our products and services was dropping to almost nothing, and the demand was falling through the floor.

We adjusted a bit, but it was not really enough. I was let go in July of 1986, (into the teeth of the Great Oil Depression) and was looking for work again.