Smaller still, a new start-up

DPC&A and I parted ways in 1986. I pursued a couple of ideas somewhat halfheartedly (I wanted to set up a Multi-Level Marketing computer sales company, and even registered a name and started some market research. Did you know that you can buy mailing lists of people in a given zip-code with children in grade school? With Phone numbers? Call them once to see how interested they are in owning computers. In 1986 the answer was, "Not so much") but my real goal was to go to work for a small (2 people!) software company called Terr-Mar Resource Information Services.

And so I did.

We sold a PC based Satellite image processing system. This was before PCs were really quite capable of such things. We have to do a lot of hardware modification, and plenty of software modification as well. The only way to get the data into the computer was to use a 9-track (those big round tapes) tape drive that was not really conducive to a PC. The only way to manipulate the data was to put it into a "framebuffer" which allowed you very fast processing. It all worked, but just barely. I spent a lot of time inside of computers.

The company was headquartered in Mountain View, CA. It was a great time to be flying out to Silicon Valley. If I would have known then when I know now, that would have been a great time to move to The Valley and dedicate myself to the software world. Instead, I stayed here in Houston and dedicated myself to the Oil and Gas world. I don't regret it, (road not taken, and all that) but I occasionally wonder how different my life would have been.

About a year into Terra-Mar, we stumbled across a local software company called GeoSim. This was a life altering connection for me.

We acquired GeoSim for no money from a fellow named Steve Nightingale. GeoSim wrote software that was used to help interpret seismic data. It, too, was PC based. Steve's family owned the Cal Neva casino in Reno, and this company was a diversification for them.

GeoSim wasn't doing so well (not that we were, either) so Terra-Mar took over GeoSim and no money changed hands. But this got us into a much bigger field with much bigger players.

(one part of that field was Reno. More than one of our Board Meetings were at the casino. It was like a movie. After one of our meals we had the opportunity to sample the "cognac cart". I chose a Hines cognac that was $50/glass. In 1987 or so. Here is my take away from that interaction. Don't piss off gaming lawyers)

Landmark Graphics, at the time little more than a start-up themselves, resold the GeoSim software. This was my first introduction to the company that would make a really big impact on my career.

I ran the Houston office of Terra-Mar for three years. It was apparent at that time that we did not have the capital to make the jump to the big time. Landmark had been recruiting me for a while, so I make the decision to leave. It was not an easy one, but it was a lucrative one.