Fox Valley Computer

I founded the Fox Valley Computer store in late 1977, and opened the doors to the public in April 1978. It was one of the first Apple dealerships in the US. Certainly one of the first Apple Stores in the State of Wisconsin.
Fox Valley Computer store was in business 1978-1983, and handled IMSAI, Vector Graphics, Commodore, and Processor Technology personal computers.

Fox Valley Computer joined forces with Microcom from Fon Du Lac, Wisconsin under the name Computerlab and was operated for several years in locations around northeast Wisconsin.

The business offered both Apple computer hardware sales to local school systems and businesses as well as professional software development for the local and national manufacturing businesses.

The premiere systems product was a multi-processor real-time monitoring and control system for large continuous plastics lines, producing packaging overwrap and other high tech packaging products. The system was installed in three states across on both tubular water quenched and standard extrusion systems with Eurotherm loop controllers as the active loop controllers and Computerlab’s HQ Manufacturing system as the monitoring and control unit.

The system helped manufacturing lines save time and reduce cull product by ramping up heats, pressures and other controls, in a prescribed way called the product ‘Recipe’. Recipes were stored on disk and could be called up for any particular customer’s requirements, reducing the line’s operator’s complexity in startup, and thereby saving millions of dollars in production losses over a series of jobs.

The Computerlab’s HQ Manufacturing produce was developed over a period of 3 years and consisted of software which ran embedded on ROM based IO processors, and within the main CPU. Operating system was Cromix – a Unix variant.

The product was so robust that 10 years later, employees at American were reporting the system was still in operation.

All software was written in “C”, targeted for ROM, with assembly language optimizations where needed. Leor Zolman’s BDS ‘C’ Compiler tools provide the speed and development stability over Whitesmith’s C. The 2 most popular C implementations of the time. Microsoft eventually delivered a buggy C compiler, but it was never used in production.