“The graphite was black and dull
His twin the diamond was bright and shiny!
But the sketch on the paper loved the former!
The latter was actually not too sharp and very whiny!”
So when you are a Harvard dropout you may feel disheartened! Add to this big failure you somehow get a great idea and start a new company!
Then how about when the first company you started is a big failure!
That is full stop for most but this guy went on to become one of the wealthiest dude in the world!
So apparently State and local governments frequently used to perform traffic surveys with a pneumatic road tube traffic counter some time before the tech was available or developed!
Rubber hoses were stretched across a road and wheels of passing vehicles create air pulses that are recorded by a roadside counter!
In the 1970s the counts were mechanically recorded on a roll of paper tape! The time and number of axles were punched as a 16-bit pattern into the paper tape! This was the way data used to be collected at that time!
Cities would hire private companies to translate the data into reports that traffic engineers could use to adjust traffic lights or improve roads!
This guy who had just dropped out of Harvard his friend were previously high school students at Lakeside School in Seattle.
The Lakeside Programmers Group got free computer time on various computers in exchange for writing computer programs!
These two thought they could process the traffic data cheaper and faster than the local companies by building a computer that could process all the traffic tapes using the Intel 8008 processor!
The goal was to sell such machines to states and local governments as a time and cost-saving tool!
The next step was to build a device to read the traffic tapes directly and eliminate the tedious manual work. The Intel 8008 microprocessor was announced in 1972 and they realized it could read the tapes and process the data.
Finally with a couple of members they went to talk to Paul Gilbert, another electrical engineering student, who worked in the high-energy tracking laboratory. It was there that Paul Gilbert was approached by the duo to become a partner in this company called the Traf-O-Data!
That year Gilbert, piece by piece, wire-wrapped, soldered, and assembled from electrical components the working microcomputer!
The two original dudes wrote the software!
Now there were many reasons why the company failed but the chief ones were that the company had done zero market research and lacked any real business model!
Finally the State of Washington offered free traffic processing services to cities, ending the need for private contractors, and all three principals moved on to other projects!
Of course big failures sometimes give more experience than even successes! The failure gave the duo lessons which they would use in their new venture which was of course a big success! The other dude is Allen while the Harvard dropout is a dude you may have heard about in passing!
A geeky guy called Bill Gates!
The real contribution of Traf-O-Data was the experience that Gates and Allen gained, skills they used to write Altair BASIC for the MITS Altair 8800 computer! So it has been said that even though Traf-O-Data wasn’t a roaring success, it was seminal in preparing them to make Microsoft’s first product a couple of years later. They taught themselves to simulate how microprocessors work, using DEC computers, so they could develop software even before their machine was built!
The earlier failures gave them valuable lessons for future success! There is a similar anecdote in birthday celebrity Ashok Saraf’s initial days as a comedian! Once when he was going to Kolhapur for the shooting of his first film, the policemen recognized him, however they made fun of the actor saying that their life is better than that of the actor. After this Ashok Saraf hid his face under the blanket! Later on of course he became a super star of Marathi and Hindi cinema!
Now turn off the computers and sleep!
Shubh ratri!
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