Wollongong - how to get a company started in ten minutes

I was the VP of marketing at an early (1977) UNIX applications company, RKA in Sacramento.  It was early 1980 and the company was spinning out of control.  We were too great at bidding and winning contract but not so good with the cash flow problems that come from rapid growth.

We had just acquired a medical applications company (2 guys, really) that could do magic with Interdata 32 bit minicomputers.  They could drive a printer at 1000 lines a minute a mile away and had to add a blinking cursor so that people would know the display had changed.  It happened too fast to see,  They could do other magic and they did it all with the Interdata real time OS.  

Naturally, being UNIX geeks, the company wanted to put UNIX on it without any thought that there was no way UNIX could perform at the speed of the Interdata OS.  There was also a buzz that an Interdata port of UNIX had been done at the University of Wollongong.  At least the Bell Jounal mentioned it.

There was constant talk about Wollongong and I mostly ignored it.  I thought we were in over our head(s) and needed to do crisis cash-flow management and didn't give much credence to the idea.  Finally, the buzz got so annoying that one afternoon I took a moment to think about it.  There was no real info.  I looked at the clock.  It was around 4:30PM and I figured that was 8:30AM in Australia so I picked up the phone and dialed long distance.

"Operator!:

"Give me iinternational!"

"International!  What country please?"

"Give me Australia."

"Australia!  What city please?'

"Wollongong".

"Wollongong.  What number please?"

"Give me the University."

"University of Wollongong".

"Do you have a MIS department?"

"I don't recognize that name."

"Do you have a Computer Science Department?"

"Yes , who would you like to speak to?"

"Give me the head of the Deaprtment."

At that moment, Dr. Juris Reinfeld, the Department head was just sitting at his desk.  He was tired depressed having contacted and been turned down by every computer company he  tried to interest in the UNIX port that two of his (brilliant) students (by Richard Miller and Ross Nealon) had done for the Interdata machine on campus.  He was ready to give up.  

The phone rang. 

"Hi!  My name is Paul Cubbage.  I'm with RKA in Sacramento and we're intersted in your Interdata port of UNIX."

RKA hit the wall and we were laid off. Three of us met with some investors and got the nod.  We called Juris, met at the Naational Computer Conference in Anaheim, and later put the deal together in Palo Alto.

There's lots more to it of course, but those 10 minutes were what made it happen.