ICOM winked into existence, more or less, around 1984 or 1985, depending on where one anchors the measuring tape. From my point of view, it started like this:
ICOM's parents met when Scott Zifferer, then working at Amcast in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, hired a bright college kid named Joe Menter to write some automation software. At some point, dissatisfied with the tools available to document ladder logic --- the native language of Allen-Bradley's PLC-2 programmable controller --- Scott realized he was seeing an unfilled market niche. He set Joe to work on the problem, and ICOM Inc. was born. Scott eventually hired Eric Norene for sales and marketing.
I'd known Joe since our freshman year at MSOE in 1981, and heard some background noise about this company he and this Zifferer fellow were starting. Early in 1985, Joe called and asked if I'd be interested in building up a few circuit boards for a few extra bucks. Now, my entry-level job servicing computers for Xerox didn't pay that well; as it was I'd been supplementing my income by doing component-level repairs of veal feeding systems. A little soldering for $75 sounded fine to me; that was 7.5 hours worth of veal feeder work! I had no idea that it would be the first of many ICOM paychecks.
The boards were optical sensors for a toy race car track, used in the ICOM booth at the 1985 Programmable Controller Conference in Detroit. After the show, I asked Joe how it went. Apparently, the lighting and electrical noise messed with the optical sensors, but for the most part the demo went okay. The bigger problem was that almost nobody was interested in software for the Apple II. Build it for an IBM PC, they were told, and they'd have something they could sell.
After that first painful lesson in the importance of market research, Joe started work on software for the PC. By early 1986, the PLC-2 software was nearly ready, but Scott had seen a new market emerge.
Allen-Bradley's SLC-100 programmable controller aimed at the low end of the discrete control market, and people loved them. Less lovable was the calculator-like keypad used to program them, displaying ladder logic one instruction at a time. A normally open contact would light up an LED next to an open contact symbol, and seven segment LEDs would display the associated rung number and bit address. Rungs with branches could be particularly difficult to visualize using the handheld programmer. Scott and Joe knew that software could make the SLC-100 much easier to use.
Joe started to do some initial reverse-engineering on the SLC-100, but was too busy with the PLC-2 to devote much time to it. In January of 1986 he called me and asked if I'd be interested in writing software for a living.
Decisions, decisions. I'd been working for Xerox for two years, and while I couldn't have hoped for more stable employment, the work bored me silly. Young and free of any dependents, I knew there'd never be a better chance to make a leap of faith like this. I said my goodbyes to the many fine people I'd met at Xerox, and turned ICOM into a quartet on February 1, 1986.
ICOM's offices were located in a small apartment in a building just off the MSOE campus. Finding it was no problem; it was located directly beneath Joe's apartment. My office was a tiny bedroom equipped with a battered steel desk and a window facing into the building's lobby, which I usually closed to keep out the stench of the weed being smoked by our next door neighbor. Because cash was a bit scarce, one of the amenities my office lacked was a computer. I had a really nifty mechanical pencil, though.
I spent the first couple weeks learning and reverse-engineering the SLC-100. The routine went something like this: key in a program; burn it to EEPROM; use Eric's computer (the bedroom next door) and a breadboarded circuit to read the EEPROM contents and print a hex dump; go back to my office to analyze the program and decide on the next variation.
Tedious? A little. Fun? Surprisingly, yes.
A computer and an entire career would follow, but for me, this was the end of the beginning.
