ICOM Lore

More Photos from ICOM in San Diego

Dave Ruske — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 17:19:00 +0000

Three dozen more pictures from ICOM's San Diego party, this time from Jim Fisher's camera.

Please note also that rather than attempting to maintain a contact list as we have in the past, it's been suggested that ICOM alumni use LinkedIn.com to keep in touch; it's simpler to let people update their own information as it changes.

ICOM in San Diego, February 1989

Dave Ruske — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 04:45:00 +0000

Dave Meyer passed along these photos of ICOM's 1989 trip to San Diego. Of ICOM's marketing exploits, this is probably the most famous. Scott basically flew the whole company out to throw a party for a gathering of Allen-Bradley distributors, and what a party it was!

Dave Meyer writes, "After a lot of years in the bottom of the drawer --- I finally dug out the shots the photographer shot in San Diego. My part in the arrangements was the hotel, rooms, entertainment (a jazz group I hired from LA), the food, booze, pictures...... and the UCLA model. A great weekend 19 years ago --- wonder what's changed!! Hope everyone enjoys these pictures, and they find you well."

Great pictures; thanks, Dave!

ICOM in the News

Dave Ruske — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 14:28:00 +0000

ICOM makes an appearance today in this Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel story about Rockwell Automation, penned by economics writer John Schmid.

I suppose it qualifies as fair use to quote the relevant paragraph, as it's a small portion of the story:

Rockwell Software owes its founding to a couple of university students at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Joe Menter was writing computer code in his apartment near the MSOE campus in 1985 when he met two business partners. They hired another MSOE programmer, and the four founded ICOM Inc., which grew rapidly. Rockwell acquired ICOM nine years later, calling it "one of the strongest and most successful companies in the automation software industry." ICOM formed the heart of Rockwell Software.

Well, that's got a breath of the truth, I guess, although Joe met Scott earlier than this, when working at Amcast. I'd also characterize Scott and Joe as the founders; Eric and I were just two guys invited to the party, and many others followed. I've already written my perspective on this story here under the caption Genesis.

Remember This Button?

Dave Ruske — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 02:21:00 +0000

Since my first day with ICOM was 20 years ago today (!), I thought I'd post this image of a button I came across recently. I'm not sure who produced these, or for what purpose, but they were all over the place shortly after the merger with Rockwell. It was indeed quite a ride!

Janice's New Baby

Dave Ruske — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 16:14:00 +0000

We're happy to note that ICOM alumnus Janice Pompa and her husband David have a healthy new baby boy, Logan John. Logan weighed in at just under 10 pounds when he was born on June 1st. He joins several cats at home in Arizona. Congratulations, David and Janice, and Happy Birthday, Logan!

Back when she was working as ICOM's receptionist, Janice had a last name of Keidel, and was one of the regular crew on Joe's boat.

The Passing of Mark Theiler

Dave Ruske — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 16:48:00 +0000

I regret that we must once again post a death notice here. Word has reached me that Mark Theiler, Scott Zifferer's assistant from the late 80s and early 90s, died of a heart attack in his Theinsville home last Tuesday. The photo above is from the ICOM's trip to San Diego in February of 1989, which Mark was intrumental in planning. (Scott basically flew the entire company to San Diego to crash an Allen-Bradley party; more photos from that trip will be posted soon.)

I best remember Mark's tidy stacks of papers, and the grief he saved us in having to deal directly with lawyers over things like software licensing. I also recall a very funny speech he gave at an ICOM Christmas party; the details are lost to me now, but I remember he got some pretty good laughs speaking about his lighthouse experience. Mark lost his job while the rest of us were in a meeting being assured that no jobs would be lost during the "merger" with Rockwell, which created an unfortunate amount of distrust in the days that followed.

From OnWisconsin.com:

Mark A. Theiler of Theinsville. March 23, 2005 - age 50 yrs. Loving father of Abbey Lynn. Dear brother of Mary Kay (Matthew) Iverson & Kris (Matthew) Sanfilippo. Preceded in death by his father Richard Theiler and mother Betty (Ken) Keitel. Further survived by other relatives and friends. Funeral service at the funeral home Wed. March 30, 7 PM. Visitation Wed. 4 PM until time of service. In lieu of flowers memorials to the family appreciated.

MUELLER FUNERAL HOME
W63 N527 HANOVER AVE
CEDARBURG 262-377-0380
www.muellerfuneralhome.com

Our thoughts and prayers are with Mark's family.

Heart of Gold

Dave Ruske — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 21:54:00 +0000

It must have been 1990 or 1991 when Joe bought that 45-foot Bayliner, one of the largest boats in Milwaukee's McKinley Marina at the time. He christened it the Heart of Gold after the improbable spacecraft in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; the Neil Young song was just a meaningless coincidence.

That Bayliner was Joe's first boat. Neither of us had any experience boating, in fact, so we took a Coast Guard course to learn safety, navigation, and how to tie the thing up so it wouldn't float off on adventures of its own. The course was terrific, taught by an old salt in a boating store way out on west Capitol Drive. (I'm fairly certain they no longer teach the course at that location, however; in recent years the building has been converted to a large, modern-looking church.)

For navigation, Joe outfitted the Heart of Gold with a state-of-the-art GPS receiver wired up to a PC running some pretty nice navigation software, and bolted a big color CRT in place in the pilothouse. This gave us a live "You Are Here" chart while we were underway. An autopilot, radar, and depth finder completed the instrumentation.

Now besides being 45 feet long, the Heart of Gold was also a fairly wide vessel, making it quite the floating party barge. Joe set up the enclosed lower deck with a nice sound system and ceiling-mounted television projector (which were huge contraptions back then --- it's visible above Janice in this picture). Throw in a well-stocked bar/kitchenette, a blender built into the countertop, and enough room to sleep... well, quite a few people, actually, if you count the pilothouse, the sofa in the lower deck, a couple actual cabins with beds, and, in a pinch, ample floor space... and you have the setting for some very memorable voyages.

Probably the favorite destination for these trips was Grand Haven, Michigan, more or less straight across Lake Michigan from Milwaukee. Grand Haven featured a great marina, one of the upper midwest's best beaches, and lively summer night life. Another favorite destination was Traverse City, Michigan and the surrounding area. At least one trip took us up to Mackinac Island and over to Sault St. Marie, then back down the Wisconsin coast with stops in Sturgeon Bay and Manitowoc.

Once in a while Joe and Scott would entertain distributors or other out-of-town guests on Joe's boat, but usually it was crewed by Joe's friends at ICOM. Eventually Joe traded the rather slow Bayliner for a much faster boat, but it never quite achieved the party status of its predecessor.

Getting somewhere quickly wasn't the magic of the Heart of Gold; like ICOM itself, it was the journey and the people we traveled with that made it special.

Here are a few photos of the ship and her crew for you to enjoy.

Farewell to Jim Bruske

Dave Ruske — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 20:48:00 +0000

A short while ago I received word from Bill Tye that one of our coworkers, Jim Bruske, passed away last night.

I don't recall exactly when Jim Bruske joined the company, whether we were still ICOM or the newly formed Rockwell Software, but many of the old ICOM crew who've moved on knew him. The photo above was taken in the mid-90s, when Rockwell Software put together a fundraising team to play wheelchair softball. The effort raised money to send a real wheelchair softball team, Jim's, to a tournament. Jim's the big Italian front-and-center in the white shirt.

Throughout his life, Jim was challenged by spina bifida, a disease which may have kept him in a wheelchair, but couldn't touch his warmth and sense of humor.

The wake will be tomorrow (10/29/2004) from 4 to 8 p.m. at the Schmidt & Bartlet Funeral Home, 106 W. Silver Spring Road in Whitefish Bay (414-964-3040).

Tomorrow would have been Jim's birthday. My wife knew Jim since they were in kindergarten, and already mailed a card. Now, sadly, we must mail another.

Pinball Wizard

Dave Ruske — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 01:31:00 +0000

Standing in Joe's office on the upper floor of the Greenfield Avenue building, we were doing our honest best to discuss the problem at hand while Scott Zifferer clacked and banged away on the pinball machine in front of Joe's desk.

The network that Allen-Bradley chose for their new SLC-500 controllers was DH-485, a simple token-passing network, usually running at 19.2 kilobaud. On the bright side, very simple, inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware could be used to interface to the network. Not so great was the computing power of late 1980s personal computers and their rather pathetic serial hardware (no interrupt on transmitter shift register empty? Aaaahg!). These machines became rather bogged down with the constant barrage of communication interrupts, and the poor things spent a large part of their time running our state machine code just to stay on the network. Some slower systems preferred not to run at all.

The problem Joe and I were discussing that afternoon was how we might relieve the PC of some of the communications burden. Now, I don't believe Allen-Bradley had come out with their KR card yet, though my memory is uncertain of this. But the KR was a weird beast in its own right. I rather liked the Zilog Super8 microcontroller at its core, and had fun writing a Super8 disassembler to do our reverse engineering. But the crazy thing had a dual-port memory 32K wide, which was a huge chunk of upper memory on a pre-1990 PC. Asking customers to install an expensive KR card and give up a big chunk of memory to use DH-485 was unappealing.

Much as we hated dabbling in hardware (too much headache for too little return), Joe and I were discussing the possibility of doing our own DH-485 coprocessor card. Zifferer drained another ball in the pinball machine and quipped, "Can't you just use the KT card?"

Joe and I looked at each other; that was it. Scott grinned when he saw that he'd shut us both up so effectively. ICOM's DH-485 SmartCable was born.

The KT card was the ISA followup to the KL, which had been a two board design for the proprietary bus of a re-branded Data General One computer. Designed to handle Data Highway and Data Highway Plus networks, it featured a Zilog Z80 CPU, SIO, and 64K of RAM, 4K of which was shared with the host computer. The coolest thing about the card was that, unlike previous communication adapters, new software could be loaded onto it. We could offload the DH-485 state machine to the KT or KL, and use the 4K dualport memory as a mailbox for incoming and outgoing packets. Eventually, when Allen-Bradley would come out with their PCMCIA version of the card, the PCMK, we'd port our driver to that as well, and issue a new SmartCable to match.

The SmartCables were enormously popular with users. No longer did they need separate cards for these different Allen-Bradley PLC networks. The DH-485 SmartCable was a true ICOM innovation, the sort which earned us many friends through the years.

Never underestimate the value of having a pinball machine in one's office.

Joe, The Stripper, and the Swine

Dave Ruske — Fri, 03 Sep 2004 06:52:00 +0000

ICOM was still inhabiting two downtown apartments when Scott Miller, Bill Gilgenbach and I decided to throw Joe that surprise birthday party. We planned a pig roast, made the arrangements, and silently spread the word through our little company. It sounded as though everyone would be there.

This would have been what, 1987, 1988? It escapes me now, along with the excuse I concocted to get Joe to come along to the back hall of the bar we'd rented for the occasion. Doubtless Joe realized something was up; it was, after all, his birthday, and he was no fool. I knew he recognized some of the cars in the parking lot when we pulled in, but he went along with it.

When Joe walked into the place, everyone yelled "Surprise!" anyway, and we joined the party, already several beers into the afternoon. We found a well-oiled Scott Miller, and I told him that Joe hadn't been quite as surprised as we'd hoped. At which point Scott blurted out, "Well at least he doesn't know about the stripper!"

Oh, dear. He does now, Scott, he does now. Well, sort of...

We'd found the stripper in the Yellow Pages. I did some initial calling around to various places, asking about pricing and services. That bit of research was both funny and a little embarrassing. I narrowed it down somewhat, Scott and I talked over the options, then Scott made a follow-up call and closed the deal.

For the record, Bill was blameless in the plan Scott and I came up with. Had he known, I think he would have warned his date, who, as I recall, was not amused with the show. Something less risqué she probably could have dealt with, but after the stripper sat Joe down, danced down to her underwear, and pretended the act was over, she played one last song and lost everything but her stockings.

Well, Happy Birthday indeed. Bill's date headed for the bar.

The dancing wasn't particularly good, but we weren't expecting ballet, and the dancer seemed to have a sense of humor about herself. As she was finishing up, the door from the bar opened and several men in their seventies stumbled through. They'd been looking for the bathroom and found a naked girl instead. They seemed okay with that, and watched as she turned off the music and started dressing. I paid her, and several of ICOM's chivalrous young men offered to escort the lady to her car. How kind!

The old men joined our party. There was a brief moment of alarm when one of the gents said, "You showed me something I haven't seen in a long time, so I'd like to show you something," and reached into his pants. Fortunately, he pulled out a deck of cards. As the party raged on and the pig was devoured, a bunch of us gathered around while this fellow showed us one jaw-dropping card trick after another. He was either really good, or the beer was making us stupid.

Maybe both.

Departure Photos

Dave Ruske — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 21:07:00 +0000

While the company moving from 102nd Street to the Clocktower isn't ICOM, it does involve a lot of former ICOM employees moving out of the last building that ICOM called home. Photos and video of our final toast to the old place are now available right here.

Enjoy!

Happily Ever After

Dave Ruske — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 07:02:00 +0000

In an email message to the company dated October 21, 1994, Steve Burt officially announced that ICOM would be merging with Allen-Bradley to form a new automation software company with a new name. "Merge" was the actual verb used, though in many of our minds this conjured the image of a bug merging with the windshield of a speeding Peterbilt.

Rumors of the merger had floated around for weeks, gradually solidifying as more details leaked out. By the time Steve's copy of the press release hit our inboxes, there was little surprise, but plenty of uncertainty. In the meeting late that day, Scott Zifferer and Rich Ryan did their best to reassure us that this wasn't the end.

Sure enough, the world kept spinning and the sun came up Saturday morning. Come Monday, we all showed up for work. We didn't yet know the name of the company we were working for, but we still had projects to complete, and the faces in the hallways were the same faces we saw the week before.

There we were, living proof of the afterlife. Not really dead, just... passed on.

That's the way it is with endings. The classic fairy tale winds up with a quip about everyone living happily ever after, though by the time we're adults we know that, in reality, a lot of what comes later isn't all so flowery. Cinderella might get drunk at the next ball, or Prince Charming might come home smelling like Snow White, and even if they make it through that, well, sooner or later one of them is going to be burying the other. But "happily ever after" lets us close the book while we still feel good about it.

October 21, 1994 is, for the purposes of ICOM and this website, where we place our "happily ever after" marker.

Nearly a decade after that marker however, another chapter in the larger story is closing, and it's difficult not to feel a little sentimental about it. Later today, Thursday, June 17, 2004, Rockwell Software employees will leave the building at 2424 South 102nd Street in West Allis for the last time. Everything will have been packed by tonight, in readiness for the movers on Friday morning. Come Monday, Rockwell Software's home will be in one of Allen-Bradley's buildings in downtown Milwaukee.

ICOM first moved into the 102nd Street building in June of 1990, and it seemed vast; how could we ever grow to fill it? The move into that building was a happy one; we were thriving, and growing, and proud that we'd managed to come so far from that first shabby apartment we used for office space. That building holds a lot of good memories, and a few bad ones as well. In leaving it, we also leave behind a piece of our shared past, that of ICOM at its pinnacle.

Most painfully, it is also time to bid farewell to the Garcia family, friends who have been cooking our meals for most of our time in the 102nd Street building, and cleaning for us since before we moved in. Carlos, Delia, Sylvia, Belinda, Julian, and the rest: we love you all. Keep in touch, and be well.

Live happily ever after.

Hello.com

Duane Fahey — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 18:59:00 +0000

I posted the two previous photos using a free program called Hello at http://www.hello.com.

It's pretty easy to use, and it communicates with Blogger directly, with settings for thumbnail size and a couple of other things.

What we really need are some old photos, like on moving day...

- Duane

Duane Fahey — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 18:58:00 +0000

Tim, Janice, Craig, Duane, and Dave in May of 2004

Duane Fahey — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 18:56:00 +0000

Friends of Janice

Early Encounter with Zifferer (by Steve Burt)

Duane Fahey — Wed, 26 May 2004 23:29:00 +0000

Back in 1985 and 86 I met with Scott at a number of trade shows while I was working for Allen-Bradley. A-B had just introduced their programming software called IPDS - I'm not sure what it stands for anymore but I remember the letters - it was a painful experience - a VERY bad product!

Anyway I gave Scott a demo of the product at one of the shows. We kind of hit it off and he actually offered me a job. Problem was he couldn't pay me just yet. Interesting offer all the same - this was when ICOM was located in downtown Milwaukee (sounds like it's going full circle) - I could basically live for free in the office down there - oh gee, and be on call 24 hours a day. It was an offer I had to refuse. After all, I had student loans and car payments hanging over my head.

I moved from A-B to Modicon and then to an A-B/ICOM distributor over the next couple of years. Scott kept on making me offers. Finally we "consumated the deal" and I started my first day at ICOM on February 14, 1989. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Turned out to be quite a fun ride!

www.icomlore.org

Duane Fahey — Wed, 26 May 2004 21:24:00 +0000

I just purchased this domain name today, icomlore.org. In a few days or maybe a week, I will be moving the web log to that location.

So, if you ever come back here to blogspot.com and you can't find the web log, you now know where it is. I would move it sooner, but it takes a couple of days to get things going.

The benefits to our own domain name is as follows:
1) Easier to remember.
2) No advertisements at the top. This page isn’t about making money.
3) We can post photos within the web log.
4) We will have space and capabilities to create web pages beyond the web log, if we want to.
5) Right now we are using Blogger.com for web log creation. By having our own domain name and space, we can switch to another technology in the future (maybe folklore.org).

Also note that Dave Ruske has agreed to maintain and share a private ICOM e-mail list (this information is in the web log’s header). Thanks Dave!

- Duane

Genesis (by Dave Ruske)

Duane Fahey — Tue, 25 May 2004 19:30:00 +0000

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.

Why do ICOM Lore Now?

Duane Fahey — Tue, 25 May 2004 15:17:00 +0000

This past weekend, Janice Keidel came to Milwaukee for a visit. Janice was married just about exactly one year ago to David Pompa, so actually her last name is Pompa now.

So, we had a little reunion, with Craig Hanna, Dave and Kit Ruske, Tim Ogden, and other friends of Janice's. Click here to see some pictures that Dave took.

We had a lot of fun talking about the old days and so on, and the idea of this web site was born.

But, other events play into this as well. Rockwell Software is moving out of the “ICOM Building” in West Allis, to a downtown location. Also, this Fall will mark the 10th anniversary of Rockwell Automation’s purchase of ICOM.

So, it just seems like the time is right for something like this. What do you think?

- Duane

Welcome to ICOM Lore!

Duane Fahey — Mon, 24 May 2004 20:22:00 +0000

This web log is dedicated to the fond memories of ICOM, Inc., which was last located in West Allis, Wisconsin. ICOM was founded in 1985 and was merged into Rockwell Automation in 1994 as part of the Rockwell Software group.

There are about a hundred people who are mostly proud of their involvement with ICOM. These are their stories.

The intention is to have volunteers contribute their memories. Over the course of time, one person’s memory is not always the same as someone else’s memory, and may not even be accurate. But it might be entertaining anyway…

The volunteers can be virtually anyone, an ICOM employee, distributor, customer, vendor, or even competitor. But, there needs to be some rules:

1) We cannot intentionally do anything that might violate trademarks or copyrights held by Rockwell Automation or others.
2) The intention is to post fond memories of ICOM, not memories that might embarrass, humiliate, or otherwise hurt someone’s feelings. Of course, this goes for photographs as well.

This is currently formatted in a web log format, using Blogger (a Google company). I hope to one-day use the software that generates http://www.folklore.org, when it is finished. Folklore.org is a web site dedicated to the history of the Macintosh computer.

So, this web site is basically an experiment. If people like it, we’ll keep it going.

- Duane Fahey (ICOM employee number 40, I think)