May 15, 1988

SNAP THIS ON: Dealers for Snap-on Tools are happy to meet one Charles Harris, a San Francisco lawyer. He says his custom PC-based wide-area network is helping him kick Snap-on’s corporate hind end in various lawsuits he has won for dealers and former dealers.

The domino effect began with San Francisco Snap-on dealer George Owens, whose breach-of-contract suit Harris won in 1986. It has since become a national story, with other disgruntled dealers coming to him in droves. Now he zooms all over the country with his little Toshiba 3100, putting together complaints.

“I call the Toshiba ‘Nitro,’” says Harris. “I always tell people at the airport to handle it carefully, like nitroglycerin. All my clients know it as Nitro, too. I guess it kind of symbolizes our attitude.”

Harris’ network was custom-built by Hammersley Technology Partners, a San Francisco high-tech consulting firm. It set him up with work-group software that gives him two-way access to a host system.

“I just use the telephone, call my office, pull what I need right off the computer into Nitro and have it all right there,” he says. “If I hadn’t had this whole system, I would never have been able to get this far with (the Snap-on complaints).”

TO IPO THEY GO: The first attempt at a public stock offering by database software firm Relational Technology Inc. of Alameda was badly timed, to say the least. The company plays Avis to Oracle Corp.’s Hertz. It was scheduled to go public Oct. 16, the Friday before the stock crash. Needless to say, RTI withdrew its plans and is now again in its quiet period.

RTI president Paul Newton figures that RTI personally caused the crash: People were in such a hurry to buy RTI’s stock, they dumped their whole portfolios. Yuk yuk.

BE TRUE TO YOUR SCHOOL: While poking around the Pixar announcement scheduled for Wednesday — the company is going to put in the public domain a standard interface for graphics computers that allow them to produce photorealistic images — I discovered that most of the graphics gurus in this industry share history.

Most went to school together at the University of Utah: John Warnock of Adobe Systems, Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics, Dave Evans and Ivan Sutherland of the firm by the same names (they were teachers), Jim Blinn of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ed Catmull of Pixar, and Alan Kay, now an Apple Fellow.

BUT DON’T DRINK THE WATER: Wondering why the American Electronics Association didn’t have its 11th annual 10K ELECTRUNCQin Santa Clara last weekend? Bizarre as it may seem, with the old book-to-bill ratio going stratospheric, AEA couldn’t get the money together. So the date has been changed to Aug. 28.

Jim Norton, senior manager of member services, says the May ELECTRUN (not to be confused with Electro PAC, the organization’s political action committee) fell victim to merger mania.
“We always lose about $6,000 to $7,000 on the race anyhow,” Norton says. “So when Monolithic Memories merged with AMD, it really crimped our plans. MMI usually provided a third of our race concessions — they have about 600 participants — and we had no chance to recover that money unless we charged exorbitant fees. Of course, then no one would want to come.”

In the past, Norton says, more than 2,000 people have participated. Although the public will be invited, team competition will still be the mainstay.

PURGE THOSE MAILING LISTS! During a visit to my old pals at InfoWorld, I was handed an envelope. Return address was P.C. Letter, a newsletter written by my old boss Stewart Alsop III, who hired me as an InfoWorld reporter way back when. The tag line at the bottom of the envelope read, “Why aren’t you (underlined) reading P.C. Letter? Sculley, Lowe, Gates, Esber, Manzi, Kapor, Kahn and hundreds of others already do.” The letter was addressed to Stewart Alsop, InfoWorld. Whaddya think? Does Stew read his own stuff?