Well, actually this went from funny to tragic.

The company was called Need to Know, and it was initially in an old Victorian under a freeway overpass in San Francisco.

So I got the computer Friday and ran into this 23 line fail that evening. I called around 8:00 pm, expecting to get an answering machine. Instead I got, " Hey come on over!"

So I drive back to SF and get there around 9:00 pm. Somebody immediately puts a drink in my hand. People are just partying in a low key way. There are computer parts all over the place, but people are just partying.

So one of the guys took my machine apart, diagnosed the CPU failure, and replaced it with parts on hand.

I’m back in Berkeley by maybe 11:00 pm with a fully functional computer.

Here’s where it gets ugly. I did business with them into the late 1980s. During that time , some psycho took on a grudge against them and literally burned their place of business down.

Several places of businesses, burned down sequentially. Fucking tragic.

I lost track of them by 1990. I don’t know if they went further underground or what.

But they gave me a really human intro to computing. I can only hope they are well , wherever they are.