The Marin Mac Shop

For all you ComputerWare fans that want to travel back in time in your own personal wayback machine, it will interest you to know that you can do just that by going to where the San Rafael ComputerWare store was located. It is now the Marin Mac Shop, and it is a great place that keeps the ComputerWare memories alive and well.

I had a recent catastrophic hard drive failure on my Mac laptop, and last time I had such a problem I went straight to a ComputerWare hardware technician. So, what are my options in 2008? Well, I sent it to the Marin Mac Shop and a certified ComputerWare Apple technician of lore, Carlson, fixed it! I even got the "Friends of ComputerWare" discount! Thank you for keeping great Macintosh customer sales and service alive and well.

QuickMail Discontinued

MacNN reports that Outspring has announced that it is discontinuing its QuickMail email client and server line. The company has suspended all sales and phone support for QuickMail, although customers who purchased QuickMail products in the last 90 days will still be entitled to another 90 days of telephone support.

Wow, that brings back memories. I only used QuickMail when I worked at ComputerWare, but I remember it well. When I got to the Santa Cruz store, QuickMail was our main link to the rest of the company. I remember all the "special" forms users created. I remember the Mickey Mouse flipping the bird message and a few others. Stefen Fanger from the Palo Alto store accumulated quite a collection of custom QuickMail forms.

Anyone have any favorites?

Also makes me think of the fact that to this day I sign all my emails with "--Eric K". This goes back to a problem on the mail server where Eric Matson's and my email boxes got intertwined. Since he was the manager of the new Sunnyvale store and I was just a peon sales guy at the Palo Alto store, I shouldn't have been able to see his email, and people needed to know when I was sending out email that I wasn't him, so I kept signing everything with "--Eric K" to avoid confusion.

--Eric K

Corporate Sales Team

Whoa. Who can remember the ComputerWare Times? The Corporate Sales Team was featured in the October 1991 issue. Where are they now? 

Also of interest in this issue:

• The new Mac CPUs included three notebook Macs: the PowerBook 100, 140 and 170
• The RasterOps 19" color display was on sale for $2399 (list: $5298)
• Announcement: 'We now carry DOS & Windows software!'

...interesting to look back 17 years!

Join the ComputerWare Alumni LinkedIn Group

Former employees of ComputerWare: The MacSource who use LinkedIn are welcome and invited to join the ComputerWare Alumni Group on LinkedIn.

ComputerWare Alumni on Facebook

Facebook is quickly taking over the world and now is the time to join the ComputerWare Alumni group on Facebook.

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

Where are they now?

Funny story: I'm going through a box of old papers and I come across this little Day-Tripper style 6-ring binder (The kind that came with the deluxe version of Dynodex). Anyway, I open it up and I see that at some point way back when I printed out various addresses using the software. One set of addresses is the entire staff at ComputerWare corporate. This dates way back to probably 1990-1991 because Roger Reid was still listed as CEO. I start to reminisce (we just had a ComputerWare reunion a few weeks ago and I was having a hard time remembering these people's names...)

So I go through all the names to see if any ring any bells. Some do, some don't. (I worked at the Palo Alto and Santa Cruz stores and seldom met people at Bayshore face to face). I get through all the departments and come to Tech Support. There at the bottom next to Kurt Widmann, Keith Redfield and Peter Corless is this name "Arnaldo Miranda". My current position as StuffIt Mac QA Lead was previously occupied by Arnoldo Miranda. He's now one of our software engineers (on the dark side!!!). I shot him an email and it turns out, our Arnoldo is one and the same...

Anyway, here's the directory. Maybe it will kick-start a few of your brain cells too...

--Eric Kopf
PS: My apologies for any typos...
PPS: If you want to know what anyone's old phone number was I can provide that info :-)

ComputerWare Bayshore Directory (circa 1990-1)

Accounting
Naomi Estep
Andrea Morris
AnnMarie Pasmore
Diana Marcus
Maria Elena Macarty
Michael Moore
Regina Moguillansky
Rick Bonin
Sandie Gibson

Admin
Judy Bergland
Kim Perkins
Laura Klaus
Mae Klein
Mary Yardley

The "Brass"
Roger Reed - CEO
Dick Meigs
Geaff Stoller

"Brass Support"
Chris Halaska
Jack Winkle
Michael Boucher

Business Development
Margaret Leventhal

Consulting
Nicholas De Paul

Corporate
Mary McCarthy
Jeff McHenry
Ken Briot

Creative Services
Joanne Lesser
Mary Swift

Customer Service
Cheri Brown
Michael Winger

Direct Sales
Marianne Cleary
Andrew Ruff
Cathy Weiss
Joel Frankel
Sarah Landau

Dist. Coordinator
Jason Elliott

Driver
Richard Buckley

Hardware
Pierre Pellisier
Abrahim Kalezan
Jonathan Braun

Human Resources
Annie Kavanagh
Michael Hyde
Suzanne DeSandre

International
Ann McLaughlin
Bryan Searing

-----------Printing problem - I could only read parts of these--------------
...Storer
...Casanova
...Reichmann
...rd Gresse
...iggs
...ne Searing
...Gresse
Pfred Arseneault
Stephen D'Andrea

...Inventory
Victor Stephenson
----------------------------------------------

MLS
Chris Stefani
Rick Johnston

Marketing
Robert Cudd
Sheryl Lee
Terry Lesser

Marketing Reps
Jennider Wread
Laurie Gibson
Rose Meagher

Night Picking
Dan Hoover

Operations
Ken Krich

Purchasing
Lynda Akkelquist
John Parkin
Julie Martinsen
Matthew Hartman
Richard Muro
Stephanie Paulson

Receiving
Norman Durang

Returns
Brian Martensen
George McClure
Will Cerdarholm

SRI
Bob Easthope

Sales & Marketing
Geoff Westerfield
Linden Skjeie
Michael Laster

Shipping
Frank Hendershott

Tech Services
Kurt Widmann
Keith Redfield
Arnoldo Miranda
Perter Corless

Apple Products Through The Years

The Apple Design Group has been one of Apple's key assets over the years, and at ComputerWare we sold almost all of these at one time or another. How many of these do you remember?

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for posting this image and story to his blog.

It appears that some of the printer are not covered in the chart, thereby removing my favorite LaserWriter Pro 810 design from discussion! :-)

Mac Mac Mac Mac Mac Mac Mac Mac ComputerWare!

For those of you who remember all the great radio ads that ComputerWare did over the years, you'll be happy to know that they are all available on the Internet in MP3 or QuickTime format!

Bob Kilburg has posted all the ComputerWare radio ads to his website. Bob was one of the principals at Darien & Kilburg, ComputerWare's chief advertising agency.

My favorite is, of course, the famous jingle: Mac mac mac mac mac mac mac mac ComputerWare! Tahaaahaa ddaaaaa!

The other classic, is the "Know How Know Where" tag, which on the radio doesn't quite hold up... it sounds like, "No how, no where, no way!"

Bob has also posted one of the ComputerWare television ads to his site. Enjoy!

Tech Support Stories

When I first started at ComputerWare in the summer of 1993 I was in the Technical Support department at headquarters, along with Earl Gerfen, Ron Reck, and Ross Gard. We did pre-sales and post-sales support for Corporate Sales, International Sales, Direct Sales, and all ten of the Macintosh-only Retail stores.

One of my favorite stories involved a customer who called to say that his computer would reboot every time he flushed the toilet. Doing over-the-phone support for this one was tricky, and you could actually here the computer chime and reboot as soon as he flushed the toilet. We sent out a hardware tech, who reported back to us the following: it was actually true. The issue turned out to be that there was an electric water pump that turned on and refilled a main water reservoir. Flushing the toilet caused enough water to run out of the reservoir that the pump kicked on and caused an initial voltage drop (brown-out) that was large enough to cut power to the computer. The computer would then get full power a second later, and reboot.

Another classic was the customer who called in to headquarters to complain about one of our retail technicians. She was very upset and wanted to make sure that we were aware that we had a thief working for us. The issue? When her Performa computer was returned to her after repair, all the virtual memory had been removed; stolen if you will...

There are also some funny Help Desk stories from other places besides ComputerWare.

My First Color Desktop: 640x480!

Here's the historic 640x480 256-color backdrop I used on my first color Macintosh (an 8/80 Macintosh SE/30 with RasterOps 8/24 color card--don't forget the Apple RGB 13" Monitor!). Remember when color was really amazing? This backdrop came with the Macintosh II way back in 1987.

Strategic Conquest in color on a "big" 640x480 screen! Life was good; ah yeah!

2001 Farewell Wake

On April 5, 2001 a large group of ComputerWare Alumni met at Fibber McGee's in Sunnyvale to have an Irish Wake for ComputerWare.


One of the attendees was Johnny Mac, who posted a great tribute page to this event, included comments and photos.

Unknown to us at the time, Elite Computers and Software would later buy the assets of ComputerWare and many of the stores would rise from the grave to live again for a few years.

Where are you now?

Where are you now? If you've been invited to view this site, then you have the admin rights to post new stories! Please post a story and picture about where you are and what you are doing. Perhaps a scan or two of an old ComputerWare business card to remind us all of your connection to ComputerWare: The MacSource!