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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
May 2019 #11238 Page #8
Celebrating 50 Years of Truss Design Innovation Part X: Windows Works Its Magic Joe Kannapell - P.E. Senior VP, MiTek USA www.mitek-us.com
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hen David McQuinn recommended Windows to MiTek’s management in 1990, few expected that Microsoft could compete with the two giants of the computer industry: Hewlett Packard and IBM. HP was the dominant provider of engineering computers. For a decade, its HP 9836 and 9845 machines had proven themselves to truss designers across the U.S. IBM, though, clearly dominated the entire computer industry: 60 times the size and 60 years older than Microsoft. At this time, Windows was scarcely 5 years old, and only on its third software release. But what Windows offered us was the chance to fashion brand new software that ran on commoditized hardware. The big unknown was “how long” it would take to build this whole new software, in a venue in which it had never been done before. We had lots of internal knowledge, but it was split among two disparate camps: the Gang Nail “guaranteed sealable” AutoTruss developers and the smaller PowerCalc Hydro-Air team. Fortunately, MiTek management relied on McQuinn’s objectivity to select the best features of both. But, most importantly, Dave relied heavily on our customers to be the final arbiters of our direction, with whom he consulted during frequent trips with us in the field. In just two years, Dave’s team delivered our first Windows release, dubbed “MiTek 2000.” About the same time, mid-1992, Microsoft released its first widely accepted product, Windows 3.1. These releases began the march forward, of both the operating system and the application software by both Microsoft and MiTek in tandem, which continues to this day. By the mid-Nineties, Microsoft achieved a market valuation equivalent to IBM’s, and by the end of that decade was worth triple IBM’s market value.
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