not a Dow Jones company
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HIGH TECH, LOW MORALS Book One in the The Silicon Valley Trilogy by Peter Mackeonis
FORWARD Imagine, or try to remember, if you can, life before the internet and social media: a world without Google, Amazon, Facebook, TikTok, and X formally known as Twitter). A time when Silicon Valley and the world of high-tech had yet to dominate global markets, business was still almost done on a handshake and the 101 freeway from San Francisco airport to Sunnyvale was bustling with developers, bankers....and hustlers. I thought that you should know this, because you are about to travel back to 1992 and the 'fake it until you make it,' world of HIGH TECH, LOW MORALS. Enjoy!
CHAPTER ONE October 15, 1990 An early morning mist swirled around the reservoir hills alongside California Highway 17 like steam off so many giant cups of coffee. The late model Porsche 928 held the road like a huge diamond-black mechanical bug on a track as Skip powered the three-hundred-and-fifty aluminum horses into the fog on that first bend coming out of Los Gatos thinking that he would probably stay in fog all the way into the sleepy town of Capitola. Highway 17 cut the main mountain pass from San Jose's Silicon Valley to the Sixties ocean-side hamlets of Santa Cruz and Capitola. During the week the road was crazy busy from early morning through midnight, but it could be a joy to ride when it was empty and that early Sunday morning it was just that. As Skip drove he thought of October '89 when the first-cousin of Big One tore the area out of its tranquil afternoon nap waiting for the World Series to start. The hillside had shook like a duvet depositing two-hundred-thousand tons of rock slide onto the switchback of a road that he was now effortlessly driving through. Somehow this morning it didn't seem that this peaceful road had the energy. He relaxed his foot off the gas pedal as he was now running early and there might well be some half-sleepy highway patrolman hiding in one of the turnouts to delay him from his first espresso of the morning in Capitola. Their meetings had been easier on the San Jose side of the mountain before the earthquake leveled the cafe in Los Gatos where they used to meet. Then he and Jill could drive to their secret meetings in ten minutes or less.......
THE AUTHOR London born Peter Mackeonis became a venture capitalist in 1981 when, knowing nothing about computers he invested in a software company that eventually became bankrupt. As a investor he became part owner in an unfinished BASIC computer language. Advised by expects to walk away from the project, he cofounded MetaComCo Software and recruited programmers to complete the software. Based on a 'lucky' conversation with a programmer in Holland, who explained the value of the completed software, Peter made a speculative 9,800 mile round trip to a computer show in Houston, Texas. Two days later he flew back to the UK with a Letter of Intent from the US software company Digital Research who licensed the unfinished software for $400,000.
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