MicroData Systems, Ltd

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The History of STUREC © Dr. Bob's Bio... (Robert Campsmith, President and Owner of MicroData Systems, Limited) Well, as many of you probably already guessed, I was born at a very young age. In Chicago, as a matter of fact in 19 something or other. When my father got out of the Navy he moved the family back to Michigan, and by the time I was ready for third grade, my Dad was building a house at White Lake (in Muskegon County Michigan). I finished grade school and graduated Montague High School in 1962. The same year that Nancy Fleming was named Miss America. Yes, I took her home from a school dance -- once! I went the obligatory two years to Muskegon Community College, majoring in, ah, something, oh well, whatever. I paid for college by working in a foundry, no fun. After a couple of years of that, I decided to move to Chicago and make my fortune. Worked in Chicago for a few years, got an advanced degree from Nortwestern then moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan. Got married a few times, had a few kids and by 1979 decided I better figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up. So I enrolled in Kalamazoo Valley Community College and Aced all of the computer classes they had then. System 34 and 38 stuff. I thought, boy, this is neat, you get to stay clean and indoors where the air-conditioning is. By this time I was pushing 40, and nobody wanted to hire an old fudd... So, I thought, I'll show them; I'll start my own company. I bought a copy of dBASEII, license number 248, loaded it onto my dual floppy 56k CPM computer and waited for the customers to flock in. While I was waiting, I taught myself about micro-computers. In 1981, my friend Ed Marlett who is the now retired director of Adult Education from Kalamazoo, introduced me to Ray Phillips who was the head of the newly formed "Kalamazoo County Adult Education Consortium". He asked if I could find him a program that he could use to put together a Fourth Friday Report. What's a "Fourth Friday Report" I asked, and as they say, the rest is history... In the beginning... In the spring of 1981, Ed Marlett the Director of the Kalamazoo Adult Education program and Ray Phillips the Director of Parchment's Adult Education program and the head of the newly formed Kalamazoo County Consortium for Adult Education approached Robert Campsmith about computerizing one of their particular challenges, the "Fourth Friday Count". At the time, Robert was helping Russ Ginter start the first software-only store in the Kalamazoo Michigan area. Robert and Russ researched all of the catalogs and literature they had available to them, looking for anything that might help the Adult Ed folks with this "Pupil Accounting" thing, as they called it. Nothing, nada, zilch! After more talk with Ed and Ray, and more research and telephone calls around the country, everybody was getting pretty frustrated... Remember that dual floppy CPM computer and the copy of dBASE II mentioned in Dr.

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