[RKDinOKC]

In the 70s my brother ran a subsidiary medical company. His father-in-law (the founder of Kimray) worked with research doctors and the local university hospital. He developed and sold a heart lung machine for open heart surgery, a kidney dialysis machine water bath, and the Vena Cava blood clot filter. My brother designed and we made a cardiac output computer. You injected a solution of a specific temperature into the heart and the computer would determine the volume of blood the heart was pumping from the time it took for the blood to return to the original temperature.

When in HS I worked there part time and was involved in all the building and testing processes including etching, drilling, and stuffing circuit boards for the computer. I remember getting some plans and every one in the company making and building our own Pong games for fun. This was before you could even buy the first Pong game. Building it, then typing in and calibrating the software and hardware was a lot more fun and challenging than actually playing it.

Brother also had one of the first AppleII computers. I remember upgrading it to a whopping 16K and what a hassle it was to load and save programs to audio cassettes. And how great it was to get 5-1/4 inch floppy drives for it. My brother later used it to run the company using the first spread sheet program called VisiCalc.