I could write a book about that whole experience because there's a whole lot more to the story than this tools issue. I told the applicable part but in order to answer your question let me explain a bit more of the situation without trying to write the whole book here.

I discussed this with the main partner many many times. Unfortunately I did not have enough percentage interest in the partnership to have any vote. The other two partners put up something like 95% of the money and thus had 95% of the vote. The pushback I always got was based upon the following arguments:

1 - The agreement between the three partners was that I do the hardware and leave the software and the marketing/sales to the other two partners. I had free rein to do my part but at the same time not tell others how to do theirs.

2 - The other two partners had come from a _very_ successful prior company that had been sold. The success of that company was largely a marketing and sales success and as such the main marketing sales guy (also the president) was to be respected and I certainly did. There was also some part of the success of that prior company that could be placed upon the software partner too. (At least he had the bank account to prove it I guess).

At this previous company, which was started right about the time the 8085 microprocessor appeared from Intel, availability of tools was not like it was 7 or 8 years later. They had used the 8085 and the concept of "using the product as the development system". Part of that was making all their own tools even including a small applications development language/interpreter. The software partner had done all this and was part of a successful team and as such had a strong initiative to do it that way again. In addition, in our business, they had this promotional concept that was pitched to potential investors that "we run lean and mean" and are not investing 1000's in Intel ICE boxes and are intending to be 100% self sufficient. It was an argument that had worked for them in the previous go around and so why not try it again. Some of the venture capitalists that came to visit us ate it up but were hesitant to open the purse until they could see the system software actually working. So we barged ahead on the charted path........

The main partner, who often used to comment "I'm not a technician" finally came to understand what I was telling him but it was too late. :(

The lateness of working and demonstrable machine software led to the failure of the company for sure. It is also true that the VC market went sour in about 1986. But the single biggest factor was the fact that by 1986 PCs were everywhere. At the end the PC was such a force that even when investors would come to see our product, which they loved, they still always asked "Where is your spreadsheet and where is the C> prompt". If we had had showable software by late 1984 things would have been quite different.

Michael Karas