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Before I managed to graduate from UW, I had been working in the on-campus TV studio on a part-time basis. This was the second-best paying student job on campus, and largely put me through school. When a full-time position was created a few months before my graduation, it was offered to me. Knowing a good thing when I saw it, I accepted, and completed my degree papers in the evenings. I resolved to myself that "this gig is good for 5 years, tops."
Working for the University had many advantages. In the time I worked there, I worked 35 hour weeks, my pay about doubled, my vacation increased to 4 weeks per year, and any overtime was accumulated to a generous limit. Then one day in January 1985, I started counting how long I had worked at the studio. I ran out of fingers on the first hand, and quit the next day.
Fortunately I had been working on a heat exchanger design which was almost ready for production. I made that my full-time job, which kept me off the streets for several years. I failed to make any money apart from a subsistence income. Somewhere along, I purchased an IBM XT clone. I remember using it for 2 things: playing simple games, and basic word processing using Q&A from Symantec. It was a combined word processor and database running under DOS. I certainly didn't do any programming with it. After struggling for about 4 years with marketing energy conservation equipment in a time of record-low energy prices, I paid off all the outstanding accounts, closed the company, and looked for a "real" job.
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