Back in the early nineties, my boy's mom moved him to Washington State, and I followed. I got a job writing assembly language code (the base language of processors in those days) with Sundstrand Data Control up in Redmond. My code went into the airline's black box, which was actually orange.

I got a call one day from Mark Zachmann, the founder of ZSoft and the creator of PC Paintbrush. He wanted to know if I was interested in writing printer and scanner drivers for his product, and I said sure. So they sent me a printer, this thing was fresh out of Japan with no docs, and I wrote a driver. Sent them both back to Atlanta, they liked the results, and I went to work for them. Over the next year or so I did a bunch of them for $5k each.

Mark and his CEO flew into Seattle one day for a meeting with Microsoft. They had a day to kill and chartered a fishing boat for some salmon fishing in Puget Sound, and invited me along. This was the first time we had met in person and had a great time while Mark whipped out a joint on the boat and got the three of us stoned.

The next day they went to their meeting and I picked up Riley from his mom's place to spend the day with me at my nice apartment in a community around a lake in Kent, WA. After the meeting, they came by my place and installed some proprietary software on my computer, given to them by Microsoft. It was the beta version of Windows 3.1, the multitasking beauty that changed personal computing forever. PC Paintbrush went on to become Microsoft PC Paint, a very popular program in those days.

Then they asked me if I could get them some pot, so I called my dealer friend and she said sure. I left those two guys alone in my apartment watching Riley for an hour while I went off and scored. How they got that ounce of bud back to Atlanta on the plane, I don't know, but it was more lax thirty years ago.

Found this old picture of ZSoft back in those days, they were bigger than than I thought!