The 1974 Computer

The first real advance in technology at Caldwell Glass had to be the fax machine. It allowed us to send and receive orders in a more speedy and accurate medium than the US mail. It also allowed us to get bids to our customers that fully covered our scope of work and gave them more confidence on bid day that we had them covered. I never had any computer background in school but after I bought our second computer accounting system I decided the idle time of the system should be used to help with the bidding process. I started programming in basic on that early CPM system and later moved to a more robust relational database language. The estimating system I developed allowed me to bid five times more work than I could do by the manual method, insured more accuracy and increased our success at obtaining bids. I interfaced that system with a fax modem to allow us to print our quotes on our customer's fax machine. In addition to computerized bookkeeping and bidding systems I dove into Auto cad to allow us to model our storefront frames in real world dimensions prior to building the physical assemblies. This allowed more productive glass ordering and frame fabrication with fewer errors. Business grew accordingly.