I was at the Brewers Twins game last night.
It was a good game, no matter who won or lost the game.
I'll let you know where my allegiances lie.
Else, other times, but I was talking with my friend,
I went with, and what would your walkup song be?
If you were, you know, a pitcher coming out,
getting ready, warming up, going out from the bullpen
or a starter, or, you know, if you're a batter,
going up to the plate, what would your walkup song be?
I can start.
I told him mine would probably be,
do you believe in a thing called love by the darkness,
or Mr. Brightside by the killers?
Like something that people understand
and then I can kind of like get a little bit of juice with
and, you know, kind of get the crowd into it.
So.
I like it.
Tara and Kelsey, we'll give people time to think.
I don't know if you guys have an idea.
I'll say Tara, you got anything?
Oh my gosh, no, I'm like the one question
I'm not prepared for.
I love music, so it's so hard for me to choose.
Like one, can I do like a mashup of like five in a row?
One.
And it's only like a 10 second part of the song.
Yeah.
It's real short.
I'm a classic rock guy, so mine's gonna be ACDC,
back in black.
See, you took mine.
That was my first initial gut thought.
I was like, and then I was like,
I don't know if I'm cool enough for that.
So yeah, that was gonna be mine.
And then I was like.
You're too young for that as your walkup song.
But it's just, it's classic.
You just, you have to,
but I think if I was choosing a more updated song,
quote unquote, what me worry by Portugal the man
has kind of got like a little like pep in its step enough
that you're like, okay, you got like enough little like
juicing up the crowd just a little bit
without trying too hard
because I just don't think that I'm cool enough for ACDC.
Not yet.
I would go with Van Halen interruption.
Okay, yes.
Another classic.
Okay, what'd you come up with?
I would do like some country song that's like nice and easy.
And then I get up to the plate and just hit home run.
So people are like, oh, she's just only gonna get like
a bass hit and just wow, the crowd be like,
oh wow, she's really good.
So I don't know.
George rates my favorite country singer.
So it'd be like oceanfront property
or something like that, very country.
If you played it backwards,
you'd run the basses backwards and get all your stuff back.
Whatever works.
Whatever keeps the crowd into it.
All for entertainment.
So when I heard this question earlier,
I couldn't think of one,
but the song that got stuck in my head
was walking on sunshine,
which is just so out of left field.
And I love it.
I love it.
Everybody's got these like rock songs
and I'm just walking on sunshine.
Yeah.
I like it a lot, Ariel.
Yeah.
Yeah, I like it.
Oh my gosh.
I feel like that would,
you can definitely get the crowd into that one too.
Yes.
It's like, yes.
Everybody's into it.
Yeah.
I think of Frank Sinatra's song or something like that.
It can always be good on those walk up songs too.
Just get real classy with it.
Yeah.
There's a lot of good options.
Yeah.
And there's a lot of good options.
Yeah.
We should definitely have some walk up music today
because we've got some heavy hitters on this podcast.
Kelsey, Tara and myself are joined by Chris,
one of our founders, Kyle, our CEO and president,
and Andrew, our customer strategy advisor,
is back to continue our CIT origin series.
I know on previous episodes,
we discussed the early 80s, early 90s,
our physical locations.
And in this episode,
we're gonna deep dive a little bit
into CIT's connection with manufacturing.
And I know Andrew had some burning questions,
so I'll just kind of throw it to you
and you can kind of take it away from here.
Well, thank you.
Yeah.
No, I appreciate you guys coming back
for third time around.
But so we talked about the manufacturer's manual.
And was that just like an industry?
It was so you found it for...
I was trying to think of what the purpose
of that manual was and then how you utilized it
as essentially a marketing sales tool.
Is it usually meant for manufacturer industries?
Oh, I need XYZ part or you go through
and then that's what that manual was used for?
Yeah, no, keep in mind, Andrew,
that this was back in the late 80s, early 90s
and there really wasn't electronic mailing lists
or wasn't electronic marketing.
There wasn't all the social media today.
So how did you find potential customers, prospects?
How did you do that back then?
Well, we use a lot of manual lists.
And when we started,
we had a big focus on Western Wisconsin
because we felt from geographical,
it wasn't well attended by the resellers out of the metro.
It wasn't well covered by the Wisconsin
because most of them came out of Madison
or east of Madison.
So what we found is a product called the Minnesota
and Wisconsin Manufacturers Register.
And this particular,
and this is a book at the time, keep in mind,
this is not an electronic list, not a CD.
It's not the worldwide cloud world today.
Like we think of it, it was a book.
So I said, hey, let's just start going through.
And the really cool thing about this book is it had,
it was broken down by counties and cities
and industrial parks, right?
So we could go real specific to Hudson, Wisconsin,
manufacturers, right there we had them.
We had size of the company, what they did, contacts,
who their executives were.
And what we found,
this was kind of happened,
the chance is that a lot of those manufacturers
were starting their transition
from what we talked about in one of our other origins
from the typewriter and terminal
to putting PCs on the desk
and starting to use some of the client server
compute technologies in the manufacturing space,
one of which was engineering and drawing
and CAD and all that stuff.
So it was just a really good reference book to help us.
And a lot of those Western Wisconsin towns
have these business parks with manufacturers.
That's how we ended up there.
I mean, it wasn't real well-planned,
but it ended up being a really well-planned,
well-executed segment for CIT to grow.
How did you find the book?
Like how did you find the registry?
Was it just like you saw it on somebody's desk
and you're like, we could use that?
Like, you know what I mean?
I think to be honest, we found it on a client's desk.
And we're like, well, what is this?
Right? So we started, I'm like, wow,
this is a perfect resource
because when we first started,
we had a couple of good manufacturing customers, right?
So we're like, that could be a huge market.
So how do we find all these manufacturers?
Well, lo and behold, here comes the Minnesota
and the Wisconsin manufacturers register,
which has exact information that we wanted.
Okay.
In a printed format of book.
Somewhere around here in the office,
there's still these books from every year
because then they'd republish them every year
with the new updates.
And was that, so you were probably out of manufacturers,
you saw it on their desk and is that mainly meant
for that industry to be like, hey, I need, you know,
like a part built so you can go through
or like what is that?
Like usually, that's what you do.
It's more of a prospecting platform.
It's more of a marketing and prospecting.
It's not really digging into what we do, what we make,
how can we, it's more business information.
Who are we, where are we, how big are we, you know,
who are executives, how do you contact us?
So it was much more of a marketing product
than it was anything else.
I think when I look back at it and when I looked
at it recently, because actually I, it's funny,
we're talking about this today,
because I just brought it up to Terrigan.
I said, hey, we should, we should look back into that
because it was a really, really good, concise resource
for us to use for marketing.
Yeah.
What, did you find anything else on customer desks
that, you know, maybe used as a resource or?
Nothing we wanted to disclose, probably.
Yeah.
But you know what I'm doing.
What does half recording, right?
So this kind of goes back to the origins,
but what I did early on when I was, right,
because Mark was kind of doing the technical delivery,
I was doing the sales and business development,
I was kind of doing it all.
So what I would do is I would deliver my product
out to our customers.
And what I would do is I'd look around their office
and I try to find who else was shipping boxes into there.
I'd look for labels, right?
So were they buying from Micro Center?
Were they buying from CW?
Where were they getting their gear?
Because then it would help me figure out
how can I chip away at that?
And then I started to do that with every customer.
And then as we brought on sales staff, I said,
keep an eye out for who else is shipping boxes
into your clients.
It'll give you some pretty good insight
as to who were their workaholic, which is awesome.
So.
Yeah, that's, and Kyle, did you have something similar
on the, you know, technical side when you were,
you know, maybe installing stuff that you,
like soft stickers.
I mean, so when we'd be out doing the deployment services
and stuff on it, we'd provide a lot of feedback.
And as a technician, you tend to get a lot more disclosure
from the customers on kind of what's going on too.
So you get a lot of insight as to where things are at.
You're touching the gear that they're buying.
So you're kind of seeing what they're using
and where the needs are.
So that helps to kind of map out greatly
where we could enhance or add to the offerings
to go through it.
Many of these manufacturers that Chris sent us into side
were, you know, they had some main system.
They had like a AS400.
They had a deck Vax.
You know, they had some many, you know,
mainframe system for lack of a better term
that was, you know, kind of a green screen system
that kind of evolved through the 80s, late 70s, 80s side.
That was what they were running their manufacturing systems on.
So when these PCs at the desk, we were generally plugging in,
you know, a Novel server, maybe a peer to peer,
but mostly a Novel server along with the PCs
and then some kind of connectivity software
for that mainframe was pretty much what happened.
And that just kind of evolved more and more
as those mainframes kind of slowly died out
and you got more and more power on the PC side.
It just transitioned.
The ERP systems flipped over to the other side
and then those ERP systems kind of died out
because they obviously were expensive.
Yeah, well, and then I'm sure Active Directory
through Windows, you know, helped with that.
So you didn't have to have the back end of Novel
to do a lot of that, right?
Yeah, I mean, Active Directory didn't really show up
until around 2000.
So that was, we had almost a decade.
Yeah.
Before those hit, but Novel had their directory services
side of it.
So Novel really invented that.
Yeah.
Directly side, but even before that, though,
just the old original Novel just had, you know,
essentially created user accounts with a password.
That was it.
I mean, he had some simple group permission sites
that you assigned, you know, shared folders
and those things.
So it was very simple, but the needs were simple.
So it kind of met.
But as it evolved, like technology does,
it just continued to enhance and expand side with it.
You know, and when Novel created that replication
of this directory service that allowed
for replication expansion, that was purely in response
to just the expansion of bringing those apps in.
And I think Bandy and Vines actually was probably
the leader side originally on that side of it.
Novel kind of took that, but there was a kind
of a niche side that existed on some very large enterprise
called Banyan.
We really didn't do anything with it
because it was a pretty large scale.
It didn't really fit the small market.
But that's kind of how you saw things evolve.
You just kind of saw these technologies
and you know, it was really exciting
because it was kind of wild west.
Things are really evolving quickly
and there's a lot of evolving, I'll say standards loosely.
Yeah.
I guess things that manufacturers come out and say,
hey, do this and you know, sometimes it sticks,
sometimes it didn't.
Sometimes it wasn't a group that brought it to market
that became, you know, ultimately leader out of Microsoft.
You know, Microsoft is kind of the master of that.
They don't necessarily invent,
but they certainly enhance and bring it to market.
You know, and that's kind of where it evolved out of.
But yeah, a lot of times we talked about this
and I've talked about in the other origins
is the transition from typewriter and terminals
to technology, right?
Cause I kind of use that as a,
even when I talked to our customers today, right?
We helped with the transition from typewriter
and a terminal to putting a PC
and connecting it to more technology,
which just started opening up more and more options
for these not only manufacturers,
but it was really starting to be all of our clients
that say, okay, well, you know,
we used to type a letter on a typewriter
and put it in the mail.
Then we started faxing
and then now we can do that on a PC
and then we electronic, you know, start to send
and we start to get rid of these main core,
big minis and mainframes and move it out to the desktop.
I mean, that was just a huge transition.
And for some reason manufacturers
seemed to jump on that faster.
I think a lot of it, and I don't know if you think this, Kyle,
but I think a lot of it had to do with engineering
and CAD and drawing and sharing of files.
And they were big, big needs for that.
So I think manufacturing was really a good industry
to start to kick that.
And keep in mind, this was all,
we were doing it all on site, right?
We had no remote support, no remote connectivity.
So not only was I going on site, drop and gear off,
like Kyle said, they were going on site
and installing it all, working with the clients.
And like he said, the client looked at Kyle and Marcus,
technical advisors, not as salespeople like myself.
So they tended to give them more information
than they'd give me.
I just had to look at boxes, trying to find labels.
So talking about those shifts, did you, in technology,
so the typewriter letter to the terminal,
and then the desktop, you said you kind of noticed it
and maybe the increase in the product.
Were there other shifts that you noticed?
Or is it more of like a looking back, like,
oh, that was a transformational time?
And I'm just thinking about with,
I know on our other podcast, we've talked about AI
and machine learning and how that's
being integrated into things.
And that, I don't think it's an if, it's a when,
that's going to change how we work.
And I can see that as a shift of, OK,
so we went from typewriters to desktops.
Do you notice those changes when you're in those?
Or did you notice those and how CIT could adapt to that change?
Well, I mean, I think it's very similar to what we're going
through, as you mentioned, with AI.
It was that big of transitional change,
because we had typing up letters on a typewriter,
and maybe the next step was you faxed them, right?
You put them in fax machine, and you sent them
via fax similarly versus sending them in the mail.
But when we started to implement client server PC computing,
where we started internally sharing of files,
where we could share files and start sharing some spreadsheets
and sharing CAD drawings, things like that,
what changed next, which I think is very similar to AI today,
is the invention of the internet into business, right?
So they could use internet as their protocol
to start transferring this stuff via the big giant
worldwide web out there, which eliminated faxing,
which eliminated postal mailing, right?
Because we really, when we started
to integrate internet early on into businesses,
they used it really just for sending email, right?
That was the big thing that we're doing.
There wasn't all the browsing, because we really hadn't
gotten to the e-commerce stage yet that came after 2000.
So early on, it was, now we have this PC,
we have these files we've been sharing internally,
but now we can actually share them externally
to the rest of the world using the internet.
So I think that was a huge change.
And then came the 2000, not only just the Y2K change,
but then came the e-commerce stage of what everyone was doing.
And saying, hey, we can start to transact and do business
on the internet, huge game changer,
very similar to what's going to happen with AI, machine
learning, and all that.
And I could see that with also the documentation change,
where you're going from the typewriter,
but then you put e-commerce in there,
and then you have to have labels, you have to have the POs,
you have to have all that tracking internally to say,
OK, what do we do with all this information that we have now?
On the education side of those newer technologies,
did you have to really talk about what the capabilities
or the limitations were?
I just think it's one of my pet peeves is how we attach things
to emails.
Email was never meant to have giant file sent.
And that's as somebody who has worked in the help desk
for many years, where people are trying to send gigs and gigs.
And you're like, no, no, it's not meant to do that.
Were there any of those instances
while putting these new things or helping customers
along of educating them with the limitations?
It was all relative.
I mean, you got to remember, these are very little graphics
environments, typically.
So many of them were WordPerfect, for example.
It wasn't Microsoft Word.
It was WordPerfect and WordStar and those things.
Essentially, they weren't even ran in Windows.
They ran from DOS.
And size is pretty relative.
We're talking entire servers were in megabytes, not gigabytes.
I mean, everything was pretty relative.
So you got to really multiply it way, way down.
So I mean, we look at like email attachment limit
sends of 30 meg in attachment.
I mean, there's ties back to original just data transfer
times.
I mean, we thought we had a high-speed connection
for a customer.
And we put an ISDN line in there that essentially was 128K
of nailed up bandwidth.
I mean, that's what we're talking about here.
What would seem by today's standards is horribly painful.
Speeds was very ample for what the needs were for the connectivity
side of that.
And the internet really didn't come along.
I mean, again, until pretty late in the game
on where this was changing side of it.
So the initial change was being able to be not dependent
on these larger mainframes where all their data resided.
And like Chris said, you started now have documents
that all became easily more accessible, easier to edit
and change and reuse for ordering in templates,
the power of spreadsheets to be able to do calculations,
and then even relational databases.
Your DB3, DB2 stuff, basically Microsoft Axis,
Microsoft's 4A into that as it went through there,
kind of opened the door to self-service data that really
wasn't, if you go back a few years for Minium,
wasn't easily accessible, was very, very expensive.
Because being a programmer in for one of these mainframe stuff
was very expensive.
Many of these manufacturers had teams.
That's what they did.
They had full-time employees.
I mean, and that was usually who we wound up working with
many times.
They were the data people for these larger systems.
And so you're talking 3, 4, 5 FTEs.
Just to run these and manage the systems,
they handle the data requests.
And now it starts to evolve where it
becomes a little more self-service.
You started to have engineers who obviously running CAD
are very, very smart.
They tended to be highly, very willing to engage technology.
They were fun to work with.
I mean, they pretty much fully embraced
and they were willing to try things
because it was enabling so much more access to things
they just never had.
So there's, I think, a tremendous appreciation
for the technology because it was really turning on.
It is a liken to that AI.
When you have, you just go, wow, look at what that produced.
That was a similar feeling.
That's a good correlation because when
you could extract these data and these reports,
stuff that used to take them, they'd wait months to get
or they just could never obtain it
to be able to get it themselves through a database
or on the side, people are like, wow, this is huge.
This saves me so much time.
So there was just a lot of energy and enthusiasm
behind that.
So whenever something new would come out,
you'd just kind of float it by and be like, yeah, let's try it.
They were very willing to always try things
as they came through.
And email became part of that.
So they said, oh, here's this new internet.
Let's try that out.
And you bring that into the equation.
And email was then on premise, right?
Were you using Exchange or Novell?
Or what did that look like?
Originally, it was internal first.
No internet side of it.
So you're doing some simple emails internally side
through.
Novell had groupwise.
I forget.
What was it called before groupwise?
I was trying to remember.
They had a name for something.
Yeah.
They were groupwise.
And then Mike told them all the PC mail, right?
Yeah.
And then there's PC mail, like Windows for Work Groups,
had an integrated email kind of protocol side of these things
that they'd work with.
Again, Exchange really didn't show up on the landscape
until around 2000 or so that that showed up.
And so Novell had their groupwise.
And there was Lotus Notes was gaining a lot of popularity.
And Lotus Notes had some unique, more collaborative stuff.
They allowed you to create forms and custom data entry sites.
It had some very unique aspects to it itself.
And Lotus was acquired by IBM.
So you kind of envision.
IBM had large enterprise stuff on it.
So there's a lot of that going on.
And you got to remember throughout the 90s stuff,
there was a lot of jockeying to kind of for what was going
to kind of evolve to be the de facto system.
You had IBM promoting OS2 originally with Microsoft
and the Microsoft abandoning that.
And you still had IBM promoting OS2 as the graphical.
You had Apple out there with their Macintosh GUI.
And then you had Microsoft kind of quickly trying
to get Windows jockeied into play stuff on it.
I think DOS being the predominant side of it,
Microsoft kind of by securing the DOS side had a step up
on everybody's side with that.
But there's still a lot of uncertainty.
And there's a lot of jockeying on where that was going to go.
So people were, you kind of had people getting into camps
on which technology they liked.
Nowadays, that's pretty agnostic.
We don't spend a lot of time worrying about that as much
because it's so web based.
But there's interesting times through that.
It was fun.
It was actually a lot of fun because you could really
experiment a lot of different things.
You could really see everything and who offered what and how.
Yeah.
OK.
The other thing to understand, Andrew, when you talk about
files and attaching and size and how big they are, back then,
remember, we were, most of us was just text.
There was no graphics yet.
The marketing department was creating
all these big, giant, graphical multicolored
because not only was it text, it was in amber or green, right?
Two colors.
So it was really, I always go back to the typewriter
and the terminal.
What we were doing is really scraping that text
from the typewriter and from the terminal
and putting it onto a PC and putting it
into an electronic document.
But those documents were very, very text.
I mean, there was no logo on them.
There was no graphics on them.
There was no color on them.
We were sending black and white text documents.
So it was very, very simple, right?
So as performance and speed and size of the network
increased, so did marketing and putting all the fancy stuff
into all these documents.
So did the engineers with all these big 3D files.
So it all kind of moved and grew together
as the technology grew.
It grew along with it, right?
So it was an interesting transition
because the GUI interface didn't really exist when we started.
Like, how it was all DOS based was text based, right?
We didn't have a GUI interface.
We were like, what's a GUI?
A lot of you don't remember.
We didn't have this Windows GUI interfaces before.
We started as text command line.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think about that sometimes working in the terminal
where it's just like some work for university work.
And it's just like, you got to do everything through the terminal.
And you're just like, I just want to just take my mouse
and click.
And you couldn't do that.
No, there was no mouse.
Yeah, there wasn't a mouse.
There was no mouse, yeah.
Well, even the initial versions of the Windows,
they ran on top of DOS.
I mean, you literally started at the command property type win,
and then it loaded the Windows interface.
I mean, it was really just a DOS app.
Yeah.
We spent many years doing that.
I mean, and the Windows would crash because you ran out
of memory because DOS uses 640k.
I mean, that was DOS' memory usage.
I mean, think about that.
I mean, that's tiny.
And it was fun times.
I mean, they went through those.
The other piece that kind of occurred through their side
just to note is the use of those online services,
the ConfuServe, the AOLs really evolved through that 90s side
of those.
And we did use, sort of a lot of times, we're on support.
We used a lot of ConfuServe.
ConfuServe's were Novels.
Sports forums were.
That's where Microsoft's support forums were because they
didn't have websites at the time.
There was no website.
So the knowledge base for help on those
was on the ConfuServe forum.
So we'd have to get on our modems, dial up
into the ConfuServe, go log into those forums,
and search those forums.
That's where we got updated drivers for the network cards
and all those things.
And that's where you converse with other folks
in your industry side of it.
So your first social networks really
evolved out of what these ConfuServe forums, AOL forums
of that was social networking.
We were doing that in the 90s.
It was just didn't call it that.
But that's how we can burst and help troubleshoot.
You post things out there saying,
I can't figure this out.
Do you guys anybody have any suggestions?
Or have you seen this?
And you get responses to it.
So there was access there.
But that was an invaluable tool for us, engineering-wise.
ConfuServe was, you spent a lot of time on that.
I know we're running up on time.
But did you see difference?
So I think of the big Apple 2E push
that they had in schools.
And it was a huge push to get that into schools.
And they did that.
Did you see differences in industries?
If you were in manufacturing, did they have a different?
They liked IBM or Windows or DOS or whatever,
versus a school or a retail or anything like that.
Oh, yeah, we definitely did.
I'd say we definitely did, because you predominantly would.
We correlate the schools to Apple products,
as you mentioned, whether it's those.
If they were heavy in design or they were marketing,
they were Macintosh.
And they generally ran Local Talk, which
was Mac's Apple Talk side of it.
It was their custom networking protocol
of peer-to-peer sharing within Macs.
And then we had, if the customer was running AS for 100,
they would say they have an IBM rep.
They're pro IBM.
So we may, for example, we'd find
that they'd have an AS for 100.
They may wind up with Lotus Notes, for example, versus.
So they would be very much getting a lot of information
from their IBM side of it.
Because the IT director, again, probably
came from that mainframe or AS for 100 background.
And they were always subscribed to say,
I never got fired for buying IBM.
Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
That was very, very common.
So that IT director would buy Lotus Notes.
They would buy IBM servers.
They'd buy IBM gear.
Unlike today, the devices back then
were much more purpose-driven.
It was education in Apple, and manufacturing
was typically more Windows and PC-based,
because the applications were driving more of that.
Today, it's really an endpoint device
that we really, it doesn't necessarily matter.
You can do most everything cross-platform.
But back in the early days, it was really
purpose-driven devices.
What do you, like I said, if you're in the marketing
and you're in the graphical and you're in the design
or you're in education, a lot more Apple Mac-based product
platform.
And they were not as easy to integrate
into the rest of the business space, the mainframe space,
and the server space back then.
Today, it's very open platform.
I mean, a lot of that has to do with when
Apple kind of embraced Microsoft,
they started to partner more, and we
moved some of those applications that were traditionally
all PC Windows-based to run on the Mac OS.
It was a huge game changer.
It made really the device agnostic to some degree.
Yeah.
And I got called in to integrate a Mac into the Novel Network.
That was a bad day.
I was going to, I was going to.
That usually sucked.
Yeah.
That was going to be my next question of Chris on the sales
side and Kyle on the technical side.
Did you have a preference?
Either if it was you made a better margin
or it was easier to sell the IBM, as you said,
no one ever got fired for buying IBM.
Or Kyle, if you're like, oh man, I
do not want to work on this network today
because I know it's going to be a bear and a half.
I mean, from a technical side, I was always,
I worked on whatever.
I mean, I worked on all this.
I mean, I was able to kind of always
wanted to take on a challenge to go through it.
But I just knew you were very limited on what
Apple was embracing as far as Apple was a very locked ecosystem.
So trying to get them connected, again,
you just knew the results to the customer.
Probably not going to be what they were looking for.
So you had to set those expectations right away.
I'm just being like, we're going to do as much as we can.
Yeah, we'll do as much as we can.
We'll find out how to get this to work to the best
of our ability side of that.
And it was always a fun challenge.
I mean, I did some OS2 connectivity.
I did Mac connectivity.
I did the Windows, still had DAW.
So you kind of a little bit of everything.
But I always kept an on mind, well,
and take on the challenge to go through that side of it.
As long as the customer kind of understood it, again,
it was all new.
So there wasn't like there was somebody out there
that had 10 years experience with it.
It didn't exist.
It's not been out there for a one or two years.
There's very few people.
It's just like everything was kind of, OK, we'll give it a shot
and see what we find out.
And to tie back to your manufacturing,
kind of how you started this, Andrew,
the manufacturing space was very, very heavy PC based.
It really was more, and there again,
it was that purpose built.
The PC plugged in, played with other platforms well.
It was an easy transition.
But we always had those outliers that say, well,
we've got this other device.
Most of the time it was some Apple based, Mac based,
some off brand product that we had to try to integrate in.
And you could do it, but you had to do a lot of work
rounds in order to make it function like the purpose
built device, which was kind of defaulted to the PC
and the manufacturer space.
Because then we ran into it with engineering,
we ran into it with marketing and design and the graphics.
So we had to start figuring out how do we integrate these platforms
better.
And today, like I said, we're pretty much device-agnostic.
It doesn't really matter what the end user wants.
We can make it work.
And the applications are such that they work cross-platform.
But it wasn't always the case back in the early days.
Yeah, what I think about it.
I remember IBM doing some dedicated OS2 machines
for some of those, again, because OS2 was being promoted by IBM.
They actually have software solutions
that were marketed in, simply around, say,
like label printing or civic function sides of it.
Because OS2 was the first truly multitasking operating
system you get.
So they could actually have two processes run at the same time.
You couldn't do that with Windows.
You can only do one thing.
That was all it could do.
It task swapped.
It did not multitask.
OS2 Warp could.
So you might put this OS2 Warp machine on the manufacturing
floor, and they needed to pull some data off of it
to talk to it.
So we had to network it.
We had to figure out how to network this OS2 machine.
But again, it's like speaking Spanish and English.
I mean, similar, but it's different.
It's inherently different.
So you had to learn two languages there.
And then all the networking side was learning on the job
right, Kyle.
Like, OK, here's how we build a network,
and architect it, and put it all together.
Because we can go in on another one
on a more technical side if we wanted to.
Because I even, it was probably over 10 years ago
when I was at university.
But we still learned about ring networks versus star networks
and how those are just internal architectures of how
to build an internal network when now it's like you buy a switch
and you just plug everything in.
It's you don't really have that technical side anymore.
We in those have Ethernet as a standard.
Yeah, we had a lot of that.
We forget that, right?
Yeah, yeah.
We had customers.
Again, the IBM customers had Tolkien Ring.
Tolkien Ring had 4 meg, and then they had 816.
So they were different.
And then you had coaxial Ethernet.
You had thick Ethernet than some of these.
And then you had the versions of 10 base T for twisted pair.
And you even had some deviance from that
because pre-standard.
So yeah, it was a wild west of.
And we had customers that have multiples
of the same technology running in there.
So it was interesting.
Oh, another topic, Andrew.
Yeah, I was going to say.
Maybe that's version four.
Yeah, definitely.
So it's the next one.
The infrastructure changes of the last 35 years.
Yeah, I love it.
As we kind of finish up here, my closing question
is on a little bit higher level when
you're thinking about CIT back in the day,
going into those manufacturing, having those conversations,
and CIT today.
Are the conversations similar?
Are you still solving the similar problems?
Different technology.
But for manufacturing kind of back then and now,
what are you sort of seeing?
Or has it changed?
Well, I mean, they're still doing the same thing
at the end of the day.
They're still manufacturing, making widgets.
I think we've just taken what was 35 years ago much more
manual processing and moved it to electronic processing, which
has pushed all this technology, all the devices,
all the connectivity.
It's pushed everything, right?
But at the end of the day, we're still
solving the exact same problem.
Word is doing it with a lot different toolset, software
set, devices, much more efficient, right?
We'll call it because we can multitask
and we can do more.
But I mean, they're still making the same thing
as they were 35 years ago.
They're using technology much differently to do it.
Yeah, yeah, I'd agree with that.
I mean, in very similar, we're still
looking at what they're trying to accomplish
and finding newer and better ways for technology
to augment and help improve those processes
and how they do it.
And again, when you talk about AI and those things,
that's kind of a good correlation of what
that could potentially do to increase efficiencies of how
they manufacture and provide their products to the market.
And I think that's, again, same end game as Chris mentioned.
It's just we're just doing it with newer and better
technologies as it evolved.
And that's kind of what we were doing back then.
Things are a lot faster, of course.
And I think the impacts are even bigger on where they go.
But same idea.
Perfect.
Well, thank you.
Thank you, Chris, Kyle, and Andrew, for joining us today.
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