That Damned Boat

 

This is the Tempest, a 68’ motor yacht built for singer and actress Julie Andrews, which she later sold to Hal Hallikainen, who created industrial and scientific instruments for the medical, petroleum and chemical fields, including one of the first heart-lung machines, which was used in open heart surgeries.  Broadcasters will recognize that name, as his son Harold developed the first fully user programmable digital (and network capable) transmitter remote control system in 1980, the DRC-190. 

Why am I posting a picture of a yacht that unfortunately sank over fifteen years ago? 

Because an offer from Harold, for me and a local radio DJ who worked part time for me, to stay onboard for a week during an NAB Radio show at Moscone Center in 1992 - at which point I was so broke I couldn’t afford a hotel room - an offer that saved my company from bankruptcy and dissolution and made that DJ More money in a couple of years than a lifetime in radio  

How?

Well, that DJ, who like all radio talent despised sales, salesmen, selling … it’s a thing you had to be in radio back in the day to understand, perhaps, but there was a “Chinese Wall” of sorts between the sales department and the production side of the business … he helped out in our booth - for free, just a trip to San Francisco and a stay on the yacht - and unbeknownst to him (and everyone else) he was a true, natural born salesman!  Some here will remember the late Kelly Hethcote, who single-handedly averaged $10 million a year in gross sales at NSN. Out of the gate!  It was stunning …

Harold and I were catching up the other day and he sent me this photo of “that damned boat,” as Kelly always called it. “I never wanted to be a salesman. Don’t like them. But a week on that damned boat changed my entire life and now, I can’t go back!”

Sadly, like the Tempest, Kelly is no longer with us, succumbing far too soon to pancreatic cancer 8 years ago. 

We still think of you, Kelly. 

You - and that damned boat.

The Fabulous DanaCam!

… a tiny little bit of internet history…

After a week of post dental surgery hell, I felt pretty good today - I wasn’t vertigo-spinning and could drive - and since my teenage daughter’s boyfriend was in Denver this weekend, we went out for lunch. 

We went to a little place called Nozawa’s over in Avon, at the bottom of Beaver Creek, and literally spent a weeks grocery budget on lunch - sushi, of course. (Oddly, it’s about the same cost as it was the last time I was there a decade ago. I’d forgotten how good it is… omg!)

Some of you satellite folks will remember we were on the internet at the office long before it was commercialized on 8/1/95.  We’d spent at least a year experimenting with different ways to pack TCP/IP into the serial data formats available with satellite modems, using our local vail.net dial up user base as Guinea pigs, to see how much latency they’d put up with and working out ways to reduce the TCP issues that latency caused. 

Our company’s commercial website came online the first day the modern net was alive and it was legal to have a commercial presence online. (There were only about 5000 websites worldwide that were up by midnight that night - commercial and government - and the vast majority were existing NASA, university and government. I remember because yahoo kept a running count back then.) 

We had Kampala Uganda up and online four days later, which made us the worlds first commercial satellite Internet backbone provider.

As far as I know, we also had one of the first live webcams online too - live on our NSN site a month or two later. One of my partners brought it in to play with, and not knowing what to do with the thing, after some discussion, we hung it from the ceiling where it looked at our front office manager and receptionist’s desk. And at her, of course. She was an aspiring actress named Dana Ryan, who went on to earn several film credits and awards, hence the name “The Fabulous DanaCam!” We didn’t have voice mail by policy, we had Dana, and our clients loved the fact they always got a real person when they called … and Dana had fun with it, hamming it up for the webcam, smiling and waving at our callers, most of whom she knew from years of dealing with them, who were a bit blown away that they were talking to and watching this Michelle Pheiffer type on the “new fangled” internet!  

After a few months it was just a part of life. After hours we’d sometimes place a life size cardboard Larry King cutout we’d stolen from a hotel lobby at a Boston NAB show in her chair … it was just a part of office silliness. 

Yes. The early days of the ‘net were Very Different times. Our company would be unrecognizable in today’s buttoned down, keystroke monitored business world. 

But all good things end, right? When a large corporation closed the deal after buying us a couple of years later, they made us take the DanaCam down since, to the big corporate legal suits, a hottie-actress playing the role of a receptionist on global streaming TV on the now big-rich-sueable-company web site was evidently asking for a harassment action - which was amusing since the company was the most harassment-sued outfit in America at the time, but I guess even they had to draw a line somewhere - so I took it down and my IT guy took it over to the then-named-Masato’s sushi bar, where he literally ate two meals a day, and it became the fabulous sushi-cam. (OK, Sushi wasn’t nearly the draw Dana had been, but the customers had fun with it.)

A few years later, Masato moved the sushi joint and took the cam to the new location. A couple of years after that, he sold out to another sushi chef named Nozowa, who’s son runs the place now. And while there today, I looked up and saw, all sad and pointed towards the wall, disconnected, the •original• 28 year old• DanaCam! (Note that it had an RS-232 serial port as well as Ethernet connection. Wifi was years away when this thing was made.) 

So - I snapped a couple of pictures for posterity. 

The current young staff was like, “What the heck is the story behind that thing? What is it? It’s just … there and nobody’s ever known what it is.”  So I told them the story. They had no idea they were working with a tiny but legitimate bit of satellite internet and web history… 😂😂

Photos by author and courtesy Dana Ryan / IMDB.com