Crazy Fish May Redefine Computer Industry

"Fish says he still feels very positively about Fairchild and would like to return if top management can clear the way," the article said. "The problem is his tendency to circumvent the usual channels to power, usually tactlessly and abrasively, friends and critics agree. However some Fairchild insiders describe him as having the 'ballsy, sophisticated, well-thought-out technical insights' that if implemented could pull the MOS division out of its alleged problems."

Fish admits he has been canned or laid off from every job he's had.

"I have a real problem working with incompetent people," Fish says. One boss gave him a paper on "the abrasive personality."

Out of work, Fish decided to write a book. He had already written one book called Microprocessors in Systems.

"I thought, 'What else do I know something about?'" Fish says. And the logical answer: "Women!"

After leaving Georgia Tech, Fish had developed a profound appreciation for pretty girls. Most liked the tall, handsome man with liquid brown eyes and crazy pick-up lines. With what he'd saved living frugally, Fish bought a handful of plane tickets and hopped around the country visiting popular bars and hot clubs and interviewing men, women, doormen and DJs.

The result was the self-published Disco Moves: A Comprehensive Guide to Meeting and Making Women in Discos, by Hamilton Fish.

Both sincere and hilarious, this how-to offers tips for picking the right disco, identifying females—the Barfly, the Disco Queen, the Bored Housewife, the Hooker, the "I'm My Own Woman," the First-timer—outplaying the male competition and the "unwritten laws of the disco written down."

These include: Thou shalt not hustle the bartender's lady; thou shalt never go after a lady in a group of more than two; thou shalt never, ever, ever give the key to your place to a lady, regardless of how well you know her; thou shalt not steal ladies from the Ali Baba Ethnic Man; thou shalt not play Macho Man when accosting I'm My Own Woman; and finally, absolutely avoid the Barfly like the plague. He offers advice on what to do the next morning when you find a lovely woman in your rumpled bed. Make her breakfast, stupid.

As an engineer, Fish, of course, included flow charts, equations, appendices and a "body language translator."

The book got Fish publicity and a column called "Sex in America" for Oui, a rambunctious soft-porn men's magazine. One column described his experience joining the "mile-high club."

The column lasted five issues. As for the book: "I hear it's popular in prisons," Fish says, laughing like a hyena.

By 1982, Fish had turned his attention to start-ups and takeovers. He had an idea forming, and he wanted more autonomy.

On an index card he wrote: "I have been concentrating intensely on a new concept...of electronic mail. Not electronic mail done with large expensive computers and highly trained operators but electronic mail done with equipment as common and easy to use as the telephone. The impact will be staggering."

Fish filed a patent in 1983 for a desktop device with a screen: the Post Mark 300, which sent and received messages like a telex.

Unable to get traditional funding, Fish raised $200,000 from friends in Austin and issued shares in his new effort: Post Technologies.

Fish found an old helicopter factory that leased for 20 cents a square foot in East Palo Alto, a high-crime minority area where blackened buildings torched in a riot a decade earlier sat untouched. He recruited assembly line workers through the neighborhood church.

One day while pounding the streets on his noon run, Fish was a few paces behind his running buddy, dodging rusted cars, rubble and trash, when he heard popping sounds. Fish turned and saw a boy crouched in the alley, pointing a handgun. A bullet smacked on the curb after whistling between Fish and his friend. "That's the kind of stuff that happened when the only building you could afford was in the ghetto," Fish says.

After four years Fish moved the company southeast to a flat, ugly town called Chowchilla. The mayor promised a new industrial park, Fish says, but it never materialized.

Facing competition from big companies such as 3M and Texas Instruments, which had rival products, Fish had to slice his costs. He moved the factory farther south to god-forsaken Kerman, California, where he says it was difficult to find prospective employees who had finished high school. Fish soon was back to working 80-hour weeks. After eight years living with his girlfriend from San Francisco, she had enough of his hours and of Kerman and moved out.

Fish was soon up to his neck in controversy after the mayor demanded under-the-table payoffs or else. After discovering police records that showed the mayor in 1962 had killed a man by slamming his skull with a billiard ball, Fish took the mayor's threat seriously, and loudly, denouncing the mayor in front of the city council.

On Halloween night in 1986, Fish was awakened in the middle of the night to the news that his factory had been torched. He discovered equipment missing, files destroyed and goo poured into his mainframe computer.