The history of PC Solutions
Our tale begins in 1972, with two IBM engineers shedding their blue suits and venturing off on their own. Under the name Wybrite Inc., Tom Downs and his partner serviced, maintained and leased enormous IBM machines that read punch cards and generated enough heat to warm a small town. It was a wise move, as all through the ’70s, the IBM world was stable and business was steady.
Then came the early 1980s. Disco was on its way out and so, too, were IBM punch cards. Through his windshield-sized glasses, Tom could see the rise of microcomputers. He responded to the changing market by acquiring National Data Products (NDP), which like Wybrite, had a strong reputation for high-quality service and technical sophistication. NDP’s service department was a leader in microcomputers and proved to be a savvy purchase for Tom and his growing team. One of the better assets that came along with NDP was a young engineer named Mark Berndt.
PCs sneak in
When a mouse was still only a small rodent, and facsimile machines were all the rage, personal computers began sneaking out of the basements and closets of tinkering geeks. Eventually, they made their way to the service desk at Wybrite.
In the early 1990s, Wybrite’s focus remained on keeping microcomputers humming along, and they began building networks with early technologies such as Token Ring, Arc Net and Nan-Tactic. It was an exciting time for our computer engineers, but it was a frustrating time for businesses thanks to the systems’ high costs and painfully unreliable nature.
The really good years arrived in the mid-’90s, when networks built on more reliable standards such as Novell and Net-ware took over. The explosive growth of personal computers greatly enlarged the market for support.
Still, most companies similar to Wybrite were just selling computers right out of the box or trying to hang onto their old business of supporting larger systems. In an effort to maintain industry leadership, Wybrite in 1994 bought a company with a great reputation for service and technology: PC Solutions.
By this time, a new generation was ready to take the company into the future. Tom retired 1996 and sold the business to Mark. Wybrite became PC Solutions. And PC Solutions experienced a golden age, thanks to the national obsession with buying, networking and maintaining computers.
Then came 9/11 and the burst of the dot.com bubble. All of a sudden, it seemed like everyone had all the hardware and software they needed.
Overcoming the burst bubble
While many other IT firms closed shop, PC Solutions continued to grow. With improvements in networking technology, PC software and the growth of the Internet, PC Solutions moved beyond equipment brokering and mid-range IBM service, turning its focus to what they had always done well: service, service and service.
In many ways PC Solutions looks nothing like the early days when Mark and other “geeks” like him actually carried screwdrivers in their pocket protectors. There are no engineers running around with soldering irons or refrigerator dollies to move individual computers.
Thanks to wireless networking and cheap digital storage revolutionizing the way we all do business, everybody is now in the technology business. And with this growing importance of technology, businesses have to be very serious about the stability and security of their information networks.
PC Solutions has remained a leader in the industry, even if its employees’ days bear little resemblance to those spent by Wybrite’s. Much of the work they do now is strategic planning and system design. They’re still all about service, even if instead of focusing on solving problems with fixes, their attention is on building and monitoring systems so they run without a hitch.
