This was originally published on June 17, 1995. 

Telix is one of the older terminal programs available on the market. Once only known to hobbyists, it has burst onto the commercial software scene with strong sales of its Windows version.

Jeff Woods has been Mr. Telix for as long as I have noticed. In addition to his Mr. Telix hat, he is also a person with a strong vision of the telecommunication marketplace and how it relates to real people.

Enjoy the interview!

PG: You have been a long time Telix supporter. How did the situation where you could buy Telix come about? What kind of financing did you need to secure?

JW: For the entire time I worked for Colin Sampaleanu at Exis, Inc., I was the sole employee.  I did everything but write the program (and toward the end, I did that, too, for Telix for Windows).  For the amount of sales we had and the number of customers we had, I knew that we needed to expand, but Colin was (and is) a programmer at heart and not a business person.  I'm a fifth-generation entrepreneur, and only a half-hearted programmer, so it was really a match made in heaven.  Wehn Exis decided that we would not exhibit nor attend the first BBSCON in Denver in 1992, I went on my own, during my vacation time.  I paid for my own trip, lodging, and attendance.  When I came back, I left a carefully written report on Colin's desk for him to read over Labor Day weekend, about what I'd seen and what I felt he needed to do to compete. When he came back from his vacation to Europe, he read the report, and the crucial line which was to the effect that if he didn't adopt the Windows platform, hire more staff, and grow the company, that he may as well close up shop.  I was QUITE surprised when he decided to do exactly that, claiming he'd worked on Telix for six years, and was ready to move on to something else.  While he felt he'd done as much as he wanted to with Telix, I felt it had much more life left in it, and I wasn't ready to call it quits.  I don't really feel the need to discuss the financing of the buyout, other than to say that it would be a fair statement that both parties came out ahead and got what they wanted in the agreement.

PG: Telix is a great product, but what else deltaComm do to generate revenue?

JW: I don't want to tip our hand too greatly, but there are an awful lot of modems out there that don't get used due to fear of cyberspace.  Its estimated that eighty percent of modems are "shelf-ware" and we're working on a concept to bring these people online.

PG: No one can just "do computers" all the time. Do you hit the golf course? Play a little ping pong? What?

JW: I'm an avid whitewater rafter, taking four or five trips each season on the big waters of the Upper Gauley (WV), the Upper Yough (MD), and the Russell Fork (VA/KY) to name a few of my recent trips.  I also like to travel, and am a "concert junkie", seeing numerous shows in many different cities.  I saw maybe 40 concerts in 1994, in places ranging from my hometown of Raleigh (Eagles, Pink Floyd) to Las Vegas, Atlanta (Elton John and Billy Joel), Washington, DC, and as far away as London, England for my favorite band, Marillion.

PG: Do the words Pearl Jam mean anything to you? What type of music are you in to?

JW: Looks like I got a little ahead of you there. <grin>  The music I listen to has been described by some as "neo-progressive".  The artists range from those you'd recognize, like pre-Collins' Genesis, Yes, ELP, and Tori Amos, to those you probably wouldn't, like Marillion, Iluvatar, Castanarc, Pendragon, Il Trono Dei Ricordi, and the new sound out of San Francisco, Enchant.

PG: How did you get involved with PCs? What about your first modem?

JW: I sincerely hope he's reading this, because I've never really told this story in print.  I was a TRS-80 person, one of the original owners of the Model 1 in 1977.  It had a 300 bps acoustic coupler, and I wrote my own BBS program for it in 1983, without really knowing what I was doing. It was crash-prone, interpretted BASIC, but it worked. My first IBM-clone was a Tandy laptop with an internal 1200 bps modem.  I was living in San Diego at the time, and was just starting to discover the online world when a sysop there named John Dwulet, who ran San Diego PCBoard, cut me up hard on an echo when he claimed something to the effect of "I couldn't tell a UART from a CPU to save my life", which was most likely true at the time.  I felt the guy was arrogant and full of hate after I heard that he'd come into the Radio Shack where I worked at the time, to check out who I was and such, without telling me who I was. He pretended to be interested in a computer, and grilled me pretty hard, and later related the incident on his BBS putting me in a very bad light.  I then decided that I was going to learn as much as I could about this subject, so that this couldn't happen again.  I guess it worked, as the last time I looked at a San Diego BBS list, his board was down, and I was now the author and owner of Telix.  I don't know what ever became of John, but he was the catalyst, and probably never knew it.

PG: Ok. Just like everyone asks a car reviewer or mechanic what kind of car they drive, what is the configuration and type of your primary PC?

JW: Its likely to change shortly.  Right now its a 486-66 with 16 MB of RAM, a Diamond Viper VLB, and a Creative Labs Discovery Multimedia pack (4x CD, Sound Blaster 16).  The modems are a PPI v.34 and a USR Courier v.32bis Dual Standard, and the hard drive is 340 MB.  I'm about to upgrade for the first time in a long time, to a Pentium 120, 32 MB of RAM, and an STB Powergraph 64 video card, but the rest will stay the same.

PG: Define the Information Superhighway in your own words.

JW: Its really too broad to define in just a few sentences, and it means many different things to many different people.  I think its probably misnamed by the trade press as a "superhighway".  I see it more as the next logical extension of the telephone system.  Almost every home in America and perhaps the world is interconnected by what the telcos rightly call their "networks", and the interface to that is the telephone.  The so-called "Information Superhighway" is the interconnecting of the computers of the world so that they can share information in much the same way, only faster and electronically.  I don't think the idea has really taken its final form, nor will we see its true benefits until it is as pervasive as the telephone is today, perhaps in about 10-20 years.

PG: Why did you choose PCBoard as BBS software? What are the pitfalls you see with it? What are the benefits?

JW: I started with PCBoard when I was student sysop at Arizona State University.  That was the BBS they had in place, and as part of my drive to learn, I volunteered to run their PCBoard BBS, which was languishing unattended.  That was PCBoard 11.0, serial number below 100, one of the first purchased commercially.  I'll leave a direct comparison of the BBS products to their respective authors, as I'm really not an unbiased person when it comes to most of their author-companies.

PG: What's your favorite joke?

JW: It's called the smushed dead frog on a leash, and it's unprintable in this article.  Ask me privately sometime.

PG: If the Presidential election were held tomorrow and President Clinton was running against Senator Dole, which would you vote for and why?

JW: Patrick, trust me, you don't want to get me started here on politics. You'll never shut me up (ask any of my employees).  Lets just leave it with the notion that I named my dog "Dittohead" shall we?  ;-)

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