The founding of Electronic
Theatre Controls, in Fred Foster's own words, as appeared in the March 2001 issue of
Live Design.
After high school, I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison and started taking theatre courses. This was 1975, and Gilbert Hemsley was teaching, and so I took his courses. I was really much more into the technology and being an electrician, I think. I find that I can cue, I can do a light plot. But what ultimately is my downfall is color. Scientifically I understand color, but to this day my wife and daughter dress me.
Anyway, in one of the theatres at the college we had a Cue File [Thorn/Kliegl Q-File], which was this English product Kliegl sold that had three racks of electronics, not even a microprocessor in it, and it cost a quarter of a million dollars. I said to my brother, who’s a couple years older than I am and was at that point a physics undergraduate student, ‘Bill, you gotta come down and see this really cool computer.’ His direct quote was, ‘Gack! We can do this for $5,000.’ It was right after the first AD-80 microprocessors came out.
So we got together with a couple of our friends and decided to build our own. Our nominal conception date for the company was at one of Gilbert’s parties on Christmas Eve in 1975. Gilbert’s parties were these wonderful, wild debaucheries where whoever he could bring into town—somebody from the Met, or Jack O’Brien—would be in his house, and graduate students and undergraduates would be there. He had gallons of Lambrusco and some kind of food cooked with a lot of garlic.
If you wanted to talk to Gilbert, you had to informally make an appointment and wait for your audience. Your audience with Gilbert would happen wherever, with whomever was around at the time. So I dragged the founders of the company—Bill, Gary Bewick, and Jim Bradley, and another friend of ours, Bob Gilson—over to this party to talk to Gilbert and propose that we do this. Somewhere well into the night, we went up and had the audience in Gilbert’s bedroom. Everybody listened to what we were going to do, and the general response was, ‘Yeah, sure. You can’t do a Cue File [Q-File].’
So we started buying parts or scrounging parts from the physics department, using the labs in the physics department or the basement of my apartment, and put this thing together through the course of that year. It generally broke down that my brother was writing software, Gary did the hardware, Jim did text editing and some things around the edges, and I was the theatrical input into it.
We didn't know what we were doing, and we didn't have a penny to do it. Sometime during the next year we needed to buy a disk drive. Disk drives were 8" floppy drives that held 150 kilobytes of data. They cost $1,500, and we all had to come up with money. We decided we'd each throw in $300 or $400, and get a quarter of the company. We still weren’t really a company at that point, but we were partners. We got a Protech floppy disk drive, so I went out to Bobby Gilson's shop and welded up the box to put it in, cut the crease panel out of a sheet of aluminum in my father's basement with a saber saw. My hands were bleeding from filing it.
We went back to Gilbert’s on Christmas Day of 1976, a year and a day later. There was another party, and he had a big ham out on the table for the Christmas dinner. We put a 3' x 1' box with a monitor built into it that ostensibly did everything a Cue File [Q-File] did, right on the table. The reaction was, ‘Oh, [expletive deleted].’
So it appears as though every company gets its start via "inspiration" from another.
