Today she was in New York City, talking to vendors, lecturers and media representatives at a computer convention, recruiting people to participate and attend a computer show(the Timex Sinclair Celebration) she is organizing this Saturday at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. Tomorrow, somewhere around seven o’clock, the pace will start again – the phone calls, the letter writing, perhaps a trip to Boston in the afternoon. It is hectic, heart-racing work, and for Waterbury’s Sue Mahoney, a job based on a dream.
Her vision – to bring together people and products, to put the personal back into “personal computers,” specifically, in this instance, the Timex Sinclair line. Saturday’s convention, which she is organizing for the Boston Computer Society in celebration of the second anniversary of its Timex Sinclair user group, will couple “the manufacturer, third party vendors of supporting services and products (software, etc.), enthusiastic users and prospective buyers.
It is an idea she’s kicked around for a while. She first started working on the project while employed by the Sinclair Corporation in 1981, but the project got scrapped. Earlier this year, while employed as manager of Technical Support for the Waterbury-based Timex Computer Corporation, she revived the project, writing a prospectus for her employer’s analysis.
But before she was able to do much about it, she became a victim of one of Timex’s recent layoffs.
“The day I was told I was laid off, was the day I told my boss and all the people above him that I was going on with the convention on my own. One of the reasons I decided to do the show is 1 got sick and tired of people saying, “What can you do with a personal computer?” I Knew people had computers just sitting on the shelf and I wanted to draw these people in.”
When she decided to do the show, Ms. Mahoney first approached Timex for seed money to get the ball rolling, but the company, she says, wasn’t able to budget the show. She searched around for another backer, and finally, received a loan from Reston Publishing Company, a division of Prentice-Hall.
“They apparently believed in the concept enough to give us the money to get us going.” From then on, it was a point of “getting on the phone and keep calling all different companies to explain the concept.”
And, come 6PM Saturday (Oct. 22, 1983), it will be all over. And Sue Mahoney will be out of a job. “I’m not sure how this will all unfold. The market is so volatile. Where am I going to fit in on this whole scene? My mission, since I started working in the computer field in 1979, has been to help people understand computers better; but whatever happens, I know it will work out,” she smiles.
Condensed from The Waterbury Republican American, Oct. 18, 1983.