Tandy Trower
| Tandy Trower | |
|---|---|
| Residence | Lofall, Washington, United States |
| Alma mater | Washington State University |
| Known for |
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Tandy Trower is the current CEO of Hoaloha Robotics LLC, a robotics company based in Seattle, Washington, developing an autonomously mobile, socially interactive robot, to empower senior citizens to live more independently.
Mr. Trower previously worked at Microsoft for 28 years where was involved with over two dozen products, many of them well known in the market. In his last role at Microsoft he formed the Robotics Group and spoke extensively at conferences and universities about the future of robotics. After leaving Microsoft, he founded Hoaloha Robotics.
After teaching himself to program, first on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1 and later an Apple II, Tandy switched careers from working as an engineer in the semiconductor industry, and moved to developing software in 1979, when he was hired to work at the San Francisco office of Wicat, a company developing education and curriculum based products for schools. There he worked for Dr. Jim Schuyler on a classroom curriculum management package for the Apple II being developed for SRA. In 1980, he was hired by Atari in the personal computer division, which was the newest of the businesses at the time, and just after Atari's acquisition by Warner Communications from Nolan Bushnell. Starting out by evaluating software product for possible acquisition, he quickly worked as a product manager for a variety of different educational and entertainment products for the Atari 400 and 800 computers, and recommended to executive management that Atari acquire a license for Microsoft BASIC, since at that time Atari's personal computers ran a BASIC created by Shepherdson Microsystems, and was not fully compatible with the BASICs that was featured on other early competitive PCs like the Apple II and Commodore PET. Bill Gates himself came down to the Atari office in Sunnyvale and negotiated the features in the spec.
In late 1981, Tandy inquired about possible openings at Microsoft and was invited up to interview and was offered a position by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's then acting HR manager, to join the company. At that time there were about 90 employees. He joined as part of a new product marketing team which included Jeff Raikes, Chris Larson, Carl Stork, Mark Deutsch, and Mark Ursino. The team was assigned responsibility for marketing all of the various BASIC products which included an OEM version of BASIC that IBM was shipping with their new PC, known as GW-BASIC. It also included a variety of BASIC interpreters for 6800, 6809, 6502, Z-80, 8080, and 8086 processors as well as BASIC compilers. In addition, he was responsible for the few games (Microsoft Decathlon, Adventure); educational products (Typing Tutor); a couple of hardware products including the already shipping Z-80 based SoftCard and RAMCard for the Apple II computers; muMath (a symbolic equation processor); and muLisp (a LISP interpreter). His first manager at Microsoft was Nigel Smith.
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