| Company: Mentergy |
| Description | Industry leading distance learning startup |
| Dates | 1994-2001 |
| Comments | I fondly remember the early days at ILINC. The company was started in the business incubator center in Upstate New York where I was going to college (RPI). We had 2 telephones: one for the salesman, and one for the rest of the company. Propeller hats and Nurf guns were issued to all senior developers. There was excitement in the air because we were doing something new. We were building a video conferencing and virtual classroom to teach over networks (LearnLinc). Several of the ideas were based on research done by Jack Wilson (one of our founders - he won a presidental award for technology in education) Version 1.0 nearly failed many times before release. Windows95 was delayed so we wrote to win32s instead. Our graphics boards were cancelled so we delayed the video portion until Intel came out with a replacement. We worked extremely long hours, and accomplished something amazing. The product is still a market leader 6 years later. It has been pushed and pulled and changed in every way. When we started, the Internet was still just for email. Our customers had to build private networks with routers and phone lines. One day my boss asked me to become a multimedia expert so I filled that need. I taught a monthly workshop training our customers on networking and multimedia authoring. I developed multimedia content and I wrote code to integrate LearnLinc with new products. As the internet grew in popularity I took on the role of Internet expert and developed a web based interfac |