Back in 1985 Rex started his first software company. The software performed statistical analysis of publicly available, but inaccessible, data sets related to hospital inpatient stays. He picked up the data quarterly, on 9-track tape reels, often in person in State Government buildings. With his 9-track tape reader connected to an early PC (DOS only), he transferred the data, integrated it into his software, then copied and mailed out tons of 5¼ inch floppy disks with the current data set to his customers (sometimes on as many as 15 disks per customer). Suffice to say, Rex has been in the business for a long time.
A few years later, when he upgraded his software to Windows, he found that most of the prospective customers he was dealing with didn’t yet have a mouse. As a result, he began shipping $4 mice along with the demos he mailed out. This led to his single funniest story in a long career in the IT industry.
Long before the advent of the Internet, Rex would guide prospective customers through a demo over the telephone (landline of course). The customer would first install the software on their own computer and then set up a call to go through it. One day Rex had a Director of Finance from a hospital in Tucson, Arizona and this exchange took place:
PROSPECT: “Every time I move this mouse to the right the cursor goes left, and every time I move it up the cursor goes down. I can’t stand this thing!!!”
REX: “Are you using the mouse I sent”
PROSPECT: “No, I have my own – this is the first time I ever used it.”
REX, AFTER SOME THINKING: “What does it look like?”
PROSPECT: “It looks like it has a golf ball sticking out of the bottom,”
PROSPECT CONTINUES: “and when I roll it around on my desk it’s all backwards!”
REX: “I think you may have trackball mouse and it’s upside down, try turning it over and just rolling the ball with your hand…”
Just an old IT story.
In 1999 Rex founded Digitech Branding, LLC (d/b/a Dynasend) and has focused exclusively on enterprise level email signatures since then. Digitech Branding now stands as the oldest email signature business in existence, and Rex is almost certainly one of the top five authorities on the subject in the world. He’s always glad to share his insight and to help out where he can.