I frequently get email each week asking how I became a "Gadget Guy" and decided to come up with a Dave Mathews FAQ or Frequently Asked Questions to tell you about my life. Here's what I came up with: Enjoy! It's a doozie!

The Early Years:

I was born in Springfield, IL on a fine April 9th, Good Friday if I recall correctly. I did the normal stuff as a child of the 1970's. I played with Lego's, Tinker Toys, and Lincoln Logs while dancing to the music of ABBA. What was not so normal with my life, was the "need" I had to take everything apart. Luckily for me, if I couldn't get it together when I was done learning, "My mom could six it." Fortunately for her, and my father's household, she had plenty of old telephones, record players and other non-critical electronics that could be my test subjects for my life-long quest to see how things work.

With all the electronics around, I did not need to take apart any family members, which was now one person greater due to the addition of a brother three years younger than myself.

Elementary School:

By the end of kindergarten, where I had my first go-cart and even a kiss from a then 'yucky' girl, my family moved to St. Louis, Missouri right before I started the first grade. This is where I learned that I could write with my left hand when my right hand got tired. Needless to say, I continue to write with my left hand today while doing everything else (pick a sport, any sport) with my right hand.

By the second grade I was connecting wires and light bulbs to batteries to make them flash and light brighter than they should. By fourth grade I joined the scouts and was building desktop battery operated fans for my friends and teachers to keep us cool in our un-air-conditioned school. My "partner in crime" Davin and I also found that we could capture bugs and do interesting things to them under a microscope. To this day both of us have stuck with electronics - thank God we are not doctors.

Fourth grade also brought me the RadioShack 75 in 1 kit where you could build 75 different projects with transistors, resistors, a speaker, and relay! This was when computers were a kit like the Altair and Timex Sinclair and the only video game was a black-and-white version of Pong! This was also the time that I put a door bell on my bedroom window, and had converted a reel-to-reel tape player into a two way intercom. This way I could talk to my friends without opening the window. A good feature in those harsh Midwestern winter months.

By fifth grade my dad brought home a Gem! It was a sewing machine sized Osborne O1 "portable" computer. This machine was a technological marvel! It had a built in 5" 40 column monochrome screen, Zilog Z-80 CPU, dual 83k 5 1/4" floppies and 64k of RAM! What made it most unique was this was the bundled with software! The CP/M (a predecessor to DOS) operating system, Wordstar word processor, SuperCalc spreadsheet, CBasic language, and MBasic all came with the computer for the first time ever! Most amazing was its $1795 price and optional 300 baud built in modem! This is where I started it all! When my friends, Davin included, had the latest gaming machine, the Apple IIe, I had my "personal business computer" where I had to write the games for it myself! This is also the time when I decided I did not want to be a programmer!

After taking my dad's Osborne apart one time too many (once was enough) I got my own just in time for 6th grade! I installed the modem, the 183k double density disk drive option, and even the 80-column upgrade! Exhausted from the built in 300 bits per second (you think today's 28.8k bps is slow!) modem, Anchor Automation allowed me 1200 BPS through the serial port and I was calling Bulletin Board Systems like a mad man! BBS' are run by people or companies as a hobby to host online communities. These were the only way to chat and stay connected before the Internet became popular!

Jr. High:

In the seventh grade, while I was attending Selvidge in Ballwin, I was ready to host my own BBS rather than fight busy signals dialing into them all over town. Jim VanDillin, a local Attorney and Kaypro (a cousin to the Osborne) user sponsored an advertising splash page on "The Missing Link BBS" for the low $25 rate of the monthly phone bill and TML went on-line! The software I ran was written by a super programmer only a couple of years older than myself, Dave Mullen, called DVMBBS which offered many more features than the popular RBBS software of the time. Today BBS' have multiple GIGs of storage and CD-ROM's for their on-line communities while mine back in those days ran from two 183k floppy disks. One neat feature then was chatting with the Sysop or System Operator. If hit a key, the single person online at that time could alert me to come to the machine for us to type to one another. I remember staying up until all hours of the night, typing to friends from Jr. High and from all over the country who had dialed into my BBS.

I made the big time when another buddy, Kyle, gave me access to an IBM PC clone and a 10 Meg hard drive! I was in heaven when I moved from 366k to 10 Megabytes of storage! I could not use my DVMBBS software any longer because of the platform change from CP/M to MS-DOS, so I modified a Turbo Pascal version of WWIV BBS software for my own use. My BBS was a Mecca for "hackers" or those people who were into learning everything they could about the capabilities of personal computers.

High School:

After teaching myself the basics of computers in Jr. High, by the time I got to Lafayette Senior High in Ellisville I was teaching classes, consulting to businesses, and building and selling PC clones out of my bedroom. This was before all of the retail stores sold computers like they do today! Somehow in there, I also had time to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout in as well. It has only gotten a little easier with my age for people to take me seriously! Back then it was tough to get people to trust me! Like I say, every computer should come with a 13-year old to teach you how to use it!

This is also the time where I found my love of cars and began to restore and customize my own, and help friends on their car projects as well. I took high-end audio systems to the limit with multiple amps, crossovers, CD players, and sub-woofers. I even had a color TV and VCR in one of my custom installations! This experimentation extended to alarm systems and relays which would even OPEN my car doors via a remote control key chain! Touch the wireless button once and the driver door opened, hold the button down and both driver and passenger doors would magically open!

College:

I started college at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, MO where I studied Business and Computer Information systems. In the evenings during the school week I worked as a lab assistant in the computer lab across the hall from our dorm room. Fortunately for me, the computer room was literally a closet, so when people had a problem they would walk across the hall to my room for assistance. Most of the time, I was building computers to sell or blasting the home theater to a room-full of friends.

My computer lab assistant position lasted for two years. The second year I was in a high-rise with a HUGE computer room! It was located two floors up from my apartment so this time my friends visited me at work. I hardly think it was the most conducive place to study, so the draw by my friends must have been my really great jokes. Hehe! Haha!.

Year three brought me an internship with IBM as a student PS/2 campus representative. This involved promotion of the new IBM PS/2 line on campus and a mentor sales program. I did this for a year before working at a car stereo shop, Auto Air & Audio, and then running my own where my partner David and I installed custom electronics in cars and home theater & satellite dishes in homes.

After College:

After moving back to St. Louis from Springfield, I started working for a network cabling company, Netcom, to learn everything in the world of connecting PCs together. My years of expertise were in stand-alone systems so networking was a much needed learning experience. Netcom was a partner of Digital Equipment and had clients who were Ralston Purina, Mallinckrodt Medical, and McDonnell Douglas, small companies you might have heard of. :-) This is where I honed my skills at wire and fiber termination, network design and infrastructure.

A few months of networking I was up to speed on hubs, routers, and NIC's (Network Interface Cards) and ran across a new concept store - Cellular World. They had just opened a few retail stores in the St. Louis area and were selling wireless phones and mobile office equipment. Since my days of car stereo I had been installing mobile phones, and when I saw the opportunity to learn how these two technologies could be married together, I had to get involved! I began working for the company as a sales person and technical guru but within a couple of months I was moving to their corporate offices in Dallas, Texas!

Moving to Dallas:

Dallas was a strategic move for me as it is the "heart" of the telecommunications sector. Ericsson, TI, Motorola, Nokia, and Northern Telecom all have technical operations in Dallas and I needed to be in the mix! My job with Cellular World consisted of keeping the real-time point of sale communication system on-line through frame relay, 56k leased lines, and modems.

One of my most enjoyable projects was a partnership with Sprint Cellular and their 42 markets across the US. I was the single point of technical support for their data sales team. This allowed me to travel the country training and assisting them with the marriage of laptops and mobile phones. This industry still has not taken off and I had just taught myself the "ins and outs" of it a year before! This experience built my base knowledge and sharpened my skills on answering problems over the phone. These two traits I am proud to have today! What could be harder than answering computer questions over the phone with a LIVE TV camera on in front of you!

In 1996 Cellular World evolved into my, and any Gadget Guy's dream store, Communication EXPO. I was on the team who met with the different vendors of products and services to explain the concept of our store to companies like PageNet Communications, SkyTel, and EchoStar. Once the funding for the concept was attained, I was a buyer of new technology products. GPS receivers (tell you almost exactly where you are on the earth), DSS dishes, and smart home products are just a few of the products I brought to the ComEXPO table. As I am true to my name, most of these toys are in my house, car, or boat. My car stereo even mutes itself automatically when the cellular phone rings. It must do this, or I would not be able to hear it ring over the 7 speakers and CD changer.

As our store started to break ground, it was time for me to shift roles again. Terry Hegg and I designed the network WAN (Wide Area Network), file server back office, and workstations that were to be used to run the 20,000 square foot superstores. About 85 PC's went in each store with T-1 access to the corporate database and shared & protected Internet. Everything was online and real-time 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even the phone system utilized Primary Rate ISDN allowing for 23 simultaneous voice or fax calls and Caller-ID information to the desktop over a digital pipeline! Each store also had a multimedia Internet Cafe with debit or credit card access to the systems. We also introduced Intercast technology in the Cafe where Web pages travel down a TV signal to special TV tuner boards inside the PC.

Net Talk

Just a few months after opening the first Communication EXPO store, the Net Talk gang met with EXPO executives to have them sponsor his television show, Net Talk Live!. As they were leaving, the execs were asked if there was an employee who could be on-air with the show. My "class clown" nature paid off as the company big shots said "We know exactly who should be on the program!" A week later, I was on television having a blast while clowning around on-air!

In the summer of '97 I left ComEXPO to write and to develop content and advertising programs for Net Talk on a full time basis. Then, I worked with CS Wireless and The Beam with their wireless high-speed MMDS cable modem project throughout Dallas. After that venture I was a key member of the group behind the concept and inventor of the Cue Cat barcode scanner and :CueTV in 1998 and can be found on the patents (#6,098,106, #6,377,986, #6,526,449, #6,615,268 and #6,643,692) associated with this traditional broadcast media and print to web technology. I also love interactive and educational toys and have a granted patent #6,629,133 for interfacing a doll with a computing device.

That's my story. Since you made it to the end, here are my tips for success:

• At any age, you have the power accomplish great things!
• Making excuses to not do something is a waste of energy!
• Achieve the impossible and make great strides every day!
• Feed your mind with knowledge by reading all that you can!
• Turn what you love to do into your job!
• Life is too short - be happy and live it to your fullest!