Laughingly, he also tells of the time the five Mow boys found
themselves at home with only four pairs of undershorts among them. They
decided that whoever washed a pair of shorts would get to wear them.
He didn't try to hide his family's plight from his classmates. As captain of the
soccer team in his senior year, whenever the team won a match, he took his
teammates for dinner at the Yangtse River Cafe, on the house. Asked why he
didn't have his teammates pay for the meals, Mow says, "I couldn't do that. I
was the hero, the all-city center forward." Mow's soccer successes didn't hurt
his standing at Riverdale, one measure of which is the fact that in his senior
year his best friend was the captain of the football team.
During his first four years at Riverdale Mow was the only Asian. Of racism
Mow recalls only isolated instances and is quick to dismiss them, saying, "Kids
can be cruel." To this day he refuses to accept minority awards because he
refuses to see himself as a member of a disadvantaged minority.
Thanks to his intense discipline Mow consistently earned a B+ average during
his six years at Riverdale despite the hardships even though he was far more
interested in soccer than in his studies, with the possible exception of math at
which he excelled.
After graduating in 1955, Mow went to Rensselauer Polytechnic Institute, the
country's oldest engineering school. Evenings and weekends still belonged to
the Yangtse River Cafe. At a Chinese Catholic Students' social he met a girl
from Taiwan named Margarita Liu. They married two years later in 1959,
the year he got his B.S. in electrical engineering. Genevieve was born in
1961, after Mow received his master's from Brooklyn Polytechnic.
For the next two years he worked as a research associate for the Institute's
microwave department. In 1963 he went to work for Honeywell's data
processing division as a senior logic engineer. There Mow learned about
integrated circuits. Kathy was born in 1964 while he was at Honeywell.
The next year Mow began teaching part-time as an instructor at Purdue
while working toward a PhD which he received in 1967. To this day his BBI
employees address him as "Dr Mow", something of an anomaly in one of the
business world's least intellectual industries. For the next two years after the
PhD Mow worked as a program manager at Litton's guidance and control
division. There he became excited by the promise of large-scale integration
technology which was being explored for application to the aerospace
industry. At around that time Wall Street experienced a collapse in the value
of defense conglomerates. In 1969 Litton's shares plunged from $120 a share
to less than $12.
Knowing that pink slips were imminent, Mow typed up a prospectus outlining
the feasability of starting a company to build equipment necessary for
developing large-scale integrations of metal oxide semiconductors, computer
chips. His stockbroker located some prospective investors and Mow made
five presentations. Four investors offered to back the plan. The key to its
acceptance, Mow says, was honesty. "They knew I wasn't a businessman.
They wanted to back me because they believed me." Mow gave 50% to an
investor willing to provide $500,000 in capital and $1.5 million in loans, and
Macrodata was born.
The company was located in Woodland Hills, California. "When we started I
didn't know the difference between cash flow and P&L," Mow says. He
concentrated on developing the technology, leaving the financial aspects of
the business to the investor.
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