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– John Loewen's BTI Stories

It was neat to find your BTI-8000 website this evening. I was having a conversation with a friend this last weekend and my years of working on the BTI-8000 came up. I wanted to look up and find out what happened to the company. I thought it was a great computer in it's day. I'm glad I found your website.

I went to Southwestern Adventist College (SAC) in Keene, Texas from 1979-1983. Some time during that time the college bought a BPI-8000. The computer center was run by Steve Sowder (he may have actually been responsible for purchasing it) and during my last couple of year there took Basic, Pascal, and COBOL. From what I understood, there were only 2 BTI-8000's in the state of Texas at the time. The other one was at Old American County Mutual Fire Insurance Co, in Dallas, TX. Old American was looking for entry level programmers so where better to go to find one than 1 hour away at SAC. Steve recommended me for the job which I took and started around Jan 1983. I worked there for 3 years before moving on to IBM mainframe shops. I had never heard of BTI since then so it was good to read about the history on your website.


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