Mr Matco's Internet Mall

My name is Michael A. Tims but I have come to be known around the Internet as Mr Matco. I have been using this acronym since I was a kid and printed a "Newspaper" under the name MAT Enterprises. Now it stands for Michael A Tims COmpany.

I am now 71 years old and retired in 2001 after teaching High School for 38 years. In my 38 years of teaching, I taught everything from Auto Shop to Computer Science.

I have also been an Entrepreneur since my childhood and sold DIY publications by mail order through the classifieds of the popular magazines of the day such as: Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, etc.

In the mid 70's I owned an Electronics Store that sold the early Commodore Computers when they first came out. I can remember struggling to put my store inventory into a Commodore 64 Computer and failing because I only had a simple Word Processing program for it and didnt even know what a spreadsheet was. I did manage to print out (on a dot matrix printer) a list of all my suppliers and what they sold.

What a step up when the Personal Computer or PC came out, although in the beginning you had to teach yourself to program your computer in Languages known as Basic, C, C++, Clipper, etc. You also had to learn DOS commands if you wanted your computer to be anything more than a paper weight sitting on your desk.

When Bill Gates developed Windows, it made the PC appealing to the masses, and we no longer had to do our own programming.

In those early years, the World Wide Web was developing as a means for scientists, engineers and the military to exchange ideas over distances. I remember begging an engineer I knew to teach me how to get onto the "Web" by typing criptic commands at the C prompt. Back then, the Web had only text available, before Windows and its Graphical Interface made it appealing to the masses which were starting to purchase PCs for "Personal" use.