After Scott demoed his new software to me, he called Mike Williamson to set up an appointment to demo the system, but Mike kept putting him off…they were too busy to see him. It took almost two weeks of calling to wear Mike down to the point that he agreed to give Scott 15 minutes…show up five minutes late, he said, and you get ten minutes.
Scott had continued to refine the program and on the appointed day packed up the gear and he and his dad drove to Mike’s office on Westlake Avenue North in Seattle. Mike repeated that they were really busy getting ready for a big project, but Scott could set up in the conference room and he would be in soon to see what Scott had. When Mike returned Scott explained that what he was about to see was raw data streaming in at the same speed it would have come from the sonar, and then started the program
As soon as the waterfall display started Mike’s mildly annoyed boredom was replaced by rapt attention. After about 15 seconds he told Scott to stop the display and rushed out of the room. Within a few minutes the rest of the company was gathered around the conference table watching the waterfall display.
The response was immediate…they wanted it. They were just gearing up for a big project that they couldn’t tell us about right then, but over the next few visits we learned that their specialty was searching for relatively small targets in deep, rough terrain, and they had been hired to provide the search equipment for an attempt to locate the SS Central America, which went down off the east coast of the US in 1857. It was reputedly loaded with gold, so this was a treasure hunt!