The following is from a document I wrote at the request of the probate attorney (solicitor if you are in the UK) who is guiding us through the British legal system. He was recommending that I be appointed as the administrator of Scott’s estate, and felt the judge should know about my background and relationship with Scott.
I grew up in a technical family…my parents met in a vocational/technical school in Seattle, Washington in the 1940s (my mom was the first woman to graduate from that school). My father worked as an engineer in radio and television, ending up as Chief Engineer for a broadcasting chain. I was the son who showed the most interest in electronics, so he spent a lot of time sharing what he did with me.
I joined the US Navy in 1965 and spent ten years as an Electronic Technician (ET) specializing in the maintenance and repair of secure voice communication equipment…which required a very high security clearance.
After getting out of the navy in 1975 I started and ran several companies, as something caught my interest. I did home repairs and remodeling, as well as installing fire alarm systems and security and cardkey systems. In the early 80s I wrote my first book, a biography of an interesting man I met through a friend…Fred Anhalt was around 90 years old and had led a fascinating life. The publisher who was setting up Microsoft Press happened to see the book and heard that I had typed it on a computer and had even done my own paste-up of the pages, contacted me and asked to meet. We did and he offered me a contract to write books for Microsoft Press. In those days if you could type a grocery list on a computer, you could be an author.
Since then I’ve written about 20 books, and had several companies that provided services to Microsoft. I semi-retired about ten years ago and my daughter took over the last company.
There is a short bio on the website of that company:https://otsi.com/about/leadership/steve-lambert/.
My initial contact with Scott Lafferty was around the end of 1985. This was just after he had the idea for his first side-scan sonar display program, and he was looking for someone to answer questions about the current state of semi-conductor chips that could convert analog data to digital data. I had included information about this in a book I was just wrapping up, and one of my sources of that information pointed Scott to me. He called me, we talked, and I became intrigued by his ideas. What he wanted to do was cutting edge for that time…beyond anything anyone else was doing. But technology changes and as a writer for Microsoft Press I had access to cutting edge technology that was far beyond anything Scott could afford to buy. So we decided to team up…Scott would be the programming brains and I would provide the hardware and programming software that he needed.
About that time I was forming a company with the Managing Editor and Editorial Director of Microsoft Press (Joyce Cox and Salley Oberlin). We invited Scott to become a partner of that company, which we named Info Express Inc. This was just a convenience for Scott…we took care of all the administrative work and he devoted himself to programming and later to designing sophisticated printed circuit boards to speed up certain aspects of the conversion of analog to digital data. (Data from survey sensors typically came in as an analog signal and had to be converted to a digital one in order to do the high-speed processing required to display it on a computer screen.)
Over the next year or so we developed and refined the main product, and then did a presentation to a local survey company, Williamson and Associates in Seattle, Washington, USA. They were very excited…they had just gotten a contract to search for a sunken ship named SS Central America (later nicknamed The Ship of Gold) that went down in 1857 off the east coast of the US. What we were demonstrating was the most sophisticated sonar display system in existence, and they wanted it.
We got that job and Scott went off to sea with his gear, so he could constantly tweak it during the survey to get the most possible out of it. And he did…and they found the ship, under a lot of silt about a mile and a half below the ocean surface. It is very unlikely they would have found it under those conditions using any other gear.
To date I think they have pulled $100M worth of gold off that wreck, and that is a small portion of what is supposed to be down there. However, the ownership of all that treasure has been in litigation from the start.
After that we started courting oil companies and picking up jobs where Scott would again go to sea to do surveys for pipelines and drilling platforms. After a year or so of that it was obvious that Scott was going to be ok, and since the nature of the company was split between his stuff and the publishing work that the rest of us did, we decided to split the company. Scott essentially bought us out, as payment for taking care of him for a few years, and he kept the name, as it was more important to him than to us.
We went through a couple of other names and ended up with Online Training Solutions, Inc (OTSI). We wrote books and provided pre- and post-production services to various publishers…but mostly Microsoft Press. I also provided programming services to Microsoft, specifically in data conversion to automate the formatting of book and online training material.
Scott and I remained good friends and I often wrote the documentation for his programs, as he wasn’t much of a writer. His hands would fly over a keyboard when writing code, but typing an email was difficult for him…just a different part of his brain I guess. He was dyslexic, so had a lot of trouble reading…but he had a photographic memory, so once he struggled through a programming book it was in permanent storage in his brain.
One of the turning points in Scott’s career was a job he got for the Royal Australian Navy in 1991. This was a big, job…his share was close to $2M. When he was about done assembling the hardware and writing his customized survey code, they asked about documentation, and told him they were withholding $250k until he produced it. Scott immediately called me and asked me to fly to Australia. I had just gotten married and told him that we were about to take off on a long honeymoon. He gave me his credit card number and suggested we have a big honeymoon in Australia…he would pick up the tab and pay for our services (my wife was an editor). So we booked tickets and flew to Sydney, where we got an apartment within walking distance of the navy base and worked about half time on documentation and spent the rest of the time enjoying the country for two months.
During that project Scott worked with Nigel Carey and Mike Baker. Mike and Nigel had been in the survey business for years, and they really appreciated what Scott’s software could do. They started contracting with him for their projects, and after that Scott pretty much followed them through any companies they worked for. So in a way they were his business manager, as I was earlier.
Scott was making a lot of money by then, but it also involved a lot of time at sea. Nigel suggested that he could invest some of that money in survey gear that he could then rent to companies doing the survey work. Scott jumped on that idea and by reinvesting his income for a year he ended up with over £1M worth of gear that brought in a steady income from that time on. After a few years of doing that he turned the management of the equipment over to a company run by another friend and went back to doing mostly programming.
Through all of this Scott and I kept in touch…mostly through Skype voice calls. We talked for an hour or so once a week. When he was working on a new project I often did the testing and wrote the documentation.
When his dad died in 2010 he came to the States and I attended the funeral with him then we spent a few days on the road, ending up in Westport, Washington, where Scott had owned a charter fishing boat and he and his dad did a lot of fishing. One of his old deckhands, who was by then a skipper of his own boat, took us out to sea to scatter Aleck’s ashes…I will be doing the same with some of Scott’s ashes in a month or so.
A few months later, when he heard that the family home was going to be sold, he asked me if I would move all the stuff he had in a large storage shed there to a commercial storage unit in the town where I lived. I agreed and spent a week or so sorting and packing stuff. This ended up filling a 15×20’ storage unit. His plan was to eventually ship it in a container to the UK, but he never got around to that. About two years ago he asked me to get rid of all but the fishing gear and any family history, which I did…which I now regret, as there was a lot of information in there about Scott’s early jobs.
A bit over a year ago, after a severe infection, surgery, and a lot of antibiotics and painkillers, Scott seemed to change a bit. He slowly stopped trusting people and became afraid of them. In July of 2017 he contacted me on Skype and told me he was in hiding and needed help…would I come to the UK? I did and spent a couple weeks travelling with him and his four dogs, from one little cottage in the countryside to another. He explained his fears to me and I tried to help resolve them. He would seem quite rational and relaxed for a while, then something I would say would click in his brain and he would become terrified and maybe start crying and speaking in a high squeaky voice, like a little kid. It was really unsettling to see him in this condition. Eventually my efforts to solve his problems became too much for him and I think he decided I was a risk, so when I was doing something else he took the dogs and escaped. He sent a text saying that he needed to be on his own, but hoped we could be friends again someday.
As were the other people who had known Scott, I was shocked and saddened when I was contacted by the police, who were trying to get contact information for his family. I gave them Kelly’s number then got in touch with her after they had time to call her. Over the next few weeks I helped her gather the information the police and probate court might need, scanned it to PDF, and posted it where the appropriate people could download it.
Since I had traveled several times with Scott in the UK and had been to his house in Bath, his warehouse in Clegyr Boia, and visited his girlfriend in St Davids, I offered to fly over and help clean up the mess and bring back Scott’s ashes. I lived in his house for three weeks, which was in the middle of being restored after a massive flood (from a broken waterline in the attic that ran for weeks while he was at sea). This is where he died, and where his body and dogs remained for two weeks until they were discovered. To say it was a mess is an understatement…it was a disaster area.
While I was there I went through three months’ worth of mail that had come through the slot in the door and piled up. I organized that by category and then integrated other paperwork and information from several of his more current computers (he had about 20 laptops).
I wrote an overview of all that information and turned it over to his accountant Andrew Hill and the solicitor, Gary Pick, who Andrew has recommended to handle the probate process.
Over the past two years nine members of my extended family (mostly on my wife’s side) have died. My wife ended up with the responsibility of dealing with most of the estates, and I went along to do the cleanup as I am now doing for Scott. Although this isn’t an experience I really sought out, it has been interesting and does seem to be somewhat matched to my background and talents. After turning over the information I had compiled to Gary and Andrew, and chatting with them in a meeting in Poole, they suggested that I might be the appropriate person to administer Scott’s estate during the probate process. This is a responsibility I agreed to take on, after getting the blessing of his sister Kelly.
I’ve known Scott for over 30 years, and from the beginning thought he was an amazing person with a story that should be shared. Over the past few years we chatted about setting up another company together, and working together on his biography…he was agreeable, but we never settled down to do it.
Now that he is gone, it will be hard to do this on my own. That is why I am soliciting stories from other people who knew Scott, and who perhaps worked with him on surveys, or went fishing with him, or just had a beer or two down at the local pub with him.
Please think about Scott…dredge up a few memories, and share them. Perhaps the timeline on this blog will help trigger some memories.
Thank You,
Steve Lambert