Overview of SEI – Educational Software Publisher – 1980 thru 1988

I founded SEI (Sliwa Enterprises Inc.) in 1978. Basically the Apple II had just come out and I bought one. As I recall it was about $2200. I had to scrimp to get it on my NASA salary and adapted a TV to be the monitor (my old trusty one I bought when I was a paper-boy). It originally had cassette tapes for storage so I was glad when they add a floppy disk drive that could hold 64KB worth of memory. These ultimately got to 128K and then kept climbing. We really didn’t get hard drives until the mid-80’s. The first ones were really bigger than the computer but could hold 5MB!

I started writing simple little programs and bought some software and tools to assist. One of my buddies, Brad Schrick, and I used to joke at the market at that time. We marveled at a chess program written in assembler that was amazingly good. We watched a customer spend a half-hour analyzing it and we were amazed for the time: good graphics, multiple levels, suggesting moves, multiple openings, coaching for end games, etc. (circa 1980). But the program was $15 and the potential customer said that at that price he would write his own. We were just shocked. Even so I decided to launch a software business as an adjunct to my work at NASA.

I had starting writing programs for practicing college board exams. I was about to take the GRE and had enjoyed gearing up and studying for the SAT a few years before. I had some study resources and thought there had to be a better way. So I wrote some drill and practice programs for building verbal skills for the SAT and tried to market them. I started getting a little money so I increased my gain.