Thomas Eugene Foulks

Thomas "Thom" Eugene Foulks (August 27, 1935 - March 24, 2004) was a multi-talented and somewhat famous individual. He made a living as a disk jockey, editor of military base newspapers, manager/news director of AFRTS (Air Force Radio Television) stations in Iceland and the Philippines, daily newspaper front-page editor, television videographer and news anchorman (local CBS - KKTV and NBC - KOAA affiliates), TV public affairs director, and a politician (Administrative Assistant, Board of County Commissioners for El Paso County in Colorado). In the latter capacity, he learned that mainframe programmers who worked for the county could actually make a program do what the user wanted; not just what they thought it should do. El Paso County may not have benefited from that knowledge, but he sure did. About the same time, he decided he could run the county better than his boss, and wound up as Commissioner Chairman (1975-1979).

Thom's life is honored by having his name on a couple of public buildings, including the Pikes Peak Center (http://www.pikespeakcenter.org/) public auditorium. Politics didn't interest Thom as a lifelong career -- too many people recognized him in the supermarket checkout line. So he did not seek re-election, and began freelancing as a computer specialist.

Then came an Apple II, a clutch of TRS-80s, modems, operating a Bulletin Board System BBS (a forebearer of the internet), and some computer userdom notoriety as author of the original operator's manual for TBBS. He taught himself dBase and Turbo Pascal, and worked for five years as a commercial freelance programmer, specializing in databases. In the meantime, his wife, Vi, (an experienced Certified Medical Transcriptionist) was putting together a commercial word processing firm that successfully transitioned from IBM Selectrics to computers. He became chief tech support for a multi-employee job-typing empire that they finally decided was too large (as SOHO began coming on), and so decided to dissolve while they were ahead.

About that time, a broadcast industry contact called and asked Thom, "Why don't you do a talk show on using computers?" That turned into a three-year gig for Business Radio Network's "Computing Success!" -- 1991 Best Radio Show award from the Computer Press Association. (John Dvorak came in second.) From that, evolved a PC World "Business Fixtures" column that was actually kind of disastrous: he couldn't handle the three-month-lag leadtime, so they mutually parted company. His first national story (in Basic Computing, on computerized voting) was published in 1983, and he had hundreds of reviews and articles published.

All that national exposure, however, did let him get together with some neat people. Like Jerry Pournelle and Thom once hammed it up at a Denver online-users computer seminar. Michael Miller (now editor of PC Magazine, then of InfoWorld) and Thom teamed up on a lot of radio activity as well as broadcast coverage from a Vegas Comdex, interviewing people like Michael Dell and Andy Grove. Bill Gates and Thom once shared a coffee table, as he talked intensely about Chicago. Steve Jobs gave Thom an eyeball-to-eyeball personal sales pitch about the NeXT, in a back corner of a Los Angeles amphitheater. One of the many users on Thom's BBS (Bread Board) was Van Wolverton who used to call from his Montana ranch to Colorado Springs just to yak with other BBSers. The designer of the famed Cheetah i486, Ron Sartore, allowed Thom to scavenge his stockpile of Cheetah parts as the firm was closing down. He had a mini factory in his basement building mother boards and generic PCs.

Prior to his 1998 retirement, he was a Product Reviewer for the Software Library Evaluations Division (SLED) of ZD Net, one of a national team responsible for the independent review of all software products posted on the various ZD Net services. He also taught hands-on HTML courses for ZDNet University, a leading-edge effort that was a mini-career of its own.