Do you remember the sharper image, not the bankrupt one, not even the one just before that that sold also to junk on airplanes?

I'm talking about the original sharper image, the sharper image of the 1980s.

The sharper image that was the wire cutter plus wired plus the whole earth catalog put together.

The sharper image that gave us a whole wondrous array of really useful gadgets.

Do you remember them? Well, one day they called me on the phone.

Hey, it's Seth. And this is a Kimbo.

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I remember like it was yesterday, but it was almost 40 years ago. It's hard to believe.

I had just spent a year of my life launching a series of adventure games, computer games based on science fiction novels from people like Arthur C. Clark and Ray Bradbury, my heroes.

I had been a marketer trained anyway as much as a 23 year old can be trained, but I had really been a project manager to get this thing out the door.

It was thousands and thousands of lines of code, it was groundbreaking technology, and we were chasing a nascent brand new marketplace.

Well, we shipped everything and the programmers, they went on to the next thing.

But here I was trying to figure out how was I going to sell more of this extraordinary series of products we had made and then the phone rang.

It was the sharper image on the phone.

I can't remember if I got one of those pink while you were out slips or not. I probably did, so I called them back.

And I said, what's up? Because I knew I didn't know the money or anything.

And the woman from the sharper image said, we see what you've built with these Trillium software games.

For those listening today, we changed the name to Tellarium. That's a whole other story.

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