Friday The 13th

The call came from IBM offering Martin Alpert a deal that could give his company a lock on its market. But he wasn't celebrating.

Tweet

he date loomed large on Dr. Martin Alpert's calendar. He was president off Tecmar Inc., a small computer company in Cleveland and on Friday, the 13th of August, 1982, he had a meeting scheduled -- a meeting that could shape his company's fortunes for years to come.

The man he was supposed to see was one William Erdman, an IBM Corp. executive serving as the front man for a group of IBM renegades who were peddling product designs for various devices that could be added on to an IBM Personal Computer, thereby increasing its power and versatility. As it happened, Tecmar was in the business of making such so-called peripherals for the PC, and Erdman had asked for the meeting to give Alpert a crack at the designs.

Under other circumstances, this might have been cause for jubilation, but Alpert was not rejoicing. On the contrary, the whole deal made him nervous -- so nervous that, on Wednesday, he suddenly decided to cancel the meeting.

Alpert had good reason for concern. For one thing, the renegades wanted big bucks for their wares. Prices of $15,000 to $150,000 had been mentioned, depending on the complexity of the design. With two or three dozen designs on the block, that could add up to a lot of money for a small, cash-tight company. But if Tecmar couldn't come up with it, somebody else surely would, and Alpert couldn't afford to let such a bonanza fall into the hands of competitors.

But, beyond all that, there were deeper issues involved, for these were not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, high-technology renegades -- adventurers from the mother ship setting out to test the waters of entrepreneurism on their own. Indeed, they were still employees of IBM. Granted, they said that they planned to resign in the near future. They also said that they had developed the signs on their own time. Yet the fact remained that they were selling IBM-related products from inside Big Blue. "The implication was that there were secrets for sale," Alpert said later.

So what was he to do? If Alpert went ahead with the meeting, he risked becoming involved in a conspiracy that would inevitably invite the wrath of IBM itself. If he simply backed off and kept quiet, his competitors would do him in.

On Thursday morning, Alpert took the next step, placing a call to IBM headquarters in Armonk, N.Y. And that was when his troubles began.

Over the course of the next three weeks, Martin Alpert became, in effect, an undercover agent for IBM. His world was filled with clandestine meetings, hidden tape recorders, and debriefings in hotel rooms. Along the way, he emerged as the central figure in an elaborate "sting" operation masterminded by IBM security agents to trap a group of high-level employees, including, Alpert later learned, some of the best technical minds in the industry, men of whom he himself was in awe.

Afterwards, many IBMers claimed that this case had a far greater impact within the corporation than the better-publicized Hitachi espionage case, which blew up in June 1982. In that episode, Hitachi Ltd. of Japan paid some $600,000 to an undercover team of IBM and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents for stolen IBM plans. But those were huge corporations grappling for a wrestling hold. The Tecmar/IBM case is writ in more human terms, shaped by more intimate, personal acts of betrayal. And while IBM used the Hitachi case to issue a warning to other companies, foreign and domestic, the Tecmar case constituted IBM's warning to its own employees against renegade fever.

This is not, however, a story about IBM, nor even about renegades and betrayals of trust. Rather it is a story about the president of a small company who became a chess piece on a vast playing board, fending for interests much larger than his own. "The basic decision was that what was going on was wrong," said Alpert when it was over. "The second decision was not to participate. The third decision was to notify IBM -- and then, where do you stop from there? I don't know . . ."

Such questions came later, however. Back on August 11, only one thing was clear. Friday the 13th was going to be an unlucky day.

Martin Alpert is an energetic dumpling of a man -- at 34, he is both a medical doctor and a systems engineer, as well as president of what he describes as the fastest-growing company in Ohio. The only son of two Nazi concentration camp survivors, a wunderkind in both academia and business, he has a curiously diffident manner that does not quite conceal his tense, speedy energy. With his wife, Carolyn, who has a master's degree in management, Alpert founded Tecmar (the name is an abbreviated flip on "Marty's technology") in 1974 -- while he was still in medical school -- to develop diagnostic medical tools based on his own mathematical models of the human pulmonary system.

By 1979, Alpert was a resident at Cleveland's University Hospitals, still doing medical research, when he discovered that there was an eager market for the analog-to-digital conversion circuit Tecmar had developed for its own research. As Alpert later noted, the personal computer industry had been born in the mid-'70s, and he "just happened to be standing there when the train went by."

 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8  NEXT