Art Collmeyer...

Yesterday I heard from my friend Cliff F. that a former colleague of ours, Art Collmeyer, had died this past September at age 70.  I knew him mainly from his time as CEO of Stac spin-off HiFn, nearly 20 years ago.

My fondest memory of Art involves, of all things, email.  I was running the IT team at Stac at the time, and Art asked me to come talk with his secretary about an email problem.  I went to her desk, and asked what the problem was.  The problem, she said, was that each time Art replied to an email, it had her return address on it.  I told her that Art must have some configuration issue on his email, and I'd better go see him.  “No, no,” she said.  “You don't understand.  I answer Art's email for him!”

Upon some investigation, I discovered that a couple times a day Art's secretary would log into his email, forward all Art's email to herself, log into her email, print out all the new ones, and hand the papers to Art – who would then scribble his answers onto the printout and hand them back to his secretary.  The she logged back into her email and replied, transcribing Art's scribbles.  The solution was easy – I just told her to stop forwarding Art's emails to herself, and to simply reply from Art's account.  Problem solved.  But then I went in to talk with Art to find out why he did his email this way.  I've forgotten the words he used, but with fine humor he told me that he considered it a waste of his time to learn how to use email.  He knew perfectly well how to write an answer with a pen, and he had far better things to do with his time than to learn this new-fangled thing called email!

I recall one other conversation I had with Art, when he somehow discovered that back in the '80s I had done some design work on special effects generators for TV stations.  It turns out that he had been involved in some of the early digital graphics efforts, and his company had identified the TV stations as a potential market for them.  To this day, he's the only other person I've ever met who had a detailed knowledge of that market.

Above all, though, I remember Art as a genuinely nice guy – something that is far from universal for people with achievements like his own.  I'm saddened to hear of his death...

More info here and here...