Linux and Ebiz Enterprises

JWise Moments

Ebiz Cheap PC 9 July 1999 in Arizona Republic

Somewhere during 1998, I joined a company called CPU Micromart in Scottsdale, Arizona, as a consultant. Soon I was their Chief Information Officer and often acted as their Chief Technology Officer too. It was a startup, so I was able to wear many hats. This company, founded by Jeffrey Rassas and Stephen Herman, was liquidating equipment they were able to purchase from companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and a host of other businesses trying to shed inventory. Around the time I was joining, the guys were embarking on building what was then known as “white boxes,” effectively no-name PCs that could be branded by chains such as Fred Meyer, one of their resellers.

Caroline Wise and John Wise at Ebiz Enterprises in Scottsdale, Arizona

After Caroline left a gig with Intel, I hired her to help with CPU Micromart’s first line of business, online sales. We needed a shopping cart, and the options in 1998 weren’t all that good, so she wrote one for the company in Coldfusion. While she was working on that, I was looking at trainloads of old games in the warehouse and a few hundred old DEC Alphas that weren’t operable. Trying to source parts and figure out an operating system for those slim computers with powerful CPUs, I started looking at Red Hat Linux along with some utilities and figured we could sell them cheap. This inspired Jeff and Steve to take inspiration from another manufacturer who was building cheap clones and try to beat them. The $199 PIA (Personal Internet Appliance) seen above in the Arizona Republic back on July 9, 1999, was that machine.

Linux Journal advertisement from September 1999

That inexpensive PC attracted a lot of attention for the company, which also brought it some investment money. With AMD and Red Hat Linux onboard, we made a serious push into the Linux market with www.thelinuxstore.com. Cheap Linux boxes, though, were not what I had my eye on; I just needed those to generate enough business so I could spearhead my dream project: the NEBULA. The New, Element-L, Beowulf, Unified, Linux, Array were going to change the world.

John Wise and Adam Muntner with Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena creators of Gnome for Linux in Raleigh, North Carolina

We launched our cluster at the 1999 Linux Expo in Raleigh, North Carolina, to great applause and media recognition that did wonders for the shareholders of Ebiz Enterprises. With the help of IBM, who was showing their own $250,000 cluster and were impressed with our effort that was going to retail for only $13,000, they offered us some tips that took our setup to the point where our system achieved half the speed of their machine instead of only a third. This project would have never gotten off the ground were it not for the tremendous effort of two people I hired for the project, Kat Kirk and Adam Muntner. In the photo above, that’s Adam just behind me with Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena, creators of Gnome, offering us a bit of fanfare.

Scottsdale Airpark News Ebiz June1999

It was during this time I met Grant Wiggins, who interviewed me for the Scottsdale Airpark News, a local magazine. Grant would go on to work with us later in the year at Alienzoo. These two pages are from that interview.

Scottsdale Airpark News Ebiz June1999

Sadly, I left the company before the end of the year due to differences of opinion on how to advance the company, but thanks to my momentary “star” power, I was able to raise capital for my next venture: Alienzoo. Unfortunately, the temporary golden child wasn’t able to deliver twice in a row.

Playing in the Snow

JWise Moments

Caroline Wise in Payson, Arizona

Other than our longer trips with my mother-in-law and visiting my father in Los Angeles, Caroline and I were not getting out as often as we should have. We tended to work too much and get kind of crazy in indulgence on the weekend. While we somewhat understood how therapeutic it was to get out of Phoenix, it wasn’t in our DNA yet, but every time we did, we had a great time.

John Wise in Payson, Arizona

While I’m posting these on Caroline’s 31st birthday, we have no idea of knowing exactly when these were shot. What I do know and remember well is that we were in Payson, Arizona. I’m also pretty sure that this snowball Caroline threw at me did NOT connect. By the way, do you think the snow makes me look fat?

Caroline Wise in Payson, Arizona

This very well may have been our first encounter with snow since we moved to America in 1995.

[This post was written in April 2021]

Monument Valley – Ruby & Axel

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Axel Rieke, Ruby Rieke, Caroline Wise, and John Wise at Monument Valley in Arizona

This is the last day of an epic adventure that begins in Monument Valley. Over the past week, we’ve driven more than 1,600 miles, seen a ton of amazing sites, and had a good laugh along the way, where our lives become even deeper entwined by spending a honeymoon together. But all great things ultimately come to an end and rejoin the cycle of change, decay, and renewal. The four of us will change, and our friendship will change, but how much we didn’t know on this excursion into the old West, we will grow older, and finally, we will effectively become different people.

Caroline Wise and John Wise at Monument Valley in Arizona

For Caroline and me, this is our second visit to Monument Valley; the first one was some years before with my mother-in-law Jutta. We’ll return to every single location we visited on this trip in the coming years and always remain astonished that we are so lucky to have the opportunity to do so. Sadly, this corner of America grows more and more out of favor with the population of the United States as they no longer find the Old West as intriguing as previous generations once did. Today though, we were celebrating being able to share with Ruby and Axel a place that we found special and full of a character worth treasuring.

Ruby Rieke at Canyon De Chelly in Arizona

Looking at the map we were traveling with, Caroline spotted a national monument called Canyon De Chelly, and seeing we felt we could afford the detour, we went. Ruby is seen here trying to muster the guts to look over the sheer wall that drops straight down.

Caroline Wise and John Wise at Canyon De Chelly in Arizona

It’s funny looking at these photos 22 years after we made this trip and seeing our younger selves. While I can know the people we were and the enchantment of seeing such iconic places, we are no longer that young and sometimes troubled couple figuring things out. There’s a calm of togetherness and contentedness we grew into over the years, and while here in the year 2020, as I finally place these old photographs taken before the age of digital images into my blog, we are in a plague situation that in some ways seems easier to be dealing with than learning who we were back then.

Ruby Rieke and Caroline Wise at Canyon De Chelly in Arizona

Little did we know that the following year Ruby and Axel would move to America, and in getting situated, they would stay with us a while before the lack of opportunity in Arizona drove them to find their good fortune in San Francisco, where they thrived. It was the year 2000, following a trip to Yellowstone, that whatever bonds had us enjoying each other’s company for the previous 7 or 8 years would fray, and we’d all move into the realm of distant memories of one another. For a time, though, we shared a solid moment of discovery, and that was priceless.

Four Corners – Ruby & Axel

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Ruby Rieke, Axel Rieke, and Caroline Wise at the Colorado State Line

It was just 11 days ago when Ruby and Axel got married in San Francisco, California, on this trip from Germany. We joined them for this big day, but it was what they chose for their honeymoon that was surprising, a road trip with Caroline and me. In some ways, this ends up being an extension of our first road trip together back in 1996 that made a good enough impression that on this trip to the United States this year, they have chosen to spend a good part of it here on another trip down some dusty roads. It should be noted that I was a bit surprised by this as Ruby might be considered a city person who was trying to escape rural America, well, as much as Bakersfield, California, where she grew up, could be called rural.

John Wise and Axel Rieke at Four Corners

Sharing time in a 24/7 journey with four of us crammed into a car and then sharing a single room with two beds so we could save on expenses should create big tensions but we’ve done pretty well so far. So, here we are at Four Corners, where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico all meet. This wasn’t on the itinerary, but we had time for deviations from the route as my travel planning skills weren’t the best yet. It took time and many more trips for me to gather my senses about distances and what was possible in this vast country.

Caroline Wise and Ruby Rieke at Four Corners

It felt like we were hogging the spot here as first Axel and I situated ourselves to cover as many states as we could, and then the women figured out how both of them could be in all four at once. Sadly, I don’t believe we opted for any of the mutton dishes on offer at the stands dotted around the parking lot as we didn’t know the pleasures of Navajo cooking at that time, but we’d learn over time.

Ruby Rieke, Axel Rieke, and Caroline Wise at the Arizona State Line

Senseless driving back and forth so we could get photos in front of all the state signs started a tradition that would follow Caroline and me for the next two decades, stop at all state signs, and start shooting selfies of ourselves.

Ruby Rieke and Caroline Wise in New Mexico

Yep, head down the road to include New Mexico too.

Ruby Rieke and Caroline Wise at the Utah State Line

And then into Utah as this is where we are spending the night.

Axel Rieke and Ruby Rieke in Bluff, Utah

We couldn’t book a room at Goulding’s Lodge in Monument Valley at the last minute, so the desk clerk recommended I look in Mexican Hat up in Utah. Looking at the map, I saw that we’d be staying just north of Valley of the Gods; sounded good to me, and the motel had availability. We passed through the town of Bluff on the way, making a mental note to return. Mexican Hat ended up falling into one of our all-time favorite places in large part due to the famous “Swinging Steak!” Streetside of the Mexican Hat Lodge is an outdoor restaurant where a grill over a mesquite fire BBQs up steaks and burgers for their mostly European visitors. A small stage welcomes musicians while their family, if they have time, also take up an instrument and will play for visitors sitting under the Milky Way in the shadow of Monument Valley and the Valley of the Gods. The romance of this place cannot be conveyed with enough enthusiasm; it’s just that great.

Durango – Ruby & Axel

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Caroline Wise in Durango, Colorado

How exciting is this that we are going on a steam train journey into the mountains? We’ve never been on one of these old-fashioned narrow-gauge relics from the past, but we are thrilled about being here and listening to this sound out of history.

Axel Rieke, Ruby Rieke, and Caroline Wise on the Durango Silverton Steam Train in Colorado

Not only is the track very narrow compared to normal train tracks, but the path we are traveling next to the Animas River is pretty treacherous in my eyes. There was one spot on a tall cliffside where it felt like the shelf that had been cut into the rocks wasn’t much more than about 10 feet wide. If that wasn’t bad enough, as the rest of the passengers realized the view, they all rushed over to our side of the train. In an instant, I could see our slow-moving train teetering into the rushing water over 100 feet below. While the soot from the coal-burning steam engines is drifting all around us, it’s a small price to pay to be out here in the cattle car, having an unobstructed view of this beautiful landscape.

Axel Rieke, Ruby Rieke, and Caroline Wise in Silverton, Colorado

Our destination is the old mining town of Silverton, and we’ll be here long enough to have lunch. While some passengers opt to go back to Durango via a bus on the windy road, we have to take in every precious moment of the experience and will plod along on the train back down the mountain.

The Animas River near Durango, Colorado

It took me six years after this first visit before I brought my daughter Jessica back this way for a father-daughter adventure, and the year after that, in 2005, we brought my mother-in-law, Jutta, up for a train ride into the mountains. Back on this first visit, another passenger asked us if we’d taken the Cumbres & Toltec that runs between Antonito, Colorado, and Chama, New Mexico; we had not. That tip would take us 11 years until in 2009 over the 4th of July long weekend to finally get scheduled, and then we had to ask, “Why’d this take so long?”

John Wise on the Durango Silverton Steam Train in Colorado

No, I’m not on the caboose bringing up the rear, but I am dangerously hanging out the train so Caroline can snap a photo of me. By the time this long day came to an end at our hotel, I don’t think any of us could believe how much coal soot was being washed away. One other thing, with this trip we have fallen in love with the San Juan mountain range.