1960's

Frank Mogavero founded the predecessor to DSW in 1960 after learning much about the industry at that time as a salesman for the Burroughs Corp. in Los Angeles. This followed his degree from UCLA in Marketing and Accounting received in 1957 after two years in the military as a cryptographer during the Korean War.

After leaving the military, Frank worked as plant accountant for Pillsbury Corp. and after a short tenure, decided to go to work for the Burroughs Corp. (which at the time was one of the leaders in the accounting solution industry).

A debilitating illness forced Frank to seek an entry to his own business as the large corporations did not care to have someone in their employ who was diagnosed as requiring surgery to place him in a lifetime position of either being in a permanent lying or sitting position. Fortunately, a supposed “quack” doctor treated Frank with his special techniques and Frank never required the surgery the expert specialists felt was needed. This brought home the fact that pioneering and new ideas could change things for the better and thus spawned the beginning of what became the largest independent dealer of its kind in the United States. That company became Bookkeeping Machines Company and later Business Machines and Computers.  BMC was founded with $300, the life savings of Bea and Frank Mogavero.

At that time there was no distribution of new accounting or computer equipment. In fact, the computer equipment of that time was mechanical accounting machines, not computers as we know them today. But these machines did accounting applications such as invoicing, payroll, accounts payable, accounts receivable, etc. Prices at that time were from $5000 to $35,000 in dollars of the early 60’s.

This equipment could only be purchased directly from the manufacturer. Thus, the need to buy used equipment, refurbish, reprogram and then resell it. A new industry was born, much to the chagrin of the manufacturers who did everything they could to stop us from reselling their products.

However, by building a strong service organization, something we feel is extremely important to this day, we not only resold but were able to service products from many manufacturers, allowing our customers such as banks, savings, commercial and government to have one company responsible for the maintenance of their equipment. Another new concept in the industry.

To communicate and cooperate with other companies who were trying to develop similar businesses, Frank in 1963, along with six other people, founded AMDA. The Accounting Machine Dealers of America. It grew to international proportions with dealers in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe. As President and Chairman, Frank developed the first “Blue Book” for the industry covering descriptions of equipment, pricing in different areas and places to find the merchandise. It was another innovation which became extremely valuable in this new industry. This was especially important because of the hostility of the manufacturers toward those of us who dared to resell their equipment.

BMC grew to five locations in California and worked with other resellers around the US through the AMDA organization much as DSW does today with the 1Nservice organization.

How our product line developed:

We began refurbishing IBM unit record equipment such as keypunches, sorters, collators, large accounting /printers. IBM would not service them but the courts forced IBM to service refurbished equipment of their brand if it was brought to their standards. Another pioneering feat which BMC sparkplugged.

With the advent of paper tape equipment such as Friden which later was purchased by Singer, BMC began connecting paper tape and punch card units to accounting machines. This allowed BMC to sell, service the accounting equipment and to then process information in our datacenter. 

The datacenter was a large room with raised flooring, air conditioning and utilizing an IBM 360 computer which we leased from IBM at $7200 a month. At that time the disk was only 4KB (not a printing error) so we converted everything to magnetic tape and did the processing in that manner.

1970's

DSW begin life as Data Systems West in 1971 along with its sister company Mogavero & Associates who carried on the tradition of BMC, focusing on the accounting machine business. DSW grew gradually during the 1970’s focusing on the resale of mini-computer systems with custom business application software. As the advent of microcomputers began to spread, Frank Mogavero, DSW’s founding father, opened a retail location in San Gabriel selling refurbished mini-computers, programming services, and accounting machines. Recognizing the price performance of micro-computers, in 1977, DSW began to sell some of the first multi-user microcomputers, from IBC in Chatsworth, California which utilized the Oasis operating system, 8” magnetic drives for storage of up to 160,000 bites of data and data products line printers. In 1978, DSW began selling Commodore PET microcomputers to school districts and in 1979, Phil Mogavero joined the company part time to help market Commodore 8032 (80 columns, 32kb RAM) microcomputers for word-processing applications using WordPro software and spreadsheet applications using Visicalcs. With solutions priced with an Okidata dot matrix printer or Diablo 630 daisy wheel printer and business software for under $10,000, the micro-computer revolution had begun.

1980's

In 1982, Commodore introduced the C64 color microcomputer with a retail price of $595 which offered more graphic capability at a price which was less than half of the competing Apple computer. Frank Mogavero once again saw a shift in technology, upgrading his San Gabriel office with one of the first retail computer stores in the country. Selling thousands of Commodore 64s, DSW developed a solid reputation as a local retailer, drawing clients from across the globe to purchase software and systems.  With the success of the Commodore Computer products, DSW added a flagship store in Sherman Oaks, with another branch in Thousand Oaks.

The early years of DSW were exciting. With retail stores throughout the Los Angeles area, DSW often provided computers and systems to the place for many well known movie, and media stars Bob Newhart, Stan Lee (author of Spider Man, Captain Marvel and others), Jack Jones, Robbie Benson, Bruce Durn, Morgan Fairchild, John LaRoquette and others frequented the early DSW retail locations.

Using the stores as a foundation, DSW expanded into business computers offering the CP/M (Control Programs for Microcomputers) operating system from Morrow Designs, Kaypro and Osborne. DSW grew to become the second largest retailer of Morrow products in the country, servicing the entire west coast. These systems leveraged Visicalc and Supercalc as the spreadsheet, along Wordstar and Spellbinder as the word processor. In 1983, the IBM personal computer was introduced to the market utilizing a brand new operating system called MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System. DSW begin to sell that product along with a slew of compatible products from ATT, Columbia, Corona, Eagle, NCR and Zenith. These machines offered 10 times the memory capacity of the CP/M computers along with 80 column screens and color graphics.

DSW leveraged the microcomputer power, along with Santa Cruz Operations (SCO), a California based company, who had developed a computer operating system first known as Xenix (later known as UNIX) to provide multi-user business systems at a fraction of the cost of the mini-computer alternatives. In 1985, DSW begin to deploy some of the first network systems, leveraging Novell file serving software and Synoptic’s ten mbps twisted-pair Ethernet network hardware. Shortly thereafter, DSW took this a step further, leveraging Novell, Synoptics and the Unix operating system with TCP/IP and NFS to build one of the first multi-protocol (TCP/IP & IPX) integrated networks, allowing PC’s to connect to both Novell file services and an NCR Tower minicomputer.

As the popularity and convenience of multi-user platforms developed momentum, while office chains began to market personal computers, DSW consolidated the retail stores in 1989, and re-focused the business on providing networking equipment, and consulting services for the corporate environment.

During the 1980’s DSW became part of the National Advisory Reseller Councils for SCO, Novell, Microsoft, Zenith (which purchased the Morrow Designs product) Sun Microsystems and Sunsoft.

1990's

In 1990, DSW was still working to define its identity and stuck at $2M in annual revenue. During the 90’s however, the microcomputer industry grew significantly and DSW saw its growth skyrocket to $35M in revenue with compounded annual growth of 28% and nearly 100 employees.

The growth began as DSW moved into a 4500 foot facility in Woodland Hills and had planned to focus on consulting solutions only, avoiding low-margin hardware. One of DSW’s first projects was for the Prudential – designing a wide area network to communicate data securely between sites with connection to a mainframe system in its corporate headquarters. DSW recommend servers from Novell, terminal emulation from DCA, Ethernet hubs from Synoptics, and routers from a company called Cisco. Upon design completion, Prudential asked DSW to provide a complete solution including the resale of the hardware and software. While we recognized the value of consulting, we recognized what customers really want is a firm they can trust for the entire project – design the solution, sell the hardware and successfully implement the solution.  Once DSW successfully built this solution for two locations at Prudential, this $50,000 consulting project grew to $7 million, 23 locations and a multi-year relationship with DSW besting EDS as Prudential’s network integrator.

In 1995, DSW was presented with a challenge from Oracle and Netscape – integrate their products together so that a web browser could connect to a database, such that Times Mirror personnel could update human resource records themselves, saving countless hours by HR personnel to input and update this information. DSW responded once again by developing one of the first “intranet” applications in the world, developing a custom application which allowed the Netscape browser to connect to Oracle utilizing a public domain piece of software called the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). This development propelled DSW’s application development business into a multi-million dollar business where DSW built numerous intranet applications for large law, aerospace, telecommunications, insurance and new internet firms. To insure security, DSW design, sold and implemented some of the first firewall technology from Checkpoint, Axent/Raptor and Cisco Private Internet Exchange. DSW also developed a substantial amount of Oracle applications and deployed large Sun servers comprised of as many as 32 processors to house them and provide the transaction speed to support the brand new business model. During this time, Mike Mogavero re-joined DSW to propel its application development business forward using a new quick development process called iSpeed. In 1999 DSW had outgrown its 11,000 square foot facility and moved to a new 20,000 square foot facility which included a raised floor datacenter aptly named B2N (Business to Net). A custom portal was developed, with automated tracking and support alarms, allowing DSW to provide 7x24 operational support for many of the applications DSW had built and supported. The new datacenter has been equipped with high speed fiber connectivity from multiple transport providers, redundant power, generator, redundant A/C, high speed LAN, security and backup on tap and responsive support.

2000's

The first part of the decade was met with the dot-com implosion, 9/11 and economic contraction, causing many firms to dramatically reduce technology spending. For DSW; however, the B2n hosting business grew quickly as many customers recognized that DSW offered a much more affordable model that delivered greater uptime for specialized operations such as database, web services, networking and security support than generalized IT could deliver. In 2004, DSW introduced its Secure Network Application Platform (SNAP) lab to provide a thoroughly tested platform to offer secure communications versus the myriad of piecemeal security solutions in the market. In 2006, DSW launched its Intelligent IT Solutions tag line to articulate a new way to provide IT solutions as a culmination of DSW’s constant concern to deliver greater value than cost while fostering open systems communication capability and establishing the fourth utility – Ethernet as a fundamental building system component as essential as power, water and gas. As we look forward to the remaining portion of this decade, DSW will accelerate our offerings into facility systems, leveraging IT technology to deliver a greater amount of value at all times – helping to migrate proprietary systems such as voice, access control and video surveillance to Ethernet, while providing IT efficiency to building systems in a quest to save energy waste and cost. We will continue to incorporate the management of these devices into our B2n Portal platform and train our resources to offer exceptional support.

Thank you to all of those that have traveled with us over these many decades. We look forward to continuing to add value and growing our relationships each and every day.

Sincerely,
Frank, Phil, Mike Mogavero and the Entire DSW Team