Check out the How To Trade It podcast with Casey Stubbs titled Preventing "Slippage." He asked EddieZ how EZ Trading Computers got started. The transcript is below or you can listen on the player below.
Casey:
Hello, everyone, this is Casey Stubs from the How to Trade It Podcast. Today, we are here with Eddie Z, the creator, and CEO of EZ Trading Computers. Thank you, Eddie, for being here today.EddieZ:
Oh, thanks so much for having me. Absolute pleasure.Casey:
I am really excited about this because I'm a tech nerd. I like tech. I like everything about tech and this is going to be a lot of fun today. We haven't had a guest talking about trading computers. I think that it's a very underserved area because you see a lot of trading education, a lot of stuff about how to trade, which is much needed of course, but then there's another side to it, which is the technology side and that's making sure you have the right equipment. So, thanks for being on the show today.EddieZ:
Awesome. Very happy to be here and what you say is so true.Casey:
I guess we'll start out just by asking, because I'm really curious, how did you get started with the tech side and being interested in computers?EddieZ:
So, I'll try to summarize it really quickly. It is a bit of a long story, but I've always been kind of a technology nerd. My very first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. What happened was, I was in about sixth grade, like 1980, and the janitor wheels in this Apple II into the classroom. Actually, that’s not what happened. What happened was that the janitor wheeled in a TRS 80 into the classroom and my friend sitting next to me goes, “Oh that thing's a piece of garbage. Come over after school and I'll show you a real computer.” He brings me over to his house after school and he had an Apple II that his older brother had set up. This Apple II had this little modem to the side of it. It was like this little rubber thing that you dialed a number and you plugged the receiver into these little rubber cups. And these words were streaming across the screen. And what it was, was an electronic bulletin board. His brother had set up a bulletin board, which is kind of the predecessor to a website. He set up this bulletin board called the Bat Cave and people were calling in one at a time on a local phone number and posting these messages on his computer. Now I thought that was the coolest thing in the world. I'm like, this is so cool. I began a campaign to my parents to get me a computer for the holidays and what showed up under my tree was not an Apple II, it was a Commodore VIC-20. I don't know if you know anything about the Commodore VIC-20, but this thing had 3.5K. We have more RAM in our washing machines today. I mean it's like a joke. The stuff that came with it had a little cassette player. The hard drive was a cassette player and the programs were on cassettes. They took 45 minutes to load. They never loaded properly. I hated this thing. One night, like a couple of days that I had it after my parents went to bed, I pried it open with the screwdriver because I was determined. I'm like 10-years-old. I pried the computer open with a screwdriver to see what was wrong with it. Like why is this thing so underpowered? Obviously, I knew nothing about electronics, but that kind of began the geekhood that I followed trying to always get bigger, stronger, more powerful computers. And the next computer I got after that was a Commodore 64. But my first computer for trading, so when I started as a stockbroker in 1993. I get hired at this firm and they put me in a cubicle and the computer had a green screen and I had to share it with the guy next to me. This guy had already been there like three years and he dominated like 80% of the symbols. These little screens back then didn't hold a lot of symbols anyway. I knew how to make it so we could add a screen and so I could watch my symbols. I went to the branch manager and I said, “I want to do surgery on this computer. I know we can make it support more monitors and then I can have more screens.” I talked him into it and I was able to get another monitor hooked to it and see my symbols. It was really hard to get multiple monitors back then, but then like Windows 95 opened up multiple monitors. I became a stockbroker, like I said, in 1993. I was a stockbroker for 17 years. Having as many symbols in front of me was really important throughout my career. I was always trying to make my computer bigger, more powerful, and stronger. Multiple monitors, that was my thing.Casey:
So that first computer that you said that you set up multiple monitors. What kind of monitor was it and what kind of computer?EddieZ:
Oh my goodness, I don't really remember. It was a PC and it was before Windows. It didn't even have Windows on it.Casey:
So even before Windows 3.0, which I think might have been the first version of Windows.EddieZ:
Okay, yes, I think so. I don't remember what year that was. It was before Windows 95.Casey:
Yeah, it was the one Windows before 95? Yeah, it was early 90s.EddieZ:
Maybe it was Windows 3. I don't remember.Casey:
Before that, it was just DOS.EddieZ:
And the first version was three?Casey:
Oh, I think the first...EddieZ:
I want to say it was maybe DOS.Casey:
Yeah, because that was the green screen. You couldn't navigate with a mouse. It was all typing.EddieZ:
I know I'm lying, I'm lying. The screen was black and the symbols were in color.Casey:
Okay.EddieZ:
The background was black and there was no adjusting anything. There was no adjustments.Casey:
Yeah. That's really interesting. The reason I'm just so interested by it because I can't remember the first time I got dual monitors. It was way after when you said, I mean, I think my first time I did dual monitors was maybe 2000 something. Maybe 2005?EddieZ:
That’s when most people even thought about it.Casey:
Yeah, but wow!EddieZ:
I had those big old CR. When I was a stockbroker, I had four of those big old CRTs on my desk. It was pretty crazy.Casey:
Well those old monitors were so big and heavy.EddieZ:
Heavy. Thank God we don't use those anymore.Casey:
Yeah. My first computer was a Texas Instruments. It was a Texas Instruments 99.EddieZ:
Oh yeah!Casey:
And they plugged them...you connected it to your TV.EddieZ:
Right. That's how the Commodore 64 was and the VIC-20, you connected it to your TV.Casey:
Yeah, and that was a lot of fun. Me and my brother would program basic. Because they had basic programming. I was more of a big-picture thinker and I hate details. I forced my brother, I said, we're going to start a business. I forced my brother to learn programming. He learned how to code in basic and I'm thinking up all the ideas. It's funny, to this day he's a computer programmer for Living Business Trader.EddieZ:
That's cool.Casey:
Yeah. We got started really getting interested in tech because of my aunt. I'm from Portland, Oregon, and Intel has a really big presence there. A lot of fabs, where they make chips. My aunt was working at Intel and she would bring home old computer parts that Intel would discard and she'd bring them home and she would show us how to build computers and stuff like that.EddieZ:
Awesome. They throw away a lot of what they call defective merchandise that actually works fine. It is just like some little, tiny aspect of it is slightly out of spec. And so even though it works, they don't want to sell it. That’s like a chip manufacturer.Casey:
That was like gold for us. You know, we would learn how to take computers apart, put them together and it was great.* * * * * *
