Mark Todes has a fascinating story to tell. The South African technologist and entrepreneur is TechCentral’s guest in the final episode of season 1 of the popular TCS Legends podcast.
Todes, who is perhaps best known for helping fight Telkom’s attempts in the 1990s to extend its telecommunications monopoly to the internet, has a storied career that began in the mid-1970s in the pre-PC era of mainframes and minicomputers.
In this episode of TCS Legends, Todes tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the founding of Compustat with his long-time business partner Mendel Karpul and how they went on to develop a word processor called GhostWriter (the name of which Microsoft later tried to wrestle away from them).
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In the show, Todes chats about:
- How he and Karpul got their start selling a bureau-based accounting solution for pharmacies – and how they got their first big break. The solution was developed in Fortran using punch cards and ran on a minicomputer from Digital Equipment Corporation;
- Their development of Survey 2000, a cadastral land surveying system – their first product for personal computers (developed by Hewlett-Packard, prior to the launch of the original IBM PC);
- The development of GhostWriter, which became an early DOS-based competitor to the likes of MultiMate, WordStar and WordPerfect.
- The launch of Internet Africa, a pioneering South African internet service provider that was later sold to Datatec (and later to Naspers);
- The early days of the internet industry in South Africa, the formation of the Internet Service Providers’ Association and the existential fight with Telkom over whether the telecoms operator’s government-sanctioned monopoly included the provision of internet services;
- Working with Naspers, Mweb and the late Antonie Roux;
- The launch of Korbitec (and its later sale to Naspers); and
- How he and Karpul became early pioneers in the CD-ROM business.
There’s much more than this to Todes’s story, making him one of the true legends of South Africa’s technology industry. Don’t miss this concluding episode of season 1 of TCS Legends. The series will return for season 2 in 2025.
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