McAfee Virus Scan. In 1990, j•Com introduced HamBase a database of all the US ham callsigns with their addresses and birthdates. It took about 20 diskettes to hold all the data. We contracted with a new Santa Cruz company to duplicate 100 sets of diskettes for us and began selling them. Shortly after the first customers began receiving the disks, they reported problems with their computers. It turned out they were infected with a boot virus which had infected the duplication machinery at our disk duplicator. I drove "over the hill" to Sunnyvale with an infected disk and had it tested by one of the programmers huddled in the tiny McAfee and Associates office. The virus was decoded and John McAfee gave us permission to send a free copy of McAfee Virus Scan to all our infected customers. I then immediately drove to the duplication company and had them make 2,000 new diskettes with no virus on them. I never heard how many other customers suffered the same fate. Over the next few years they duplicated hundreds of thousands of diskettes for us as the database grew and j•Com thrived.

BigMouth from Talking Technology was the answering system and voicemail for j•Com. It functioned as our small office PBX, directing calls to voice mailboxes for sales and customer support when Susan was unavailable to answer the phone. It ran on an old PC under DOS. 1990 to 1993.