Even since I was a child, I would put the name "Thunder Enterprises", a company that I had "made up" on my first Radio Shack color computer with 16K of RAM on my DOS boot-up screen. The Radio Shack color computer used a tape player/recorder to load programs into and off of the machine. It took up to 20 minutes to transfer a text based game to the PC for playing. At age 11, I sold that computer for $400.00 to put towards buying an Apple IIe and decided I really liked putting people with technology they wanted.
Fast forward 15 years, and the childhood dream became a reality. Our company began in 1996 as Thunder Enterprises. Our mission was (and still is) to sell a high quality PC and better inform consumers about "what's in that box", e.g., inside the PC. As a one man operation operating a hobby on a part-time basis, I signed up as a reseller from Midwest Micro.
Back then Midwest Micro was a medium size, privately owned PC manufacturing business. Their only brand, Infotel, developed 10 mbit lan cards and other ISA cards such as modems for PC's. Before I knew it, My Thunder Enterprises hobby became a real enterprise with over $50,000.00 worth of sales each year. The PC's Midwest Micro built, and still build for me, under my private label use all top-quality components. I know each company that manufacturers the drives, motherboards, video cards, memory, optical disk drives in the PC. You put top quality components in a PC and it will last. It's just that simple.
At the time, the big box stores put bottom of the barrel technology in their PC's. Remember Packard-Bell computers? Well, they were huge then, but gone now, as their quality was, let's just say, inferior, ok? I remember people getting quotes to repair a motherboard which cost more than the whole PC did originally. Crazy, huh? But I digress, here's more of the story.
In 1998, as a marketing director in my full time job, I made an executive decision to rebrand the company from an "enterprise" to a "computer" company so to build a brand image. I chose the name Warp10 Computers. Being a sci-fi nerd, and watching Star Trek Voyager at the time, Warp10 was known as the theoretical fastest speed in the universe. I thought that would be a good monacle for a company that sells fast computers. I created this logo, which was basically a ripoff of the Starfleet insignia. The bottom right corner is actually written in Klingon. While way cool, it did not have a "universal" appeal, pun intended and implied.
In 2000, I changed professions from Marketing to Information Technology within the same company. I studied for and took my Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer classes over a 6 week period and I never failed a profeciency exam. As the IT "guru" within my company, nearly every employee there had me coming to their house to work on their PC's. At the time I charged $40 per hour and was busy 2 or 3 nights per week.
At the same time, some other dreams of mine had come to fruition, my wife, Laurie and I bought some land on Foley Drive which I had driven by for the last 15 years thinking, that would be a great place to build a house. We build a house and two months later, Laurie was pregnant with our first child. It was a time full of wonder and fear as the stock market had a crash and we were left with very little money to pay the mortgage.
We kept moving forward, but Warp10 Computers kinda quieted down. I no longer promoted the company and would only take jobs for good friends who had nowhere else to turn for PC support.
We made it to 2006, and I was forced out of the company I had been with for nearly 15 years. Within three months I had found another job as the quality manager of a tier one supplier to Chrylser. I also did their IT which was not really a challenge as we were not the principal location. Email was outsourced, and their biggest technology challenge was a stand-alone system which interfaced with the Union Pacific Railroad.
Fast forward another two years, to July 2008 and the new economic challenges has brought a fast end to the Chrysler North van plant where most of our work came from. I decided that I would not go gently into that good night and left the company.
I decided that it was time for me to do Computer work full-time. I really enjoy helping people. I'm more of a 'teach a man to fish" than a "give a man a fish"kind of guy.
I decided to rebrand again into something that had an animal, because I am a avid fan of the Belleville humane society where I have rescued 4 animals over the years. As fate would have it, my son played the Rock band game at my sister's house, and on the way home kept singing Bon Jovi's 1980's hit "Dead or Alive". He kept singing, "I'm wanted, on a steel horse I ride, I'm wanted...dead or alive".
So, Steel Horse Computers was forged. I can't imagine a better mascot than the horse. The horse helped the Spanish conquer the Americas, the cowboys conquer the old west, and everyone still watches the Kentucky Derby to see which horse is the fastest. We owe a lot of our progress though the ages to the horse. So, I feel a horse, a Steel Horse, is what you can rely on as your trusty steed to help you through the digital age.
As it was in the beginning and is now, we're available 24 hours per day to provide the best quality customer service and computers that exist in the market. We may not always be the lowest price, but you can count on the Steel Horse.