Daniel Meyer

Daniel Meyer was the founder and president of Southwest Technical Products Corporation. He was born in New Braunfels, Texas and raised in San Marcos, Texas, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics in 1957 from Southwest Texas State. After college he married and moved to San Antonio to become a research engineer in the electrical engineering department of Southwest Research Institute. He soon started writing hobbyist articles.

The first article appeared in Electronics World (May 1960), and later he had a two-part cover feature for Radio-Electronics (October–November 1962). The March 1963 issue of Popular Electronics featured his ultrasonic listening device on the cover. The projects would often require a printed circuit board or specialized components that were not available at the local electronics parts store, so readers could purchase them directly from him. Meyer saw the business opportunity in providing circuit boards and parts for the Popular Electronics projects, and in January 1964 he left Southwest Research Institute to start an electronics kit company.

He continued to write articles and ran the mail order kit business from his home garage in San Antonio, Texas. By 1965 he was providing kits for other authors such as Lou Garner. In 1967 Meyer sold a kit for Don Lancaster's "IC-67 Metal Locator." In early 1967 he moved his growing business from his home to a new building on a 3-acre site in San Antonio, and The Daniel E. Meyer Company (DEMCO) became Southwest Technical Products Corporation (SWTPC) that fall.

In the first ten years of SWTPC, the most popular products were audio kits followed by test equipment. There was also that very 1970s material such as color organs that would synchronize colored lights with music, and strobe lights. He developed a series of audio power amplifiers known as Tigers, which are still in use today. Don Lancaster developed a series of decimal readout counters and voltmeters that used the latest technology.

In mid-1975, Meyer asked one of his engineers, Gary Kay, to design a computer based on the Motorola 6800 design kit. The first deliveries were in November 1975. In June 1976 SWTPC introduced the AC-30 Cassette Interface for data storage and the PR-40 printer, making it possible to obtain a complete computer system for about $1,500. Many of the early hobbyist computer companies were founded by engineers who did not know how to run a business and folded within a year or so. SWTPC had been successful in the kit business for over a decade and was therefore able to deliver working products.

Floppy disk systems, full-feature terminals, and many peripherals were added in 1977. The bus structure was called the SS-50, and soon many other vendors were making add-in cards and complete systems. In 1979 SWTPC introduced a new line based on the Motorola 6809 processor, and these systems were produced until the mid-1980s. By then the IBM PC was dominating the personal computer world, and SWTPC shifted to point-of-sale systems.