Raising the Venture Capital and strengthening the management team had taken all my energy. During the last half of 1989 and into 1990 I primarily focused on my health. I rarely visited customers. I was concerned about the engineering team. Al was working on the much improved design called the TMC-950 which we would manufacture ourselves, giving us better performance, compatibility and margins. The new TMC-950 was very late, we had projected the product would be done by mid-1988, then end of 1988, now the schedule had slipped to mid-1989.
After Al finished the MCS-350 microchannel adapter in late 1987 which was a discreet design, he began working on a new 16 bit chip that would be dual function, both AT bus and microchannel bus. He promised to deliver the product mid-1989, but again this project was running behind schedule. Tom Miller continued to get pressure from customers for 16 bit products and bus master products. While I was gone Al and Tom got into fights over the issue. After a while they stopped speaking to each other. Now Al was doing what he wanted in engineering, and Tom was doing what he wanted in sales, without any coordination between the two of them. By early 1990 the results of this dysfunction began appearing in our sales.