Biography of Bill Woelk

I have been building and working with PCs since I first caught the bug and built my first IBM-PC XT clone back in 1986. I was working for Moore North America, Inc. at the time, repairing mainframe after-writing computer forms processing equipment. My employer was quick to jump on the IBM PC bandwagon in the early eighties and thought that it was important for all of their customer engineers to learn about micro computers. Moore even started a new division of the company called Moore Business Systems, Inc., that serviced: Altos, IBM and Compaq business computers. Dell and Gateway were not even around yet at that time.

My manager gave me an empty PC-XT shell along with a few extra parts he had lying around the shop and told me to take them home and have a crack at building my own computer. I mailed ordered some additional parts and the  RAM memory chips I needed and soon ended up with a 10 MHz PC-XT clone system. It featured one full height 5.25" 360 KB floppy drive and a used, very flaky, 20 MB (yes, MB not GB) Microscience hard drive. Not exactly state of the art even for that era. Later on, I swapped a customer for some service on a large UPS in exchange for an NEC thimble printer he had collecting dust. I next purchased a used 13" NEC Multisync EGA monitor from an auction. Now I was in business with my new PC-XT running all kinds of DOS software at home and able to print out reports and perform basic text based word processing. I enjoyed it and I was soon thoroughly hooked.

Pretty soon the IBM-XT was getting too slow, so I next upgraded it by installing an NEC VIC-20 CPU. The VIC-20 was quickly superseded by a new mainboard and an Intel 286-16 MHz processor. This was followed a few years later by another Intel 486-33 MHz clone system, complete with a whopping 4 megabytes of fast page frame memory.

Around the late nineteen eighties, many of the business forms salesmen that worked for Moore starting buying PC's for business use at home. Since I had a reputation at this time for being a PC geek, I was getting frequent requests to come over and fix various PC problems. They bribed me with free beer, food, Etc. At first I did not even charge for my time, but soon these sales reps started telling their friends and more and more people starting calling me for PC help.

Pretty soon I found myself in business fixing mostly residential PC's in and around the Detroit area as word about me continued to spread. The new business needed a name so I started putting User Friendly Computers at the top of my invoices. I later found out how popular that name was, when I went to register my new business name with oakland County. Hence the need to add the Royal Oak at the end. As I became more knowledgeable about networks I started getting more referrals and calls from local area businesses.

If you are having PC problems and are tired of getting the run-around from the foreign, fast talking, telephone support jockeys at the major tier one providers, feel free to give me a call and we can discuss your problem(s). I promise not to make you wait an average of 20 minutes on hold either! Even if I can't help you with your specific problem, I do have a network of friends and associates who specialize in such fields as computer programming, web page design, and small business server support.

For friendly, knowledgeable PC service, please call Bill Woelk at 248-585-9132 for a free estimate.

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