During Bob's time at SECO/Warwick, he was a Project Manager and later Manager of R&D. SECO/Warwick is a manufacturer of Industrial Furnaces for heat treating metals. Much of the equipment they build is custom and required calculations for heat transfer, strength of material, as well as electrical design.
In the late 1970's, calculators were becoming powerful enough to be programmed. Bob saw the value of these programmable calculators to do in minutes what previously took hours.