So just exactly what the heck is a Quasatron anyway?

Hi, My name is Kenneth C. Mazie, I own Quasatron Systems. Yup, just me. Right now I’m a one man operation. And although I do occationally do some outside work I primarily work as a systems engineer doing development work on Wintel based server systems for a very large HMO.

Some people have asked where the name Quasatron came from. This page is a timeline describing my creation of the name and where it’s been used. Yes, I did create the name on my own. There have, interestingly enough, been a few other people who have used the name also. I did my best to generate what I thought would be a unique name but alas, I guess others had the same thoughts.

When I was in high school I was very much into comic books. My mother was a commercial artist and so I was gearing my schooling towards architecture and mechanical drawing. I was pretty good at it and won a number of awards. I was never real good at freehand drawing but I started drawing my own comic book super heroes. I also had a compiled a collection of tracings I had made of my favorite heroes. I created three heroes of my own design with the intention of sending them into the comic book publishers to see if they could get picked up a real characters. The first was Polaris, the second was the Cosmic Warrior, and the third was Quasar (see where I’m leading). I never sent the drawings in but kept them around.

Eventually I got bored with drafting and since I had always been interested in electronics I moved in that direction. Around the year 1978 I got into CB radio. I spent long hours talking with buddies using the handle of “Quasar”. I started hacking up old radios to see how they worked. I got quite good at that and started doing repairs and modifications to radios for friends. I decided to create a company name that I could use when doing radio work and decided on “Quasatronics” which was a combination of “Quasar” and Electronics”. I also created “Pulsar Graphics” which never went anywhere but was used for creation of numerous form templates for some of my then current employers.

Sometime around 1983 I dropped the “ics” from the name and started using just “Quasatron”. It started as Quasatron Electronics but as I got out of the radio world and more into computers I changed it to Quasatron Systems.

From 1989 to 1994 I ran the Quasatron Systems BBS, a dial up bulletin board running the Wildcat BBS system. See this link for info: 415 BBS List and 510 BBS List. That was fun but since I hated to charge for access I eventually had to shut the system down due to lack of operating capitol.

I’ve been using the name since.

Since then I discovered that there have been a few other Quasatrons. In 1986 there was an early PC game called “Quaz atron “ for the ZX Spectrum 64. There also appears to be a Quasatron BBS of some sort in Russia. In 1980 Armitron sold a ladies wrist watch called “The Quasatron” . There also appears to have been at least two old style handheld games made by someone using the name “Quasatron” Foreign Misc. Games.

And that as they say is that….