P. W. Bill Bailey III

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Bill Bailey (born Percy William Bailey III, July 21, 1948) is a serial entrepreneur and inventor living in Texas. Bailey's inventions range from machine tools to computer software and laser printer hardware. The typeface software products his companies developed were either the first or among the first of each generation as the microcomputer software market matured, and produced some of the first TrueType Fonts for the World Wide Web.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Professional career 3 Personal life 4 References

[edit] Biography

Bill Bailey was born in Buffalo, New York, where his father, P.W. "Bill" Bailey, Jr. was attending medical school at the University of Buffalo. The family moved to Galveston, Texas in 1949, where Dr. Bailey completed his residency in Psychiatry and Neurology at John Sealy Hospital. His formative years were spent in Corpus Christi, Texas. Bailey joined the U.S. Army in 1967, where he spent two years in Việt Nam as a Crew Chief on the maintenance helicopter that supplied a mechanized Air Cavalry troop. Bill flew over 900 hours in Viet Nam, and received nine Air Medals. The UH-1H Huey Helicopter, 68-15482,which Bailey crewed on is still in service 37 years later, and is now owned by the Air Force of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bailey's unit, (518th TC Detachment to D Troop, 2nd Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, Mechanized) received the Presidential Unit Citation.

After his US Army service, Bailey spent three years as the general manager of a regional industrial tool company, and left to attend college at Lamar University under the G.I. Bill.

[edit] Professional career

After college, Bailey moved to Houston in 1977, where he started Tooling Systems, a machine tool manufacturing company to build his first invention, the ThredMil, a device that circularly interpolated large internal threads in the blind holes of Oil Well Blowout Preventers. This device replaced the time consuming method of tapping that was previously used, and saved eight hours of manufacturing time per assembly, with an equivalent savings in tooling costs. This device required a specialized computer program to operate and Bailey wrote the program to drive this tool in the Compact II language for CNC machining centers.

In 1983, after the Oil Industry experienced its largest-ever decline, and the Hughes Operating Rig Count in the United States dropped from over 5,000 rigs to under 1,000, the business of building blowout preventers virtually disappeared.

Bailey had been doing contract programming work for Palantir Software,^[1] and eventually took a job full time with the software company that published word processing software, where he wrote terminal and printer drivers in 8080/8086 assembly language. Among his first projects was the first right-justified proportional driver for the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet Classic, and was displayed at the HP booth at Comdex in Las Vegas during the introduction of the first LaserJet to the public in 1984. Bailey worked on the teams that produced MacType, the first typing tutor for the Macintosh Classic, and was on the team that wrote the first PostScript MS-DOS-based printer driver for the Apple LaserWriter in 1985.

When Palantir Software, a venture capital-funded start-up funded by a partner of Fund Manager Fayez Sarofim folded, Bailey and Palantir Sales manager Don Holcomb started The Font Factory, Inc.

From 1985 to 1989, as Executive Vice President of Engineering for The Font Factory, Inc., Bailey provided the engineering for the Company. Bailey designed typefaces using the MetaFont typeface design program developed by Donald Knuth, and developed typeface related software and drivers for the OEM market.

In 1988, Bailey created WinFonts and FontMaker, the first Windows-based scalable type programs based on Monotype Typography's (then Compugraphic) Intellifont technology. Although the underlying technology was robust, In that era, PCs did not have the horsepower to run the program in real time, and eventually Microsoft introduced Windows 3.1 which included a TrueType rasterizer built in to the operating system, and the program was made obsolete.

In 1990, after selling his interest in The Font Factory, Bailey formed TypeHaus, Inc. to produce OEM hardware and products for the Digital Printing Industry. All of the HP LaserJets and most from other manufacturers that are sold in Central and Eastern Europe have Cyrillic script typefaces which Bailey designed for Agfa Monotype.

Dense-Pac Microsystems purchased TypeHaus from Bailey in 1997, and retained him as President in order to diversify their product line beyond military applications. At Dense-Pac, Bailey invented the CheckBox, the first commercial product in the US to employ Secure Digital Flash Memory, which Hewlett-Packard marketed under the name 36599A Secure Font Box In a leveraged buyout in 2000, Bailey, along with Company vice president Dan Jakle, purchased the module manufacturing and printer peripheral business from Dense-Pac. Bailey sold his interest in the Company to XFM systems, a San-Diego based manufacturer, in September 2002 and retired.

Bailey came out of retirement in 2003 and is now working as an executive mentor and corporate transformation consultant.

[edit] Personal life

Bailey lives in Parker, Texas, the home of Southfork Ranch with his wife, Gabrielle Nikolin.

[edit] References

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Persondata
NAME	Bailey, P.W. Bill, III
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Bill Bailey
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Inventor and Serial Entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH	1948
PLACE OF BIRTH	Buffalo, New York
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH