Mike’s career started in 1984, when he landed a summer intern job with Honeywell's Marine Systems Division in West Covina, CA. A year later he was back again at Honeywell as a permanent employee while continuing his BS Engineering degree at Cal Poly, Pomona. The early years at Honeywell were in various support roles for projects and computer systems as both an admin for Lisa’s, Mac’s and PC’s, and then moving on to Data General, VAX and UNIX Systems support and administration.
One of these projects involved image processing work for the GBU-15 (Guided Bomb Unit) weapon simulator. Mike became very interested in this field and spent the next 10 years working in image processing for aerial and space reconnaissance programs. This involved everything from color balancing of target inserts into digitized photos, to orthorectifying satellite data and material classification from hyperspectral sensors.
In late 1993, Hughes Aircraft (Hughes had bought the Honeywell Division Mike was working with) was developing a new HyperSpectral sensor called the Wedge Imaging Spectrometer (WIS). Satellites often have 5 or 10 imaging bands, and are called MultiSpectral. WIS collected data across a maximum of 722 imaging bands. Here's one way to put that into perspective: your typical computer monitor can display 24 bits of color for every pixel on the screen, WIS provided over 8000 bits of color for every pixel. Mike developed an application for WIS that was entered into a contest run by the people that developed the IDL programming language. The application won first prize for its category, which was a $1,500 IDL license. Hughes management discovered it would cost more time and effort to put the software package into the Hughes system than it would cost to purchase it directly. Mike was told to take the IDL package home, instead.
Shortly afterwards, Hughes was going to shut down the Santa Barbara plant Mike was working at and move everyone to El Segundo. Mike, along with several other employees, became a contractor and consultant at that point and began bidding on and winning projects within Hughes, and eventually several other companies. Our first company name was Custom Data Visualizations, which was a mouthful. This was eventually shortened to Custom Visuals in 2003.
Rhonda is involved in running the daily aspects of the business, while Mike concentrates on the development and system administration for the projects. Rhonda brings a background of business administration, customer service, marketing and promotion and is generally the customer-oriented side of the business. Rhonda’s background includes front and back office work, unit coordinator and other positions in a variety of medical facilities. She has started and managed massage therapy businesses within chiropractic offices and resorts. She has worked as public relations director for a non-profit and promotional director for authors.