What does that actually mean?
It means that since 1994, staying current hasn't been optional. It's been the job. ALWAYS BE: Solving Problems, Re-Training, Fixing Things and Designing Things and Building Things, and Always Be Learning Things. Always keep up with the Industry and Vendor Things... Pretty simple.
Wrote an elaborate business plan with the wonderful SCORE volunteers, pleased the SBA, and secured an actual bank loan. Computer.doc was opened in Osage Beach as a retail computer store, with a service division. Floppy disks, printer ribbons, and dozens of bizarre cables were sold from the shelves while the small staff also drove to locations to fix PCs. Our first workshop repaired and upgraded computers, and soon fabricated our own brand.
We were busy with gnarly coax cable, proprietary network cards, and early ethernet slow stuff. LANtastic and ARCnet tied DOS and CP/M workstations together until the Novell big bang. Windows 3.x on top of DOS hooked to Novell servers became productive, with crazy apps like WordStar, Q&A, dBase III — and then early Quicken showed up. Could the folks ask for any more?
We became an ISP. Real internet access — delivered over phone lines at speeds that would make you weep today. Dial-up plans, busy signals, and the occasional modem handshake at 2 AM. It was glorious. (Ouch.)
One of our clients told us that most people were already calling the business "Cdoc" as shorthand, and that it was pronounced SEA Dock. We stole that for our first domain name, cdoc.net, and the short name started being used everywhere.
Not for the faint of heart, or for sane people to attempt — but hosting and email were business opportunities. Cdoc bought and built networking gear, signed up for a Very Expensive internet connection, and did business. But then…
We were in business for a couple of months before SPAMmers, network worms, viruses, or hackers really existed — if you can believe such a thing. Then there was trouble, and we needed network security.
After working with ordinary firewalls that disappointed us one too many times, we built our own. The first MooseWall was born out of necessity and stubbornness — two qualities that have served us well ever since.
Cdoc had to get the new-wave Wireless Fidelity protocols working for clients — and they were ugly, security nightmares. But we needed the connectivity. Portable medical devices and Volvo repair apps for marine mechanics were showing up everywhere before WiFi was working very well. The Cdoc WiFi Lab was established, and we Fixed Things.
Cdoc Labs was also called up to mitigate the World Destroying Y2K Event, and was successful. "Saving The World From Y2K Doomsday™" turned out to be easier than dealing with Windows 98, Windows ME, and other horror stories — but everyone survived those, too.
Cdoc again had to adapt. E-commerce was starting to rule and change the entire supply chain business. The cloud was emerging.
Ransomware. Phishing. Remote work. Cloud services. The threat landscape grew up fast and so did we. Network security stopped being optional and became the whole game. Firewalls got smarter, VPNs became essential, and the idea of a "perimeter" to defend basically dissolved. We kept up.
More vulnerability scans, more interior LAN sniffing — but do-able. There are now a lot more cool tools to get this done. Old, broken TLS and other crypto standards were replaced with new stuff in response to worldwide security events.
By 2024, Cdoc management had decided to convert most every business workflow into an AI-enhanced environment, then launched the Cdoc Labs version.
The same hands that once cleaned floppy drive heads are now prompting Large Language Models. We evaluated all of the AI on the market, figured out how to run our business on it without leaking client data, and have moved everything — from basic PC repair issues to large complex network questions — to AI.
(Of course, our AI Claude, who did our website, is our favorite.)
It's not a marketing slogan. It's a survival strategy that accidentally became a philosophy.
It means we've done the work to understand it — not just read about it. We use AI tools ourselves, every day, for real tasks. We know where they're extraordinary and where they're still awkward. We know how to prompt them, how to verify their output, and how to build workflows around them that actually save time.
When you're ready to bring AI into your business — whether that's automating repetitive work, building smarter systems, or just figuring out what the fuss is about — we can help you do it practically, without the hype and without the nonsense.
Because that's what we do. We learn the new thing, we figure out how it actually works, and we put it to use for the people we serve. We've been doing exactly that since 1994.
Curious where all this comes from? → Cdoc Laboratories