Birth date: Jan 23, 1947 Death date: Feb 8, 2017
On February 7, 2017, the pearly gates of Heaven opened and welcomed Charles Robert “Chuck” O’Neal, Jr. to his heavenly home. He was born January 23, 1947, in Gainesville, TX. to Charles Robert O’Neal, Sr. and Peggy Jean O’Neal. He Read Obituary
I love to remember the times spent at the camp on Lake Texoma. Fishing and games were a great bonding with our new family, Aunt Peggy & Uncle Charles, Chuck & Peggy Leigh, Nannie and Grandad Aldridge. I can still taste those fresh caught bream fried with a crunchy crust by Nannie. Happy Days how I wish you were here again.
Rest in Peace, Chuck
Your Cousin, Shirley
I knew Mr. O'Neal for several years through his quick print business, first when it was located downtown, I believe on the same city block as the Post Office building, before the row of buildings that included radio station KFRO was demolished. If I remember right, Mr. O'Neal's business may have been located in one of the retail spaces on the street level of the old hotel in downtown Longview -- which back in the days of the East Texas Oil Boom, was actually one of the very early properties built by Conrad Hilton when he was just getting started. At any rate, I worked with Tucker Conley, who was in the advertising business, and we were regular customers.
Later on, after Mr. O'Neal had moved to his location on McCann Rd., I got to know him better because he was the first person in town to purchase an Apple LaserWriter, which if I remember cost $6,000 or $7,000. It was a modern technical miracle at the time, the first printer that was capable of typographic output, and inexpensive compared to other typesetting equipment of the day. Today, however, a laser printer of comparable capabilities can be had brand new for less than $200.
Mr. O'Neal was an early adopter of Apple Macintosh and Desktop Publishing. Those early Macintosh computers had just 512 kilobytes of memory and cost $3,600, plus Aldus PageMaker was hundreds more, maybe more than $1,000. I used a program from a company called Manhattan Graphics called ReadySetGo!, which was very good but never got any real traction in the market, even after it was acquired by Letraset, another graphic arts company that was a big name at the time. This was long before the emergence of Quark Express and Adobe InDesign, which are the only survivors in the Desktop Publishing field today, and much diminished as are all things print as the world turns increasing digital and paperless.
Those early days, 1985 - 1987 or so, Mr. O'Neal was a member of a Macintosh computer user group called BETA Macs -- the Beautiful East Texas Area Macintosh Users Group. Because of this shared interest, it was a pleasure to get to know Mr. O'Neal in a setting other than strictly business, as a customer at his print shop.
BETA Macs was run by a guy named Rand Miller who was the IT guy at a bank in Henderson. People from as far south as Nacogdoches, Lufkin, Tyler, and Longview attended monthly meetings, which were held in the community room of Rand's employer in Henderson. It was an exciting time. Apple was a real underdog, and widely disparaged as a toy. Back in that day, IBM had all the business credibility in the world, and when they launched the PC, running the MS/DOS command line operating system, it was widely adopted. Anybody who used Macintosh was ridiculed, but our BETA Macs meetings were well attended anyway because the Mac always had a small but devoted following.
Rand Miller and his two brothers went on to fame and fortune by writing a computer game called Myst, which became a huge best seller, so much so the Miller brothers were featured on a front page story I saw in the Wall Street Journal. They moved their company, with a name a printer would like - "Cyan" - to Washington state, and as things always happen, we all fell out of touch when the group disbanded.
Sorry I don't have more personal recollections to share from those days now more than 30 years ago, but I did have warm feelings for Mr. O'Neal, and I was grateful to get to know him and often think of him as I drive past the shopping center on McCann Rd.
