Positronic Design About Us
Positronic Design, The SEO Company is a collaboration of many distinct individual business entities which have formed a strategic alliance to create a powerful promotion and marketing force. We have decades of combined experience in the graphic design, print and web development industry. We have a flexible operating structure that allows us to call upon our reserve army of specialized contractors when needed to complement our principal contractors.
Positronic Design owner and founder, David Caputo, started out in the computer industry in 1982 with such companies as Digital and GTE. He had an e-mail address in 1984, Caputo::Psyche, (no @ back then) and worked with “Decnet”, then the world’s largest nonmilitary computer network, a precursor of today’s Internet. At Digital, he was one of the first ever laserdisc multimedia programmers, utilizing DEC’s IVIS system and large format Phillips LaserDisc players. At Digital he met graphic artist George Wisnowski, who was to create posters, album covers, and other visual materials for David’s first company, Verge Productions.
In 1984 he started Verge Productions with Laura Tilsley to sell records and promote events and media appearances for such bands as New Man, which featured Greenfield, Mass native Scott Gilman, later of Foreigner. These included distribution through Strawberries Records, winning the MTV Basement Tapes competition, radio appearances, a feature on Evening Magazine, and T-shirt sales at concerts opening for Bryan Adams, Culture Club, INXS, ELP and others.
In 1985 David hitched up his wagon and moved west to the Happy Valley, where he has remained ever since. In 1987 David teamed up with Ramon Olivencia and graphic artist George Wisnowski to create the board game Go To Jail, which was featured in local specialty stores.
Through the late 1980s David worked as a consultant in the Boston with such companies as DEC, TJX, and Lotus, and held several other programming positions with local valley companies. This was while David was attending the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he was a STPEC (Social Thought and Political Economy) major.
In 1989, David started “The Weekly News” with Mykal Ostapovicz, B.J. Cummings, Ralph Reed, Stacy Adams, Ramon Olivencia, Michael Levine and many others. The Weekly News was an independent journal of opinion sponsored by STPEC and distributed free in the Happy Valley and sent by subscription nationwide. It published 19 issues over 2 years and saw its circulation expand from 200 to 5000 over that time. The Weekly News was mostly supported by small business advertising and benefit concerts by the band Phish.
David produced four Phish concerts in all, two at the UMass Student Union Ballroom (2/90 and 9/90), one at John M. Green Hall (2/91) at Smith College, and one at the Greenfield Armory (12/91). Recordings of these concerts are available online.
Here is the first Student Union Ballroom Show – 2/17/1990
It was during the production of The Weekly News that David became fully conversant with the Computerized Graphic Design process. Initially, columns were typeset in a 38 character per line format on various PCs and Digital Vax terminals. DEC had the best laser printers back then. Then the columns, cartoons, artwork, etc. were all pasted up with scotch tape in midnight Kinkos sessions. Then an event happened that forever changed David’s life. He bought his first Apple Macintosh computer. It was an SE/30 with a 16 MHz 030 processor, 1 MB of RAM, 40 MB Hard Drive, 9″ b/w screen and a 90 day warranty for $3,500.00!!!!
But it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and it gave David’s housemate, Robert Llamas, a case of Mac Envy since his formerly wicked-cool SE was now rather pokey by comparison. So he went out and dropped a cool 8 Grand on a Macintosh IIcx with a 19″ Radius greyscale monitor, LaserWriter IIntx, and 4 bit greyscale scanner. Now they were in business!!! The Weekly News switched to this new production method and they got pretty good at it. They used PageMaker and Photoshop and Illustrator and cranked out some pretty good stuff. Graphic Design Guru Ralph Seaman turned them to the true path of QuarkXpress and markedly increased their graphic design technique and sensibility. For this David is forever in his debt.
David and Robert decided they could compete in the then embryonic desktop publishing market and Radical Solutions was born in March of 1990. Business built up so much working from home that a storefront in downtown Amherst, MA was opened in September, 1990. Radical Solutions featured graphic design, print consulting, specialty product printing, multimedia programming and web site design, maintaining a downtown storefront presence for six solid years. Radical Solutions served such prominent local clients as The UMass Mullins Center, Dar Williams, the Amherst Chamber of Commerce, Yankee Candle and Mt. Holyoke College in addition to national clients like L’Oreal and ITT/Hartford.
In January 1997, David closed Radical Solutions and moved his base of operations to David Caputo Graphic Design at Studio 11, 140 Pine St., Florence, MA which transformed itself into Positronic Design with the turning of the new millennium in February, 2000.
Positronic Design has grown and evolved from the original collaboration to become a dynamic team of independent business entities that work in concert to take advantage of the profound benefits of collaboration, both professional and personal. See our Current Team page for a complete list of our active collaborators.
In 2005, Positronic Design moved its headquarters to Holyoke, MA, and in April 2006 we moved into our permanent home at 903 Dwight Street, on the edge of historic downtown Holyoke by the banks of the Connecticut River. Please call and arrange a visit if you’d like to see what we’re doing to help Holyoke’s transition from a once-glorious-now-rundown industrial city to a modern knowledge-economy powerhouse with the location, skill set, and cultural advantages necessary to thrive in the twenty first century.
We can be reached at 413-587-0011 or 800-472-3765. References are available upon request, please call or e-mail for more info. Obviously things have been left out. Send e-mail if you think an important detail has been omitted. ;-)
