Richard Weatherford is a bookseller who loves old books and new technology. After teaching college for a number of years, Dick turned to selling antiquarian books via specialized catalogs from his home near Seattle. He soon realized that computer databases had a lot to offer the antiquarian book business. In 1982, he wrote a business plan for a company that would build an online database for antiquarian booksellers. He called the company Interloc because it would serve as an interlocutor (that's English professor for "go-between") to help sellers to locate hard-to-find books. Unfortunately startup capital was harder to find than a signed JD Salinger, in part because personal computers were still scarce, expensive, and difficult to connect.