I am musician and worked the Portland, Oregon scene full time as my main source of income for a long time pre Y2K, which included stints in audio and video production facilities. Engineer to Director. I also have a degree in electrical engineering (1986), and did a bit of bench work primarily working on hearing aids.
In the early 90's I was in a bad car wreck and while I was laid up with a back injury someone mentioned to me that you could record music onto a computer. I was intrigued and bought a 386-SX25 with a coprocessor and found I had a knack for computers. I had that little machine running 4 channel audio in no time.
That knack led me to IT jobs and at that point I had kids so the money was too tempting and I left my full time love of music to persue an IT carreer which ended up being primarily in cybersecurity. This continues to be my main source of income.
Around Y2K I was working an IT job for local government and as with all local governments budgets were tight. There was a need for a large set of test servers, and so I ordered parts and built a set of servers for very little money. These servers ended up running continuously for over 10 years, long outlasting thier production counterparts. I had long moved on to other adventures but I heard from a friend that the techs working with these started calling them the "mark-o-matic" servers. After a good laugh I thought, well why not. The Mark-O-Matic name stuck.
I was also getting back into music and building my own studio at that time. I got a lot of hand-me-down gear from other musicians and engineers I knew. I started really wanting the gear to be better but couldnt afford the high prices of top end studio gear so I started by modifying the gear, and then eventually designing and building my own gear. Mark-O-Matic LLC allows me to pass along some of that tech to others. I build small batches every year and only advertise by word of mouth. I also started getting a lot of queries for custom work, and some of that work is starting to make it into new products I plan to offer.