I don't think the card game story is true, alas. Recollection is that Simons convinced his father to invest and they nearly lost their shirts when the tile fac

I don't think the card game story is true, alas. Recollection is that Simons convinced his father to invest and they nearly lost their shirts when the tile factory took longer than expected to become profitable. The story about Simons hiring essentially the whole IBM Speech Recognition group is true though. I have a neighbor who worked there in the early 90s. He's got a paper from that period with 4 other co-workers, and he's the only one of them who didn't end up at RenTec.