Sim Wong Hoo was born on the 28th of April in 1955, the tenth child in a family of twelve children (five brothers, seven sisters). His family were Singaporean Hoklo with ancestry in the southernmost area of Fujian, China, and they spoke Hokkien. He grew up in a kampung called End of Coconut Hill in Bukit Panjang, and his father, Sim Chye Thiam, was a factory worker while his mother, Tan Siok Kee, raised chickens, ducks, pigs, and rabbits, and grew fruits and herbs. The young Sim had chores around the house and around the farm as soon as he was physically able, and he often sold eggs at the local market before school classes started each day. This afforded him the ability to buy things for himself such as his harmonica when he was about 11. The harmonica was a hobby he greatly enjoyed throughout his life. He also enjoyed making his own games.
Sim graduated from Bukit Panjang Government High School and then went on to attend Ngee Ann Technical College for engineering. At the college, Sim was a member of both the harmonica troupe, consisting of thirty people, and the Practice Theatre School. In the theatre, Sim provided musical accompaniment for the school’s performances with the harmonica and the accordion, often performing his own arrangements. His two interests collided at this time in his life. When writing or arranging music, he’d only be able to hear his composition during weekly practice. Having seen a computer, he realized that a computer could allow him to hear the music precisely as written while still working on it. Sim envisioned a computer that could play music, talk, or even sing, and his earlier entrepreneurial spirit drove him to an ambitious goal: selling 100 million units of a single piece of equipment. Sim graduated in 1975 and then entered the uniformed services for his obligatory two years.
For three to four years following his service, Sim worked a brief stint on an offshore oil rig, designing computerized seismic data logging equipment. After that, he opened a computer education center at Coronation Plaza. As he was more interested in teaching and researching, he left the business work to his business partner. This wasn’t a great decision. His partner took off with all the money.
Sim Wong Hoo with a variety of Creative products
On the 1st of July in 1981, Sim founded Creative Technology with Ng Kai Wa, who had been his childhood friend and classmate in a 440 sqft shop at Pearls Center using his own savings of around $6000. The company initially did computer repair and sold parts and accessories for microcomputers. Business wasn’t great, so Sim also did some teaching. In whatever time he had left to him, he was busy developing his own products.
Creative CUBIC 99 advertisement
The first Creative product (at least, for which I can find any evidence at all) was a memory board for the Apple II. Having an understanding of the Apple II, Creative followed their memory board by producing the CUBIC 99 in 1984. This was an Apple II compatible machine with a 6502, but it also featured a Zilog Z80 for compatibility with CP/M. I am not certain how this was arranged, but I imagine that it wasn’t entirely dissimilar to the Microsoft Z80 SoftCard. Of course, this is Creative Technology, so the machine also featured a voice synthesizer allowing users to record and playback words in English or Chinese. The computer also had an optional Cubic Phone Sitter which could make and answer calls. This was the first computer to be designed and manufactured in Singapore.
The market was moving quickly, and the IBM PC had created a standard. The CUBIC CT was released in 1986 as a PC compatible, and it featured graphics and sound capabilities. This was, essentially, a multimedia PC (with a weaker CPU than that standard would later dictate) localized in the Chinese language. Unfortunately, it was too early. With nearly zero software support for anything approaching the capabilities of the CT and an even smaller local market, the product was a failure.
Creative Music System advertisement
Realizing that the sound features of the CUBIC CT were likely more salable and supportable than the computer itself, Sim and his company chose to sell the sound card by itself as the Creative Music System (also C/MS or CT-1300). This board was built around two Philips SAA1099 chips providing 12 channels of square-wave stereo sound on a half-length 8bit ISA card, and it shipped with five 360K 5.25 inch floppy disks (Master Disk, Intelligent Organ, Sound Disk 1, Sound Disk 2, Utilities). To promote this card, Sim moved to California in 1988 and established Creative Labs. His goal was to sell at least 20,000 cards generating $1 million in revenue. The USA was the largest PC market, and he knew that sound cards were seeing good sales.
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