1980

E.K. Fox & Associates, Ltd. was officially incorporated in the Commonwealth of Virginia on June 30, 1980. Our original office was located in a 1,200 square-foot townhouse on Lee Highway in Arlington, VA. We started out with sawhorses and flat doors for drafting tables, cinder blocks and boards for shelving, and we even had to use a telephone booth in the building next door or the 7-11 at the corner to make calls before our own phone line was installed. We purchased our first computer, a very big and extremely heavy Radio Shack TRS-80 Model II, for $3,899 (over $12,000 in today’s money). Our first project was a tenant buildout at the Bethesda Air Rights building in Maryland. We also established our first long-term relationship with a telephone call from the Director of Engineering and Architecture at the U.S. Department of State, Office of Foreign Building Operations (FBO), now known as the Overseas Building Operations (OBO). These original FBO projects included six sites in Africa.