the quality of sound for 25 years its popularity can be gauged from the fact that it was minting money for the company for over twoandhalf decades against the standard accepted product lifecycle of six to seven years in 1972 bose introduced its first professional loudspeaker for performing musicians the introduction of acoustimass speaker technology reshaped conventional thinking about the relationship between speaker size and sound speakers small enough to fit in the palm produced sound quality previously thought impossible from small speakers the company that started in 1964 with a handful of people is now an international success whollyowned bose subsidiaries distributors and manufacturing facilities are found throughout the world bose was fond of swimming for long hours and competitive badminton in addition to his position as chairman and technical director of bose corp he retained his mit faculty appointment as professor of electrical engineering and computer science he was firm in his belief that only the best education can lead to the best technology he taught acoustics and supervised graduate and undergraduate thesis students bose believed in the old virtues of really challenging homework and his students were always given a formidable workload his everoptimistic message remained that man is a 100 cylinder engine utilising just one cylinder