In July of 1981 IBM announced a new system for small businesses. It replaced the system that we were familiar with, the IBM 5110/5120. Outside of the people who programmed software for small businesses, the unveiling of the System/23 Datamaster was greeted with very little enthusiasm. For one thing the model that IBM was promoting looked very much like the 5120. The cost was half as much as the 5120, but it was still a lot more than what people were paying for “personal computers” that were marketed by competitors. Most people eagerly awaited IBM’s approach in that market.
That answer would come in a few months. To us at TSI the Datamaster was just what the doctor ordered. The information about this system on the Internet is shamefully incomplete and, in a few places, erroneous. Here are details of the original announcement.
The 5322 took up much of a desk. The printed documentation shown here was uniformlyexcellent.
The processor was an eight-bit 8085 chip from Intel, which was a little bit surprising. IBM did not usually outsource processors, and the 5110/5120 used a sixteen-bit processor. The 256K of memory seemed more than adequate.
The only programming language supported was BASIC. Nevertheless, IBM offered no method of converting programs from the 5110/5120. This did not bother us much, but software companies that had put a lot of effort into systems for those computers were not happy.
There were two models. The 5322 looked a lot like a 5120. The 5324 came in three pieces. Its processor and diskette drives were housed in a standing steel box the height of a two-drawer file cabinet. The display and keyboard for the 5324 were separate.
The displays for both models used green letters on a dark background. Research had shown that this was slightly easier on the eyes than other combinations. This was somewhat important.
Two CPU’s could be connected to a box that held two additional diskette drives. We never saw anyone who purchased this box, which was benerally called a “toaster”.
IBM supplied several business applications, including accounts payable, general ledger, and payroll. We worked with several customers that had bought these packages. In general they found them extremely cumbersome and painfully slow.
A word processing program was also available from IBM. Unlike the business applications, the word processor was extremely good.
At first only two printers1 were available. Both were dot matrix printers. One printed at 80 characters per inch, the other at 120 characters per inch. Only idiots bought the 80 cps one, but it allowed IBM to quote a lower base price.
The most important change as far as TSI was concerned was that the BASIC interpreter allowed variable names of up to eight characters. This was a huge improvement over the 5110/5120, which only allowed one character and an optional digit.
The BASIC interpreter was also changed to allow up to five digit line numbers. There were a few other improvements as well. I don’t remember all of them, but I remember being very impressed with what we would now be able to do.
The system came with a set of templates that fit at the top of the keyboard. Each template displayed what it meant to use the key labeled “Cmd” and one of the keys. Every system command, every BASIC command, and every operation of the word processing program could be accessed by pressing two keys. This feature made it possible even for people who were not good typists to key in long BASIC programs very rapidly.
The components of the system were of very high quality. Many of our customers used the systems for years without ever encountering problems with hardware or the system software.
The 5324 was called “ergonomic”. It took up less desk space, and the tilt of the display could be adjusted.
I don’t know the date of the additional features, but they came within a year or so
A letter-quality printer that used a daisy-wheel. In my opinion, the addition of this printer made the Datamaster the best stand-alone word processor available. It was certainly superior to the Displaywriter that IBM sold for that purpose. When we got one, we used it for all of our word processing (and everything else) for many years.
A hard drive unit that could hold up to 30 megabytes. Up to four Datamasters could be attached to it. The software for record-locking had already been delivered in order to make the toaster usable by two Datamasters. So, the delivery of the hard drive made the Datamaster a true multi-user system. Also, access to the hard drive was much faster than to diskettes. Reliable PC networks were still years in the future, and the PC’s themselves were notoriously subject to the dreaded “blue screen of death” and other catastrophic failures.
The brains of the 5324 was in this stand-alone box designed to fit under a desk. The hard drive was the same shape minus the two diskette slots.
There were, of course, some severe limitations. Most of them were similar to limitations that the users of the 5120 also faced.
All of the hardware interfaces were unique and strange. This made it difficult, if not impossible, for third-party hardware vendors to develop printers or anything else that could attach to the computer. IBM had done this for years, but Datamaster prospects were not accustomed to this approach.
There was still no way to communicate with the system remotely. This meant that it was very difficult to market a software system to customers outside of driving distance.
There were no subprograms that could be called repeatedly as routines. Programs could be linked together, but all the needed data also had to be passed. The first program was erased from memory when the second was called. So, commonly used routines—such as date functions—needed to be built into every program that needed them.
There was no text editor with a search function.
The system had no graphical capability at all.
Calculation-intensive applications were so slow that no one could possibly use them. One company developed and tried to market a spreadsheet program through other software vendors. The instructions for showing the software to a potential client highlighted the places in which the person doing the demo should have some patter ready to distract the prospect from watching the screen. I would not have been able to keep a straight face.
The only backup medium was diskettes. We dreaded when users backed up because they sometimes designated the wrong drive as the target.
The system came with several “templates” that showed what the various keys did when used in combination with the Cmd key. One template was for system commands, one for BASIC, and one for the word processor.
From TSI’s perspective one of the best things about the Datamaster was that the IBM sales reps were suddenly eager to work with software companies. They could sell Datamasters to many diverse businesses, and the starting price had been cut in half. They brought us in to meet with prospects, but only when the IBM software packages were not applicable. Therefore, we ended up creating systems with little chance of being appropriate for more than one customer. It was enjoyable and satisfying work, but not very profitable.
Eventually IBM started a Value-Added Remarketer (VAR) program that allowed software companies with qualifying products to sell Datamasters. When that happened, the IBM reps treated us as competitors even though they got some credit for our sales.
1.There was really only one printer. The slow one could be “field upgraded” by an IBM customer engineer who made a slight adjustment to speed the printing.
By the fall of 1980 my dream of a life as a debate coach seemed unattainable. I enjoyed coaching as much as ever, but I could not visualize how I could make an enjoyable career of it. A few colleges hired someone just to coach debate, but these highly prized positions seldom turned over. Although I had a good record, I had no strong connections. Moreover, I had no idea how to find and obtain such a job.
There was not an abundance of potential coaching positions, and the vast majority of them were for someone with a PhD who would act as Director of Forensics and would also perform other roles in the speech department. This path did not appeal to me for at least four reasons:
I would need to finish my PhD, which meant doing my dissertation. This did not appeal to me at all, for reasons that are described here.
I could not see myself as a faculty member of a speech department. I had little or no respect for any of the speech professors that I had met, and I dreaded the prospect of dealing with departmental politics.
I would be expected to research and publish. Nothing about the field of speech communication interested me enough to research.
I would be expected to teach and serve on committees of MA and PhD candidates. I would almost certainly get stuck teaching the statistics class that every grad student hated. I probably also would be the guy on the committee who forced students to deal all of the problems with the design of their studies. I cannot seeing myself approving any approach that misused statistics or drew only patently obvious conclusions. I would not mind much if some people didn’t like me, but I did not want to be the ogre of the department.
There was one other factor. Sue and I had very little money by the end of 1980. I needed to start bringing in some bacon pretty quickly. I knew that I had a real talent for computer programming, and I really enjoyed bringing an idea to life. So, I determined that I should try to help Sue turn TSI into a real business.
But not in Detroit. The neighborhood that we lived in had deteriorated markedly. The third break-in at our house (described here) convinced us that we had to move. Following the rest of the Caucasians to the suburbs would be expensive and would only address one problem. The other was that the entire Detroit area was in the throes of a severe auto recession. Finding customers there would be difficult for the next few years. Most of the rest of the country was doing better. Sue wanted to return to New England, and I concurred.
The third break-in was, in one way, a blessing in disguise. The thieves took the television and the stereo. They did not take the 5120 computer, which weighed ninety-nine pounds, or the printer. We didn’t have any valuables, drugs, or guns, but they certainly looked for them. Between the second break-in and the third we had bought renter’s insurance. So, we had fewer things to move, and the claim gave us enough money to hire movers.
I think that Sue made a short trip back to Connecticut in the fall of 1980 to look for a place for us to rent. Somehow her dad helped her find a wonderful house in Rockville. The rent was $300 per month. That was more than twice what we paid in Detroit, but it was still an incredible bargain, and it was a perfect place for a small business.
Rockville, a “village” in the town of Vernon, was less than a half-hour drive from downtown Hartford, even in rush hour. The prosperous part of the Hartford area was mainly on the west side of the Connecticut River. However, we would not have been likely to find anything comparable in the wealthy suburbs. If we did, our rent would probably have been a four-digit number.
Rockville at the turn of the century (i.e., around 1900) was a very prosperous mill town. Eight decades later it was still the location of many mansions that were once owned by the people who owned or managed the mills. One of the most impressive of the mansions was (and is) owned by the Rockville Lodge of Elks1. We rented the mansion’s Carriage House from the Elks. The address was 9 North Park St. North Park has one of the steepest slopes without switchbacks of any straight street that I have ever seen. I never tried to jog up it.
The Carriage House was a split-level dwelling. The stairway was in the middle. To the left of the front door pictured at left were levels 1L and 2L and the attic. To the right were the half cellar and levels 1R and 2R. The front door was on level 1R. Two rear doors were on level 1L.
Behind the house was a courtyard that was approximately twenty feet deep and twice that in width. The left side of the courtyard was open. The other two sides were brick covered with ivy. I eventually planted a vegetable garden here.
Level 1L contained the living room (which contained a fireplace), a dining area, pantry, and a kitchen on the far left. We used the massive barnboard shelves to serve as a divider between the dining area and the living area. A door led from the kitchen to a courtyard. A second door to the courtyard was on a landing at the foot of the stairs in the middle of the house. The only shower in the house was on that landing.
The half-cellar was across from the back door in the middle of the house. It had a sink as well as the oil burner, water heater, and fuse box. Above it was level 1R. The only use we had for the cellar was during my abortive sauerkraut experiment several years later.
Level 1R contained the main office. We placed the 5120 computer and printer and Sue’s credenza here. Eventually the office acquired additional equipment and furniture. There were windows on the front side and on the right. There were no windows on the courtyard side.
The master bedroom took up the front half of Level 2L. The spare bedroom housed the waterbed and later became Sue’s office. That room and the bathroom (tub but no shower) were on the courtyard side.
Level 2R was another bedroom with a sloped ceiling. We only used it for overnight visitors.
Level 3L was an attic that could be reached from the bedroom on 2R by a door at the top of three or four stairs. It contained possessions of a previous resident. We did not use it.
One-way driveways leading to the main house and the Elks Club bar were on either side of the Carriage House. The entrance could be seen from the main office on 1R and the exit from the kitchen on 1L.
The club had garage space for three cars. We were allowed to use one of them. The garage was forty or fifty feet from the kitchen door.
The grounds of the Elks club contained a fairly large wooded area. In the winter we scoured it for firewood. We could not afford to buy it at a store. We were quite poor throughout our first few years in Rockville. I think of these as the macaroni years.
The placement of the shower was inconvenient, but the only thing that I really hated about the Carriage House was the oil heat. It was horribly obsolete in 19812. I can hardly believe that I am still living in a residence with such an outmoded heating system forty years later.
When we moved in we only had one phone line. Eventually we bought a multi-line system.
Most of our friends from 1972-1975 were no longer in the Hartford area. We reconnected with Tom and Patti Corcoran, who were living in Wethersfield, the city just south of Hartford. By this time they had two kids, a boy named Brian and a girl named Casey.
I think that this photo of Casey and Brian is from 1983 or 1984.
We spent a lot of time with the Corcorans. They often fed us much better than we would have otherwise eaten. They came to visit us occasionally as well. I remember that I fixed country-style ribs and sauerkraut for them once. I don’t think that Casey tried any; in her early years she consumed only nectar, ambrosia, and the dew from daffodils. However, Brian was shocked when he took the first bite. “This is good!” he exclaimed with as much enthusiasm as he ever exhibited.
Sue registered TSI as a partnership at the town hall in Rockville. She was the president; I had no title. We never sat down and decided who was responsible for what part of the business. She arranged for her dad’s accounting firm to help her set up our books. Dan Marra3 of Mass and Hensley worked with her.
We hoped to be able to establish a relationship as the go-to programmers for IBM’s small business clients, but that did not work out too well at first. IBM went through periods when they loved the third-party programmers who specialized in IBM systems and periods when they were not eager to work with us. Early 1981 was one of the latter periods.
I tried to come up with ways to market Sue’s experience with IBM’s construction payroll system. Unfortunately, we had no access to any lists of IBM’s installations. Sue did some custom work for FH Chase Inc., a construction company south of Boston, and another firm in Boston. At FH Chase she worked with Victor Barrett4 and Mary Brassard. I also recently came upon an invoice from 1981 that Sue sent to Scott & Duncan, Inc. in Roxbury, MA, for a change to its payroll system. It was sent to the attention of Paul Williamson. I don’t remember anything about that company.
Sue sold one copy of Amanuensis, the word-processing program that I wrote, to Brown Insulation in Detroit, and I developed the retail inventory control and sales analysis system for Diamond Showcase. Sue also did some work for clients that she had contacted when we were in Detroit. They included CEI, based in Howell, MI, which owned a number of companies in various locations,
We were not making it. Sue and I were very frugal, but we were not reaching our “nut”. For one thing, the price of oil, which was at an all-time high, was killing us. I was just about at the point of throwing in the towel and looking for a job doing … I don’t know what. However, in July of 1981 IBM made an announcement that had a big effect on both our business and our personal lives. It was not the IBM PC; that came later. It was the System/23, also known as the Datamaster. At some IBM offices it was called the Databurger.
1. The Elks still own it in 2021.
2. I am embarrassed to say that forty years later we are still living in a house that is heated by oil. It makes me feel like a caveman.
3. Dan Marra lives in Colchester in 2021.
4. I am pretty sure that Victor Barrett works and lives in St. Charles, MO.
In retrospect it seems that it should be rather easy to pin down the date—or at least the year—that our company, TSI Tailored Systems, was founded. The fact is that it was not that big a deal at the time. Sue was already helping to support the software that Gene Brown and Henry Roundfield had installed at their customer’s sites when they proposed that she take on support of the customers as an entity separate from them.
The transition was a simple one. Sue merely had to get a DBA (“doing business as”) from the state of Michigan, which anyone can do. There were no out-of-pocket expenses. Gene and Henry allowed her to use space in theor office in Highland Park. Of course, they were no longer paying her a salary. She needed to make arrangements to get paid by the users of the systems that Gene and Henry had sold. The customers were already paying hardware and software maintenance to IBM or, if the system was new, they soon would be.
One thing that I don’t recall is what was done about phone bills. In those days long-distance calls were expensive, and at least two of the 5110 clients were not local calls. Furthermore, Sue can be gabby on the telephone. I wonder what the arrangements were for those charges.
To tell the truth, I don’t even remember talking with Sue about whether TSI was a good idea. We certainly didn’t draw up a business plan or anything like that. I suspect that she just decided to do it.
The name was definitely Sue’s invention. “Tailored” was the key word. From the very beginning the company’s philosophy was to make the system do exactly what the customer wanted. At first the original code was written by another company (IBM or AIS). After the first few years we wrote and marketed only code that we had written—every single bite of it. The concept of “open source” was not prevalent and definitely not profitable. Even if other developers had offered their code for free, we would not have trusted it. There was a lot of garbage code out there. Some of ours probably was, too, but everyone is used to disposing of their own garbage.
Any resemblance was purely intentional.
And what did the I in TSI stand for? Fifteen years later it stood for incorporated. Now it stood for nothing, but It was blue with stripes just like IBM’s log.
When did the blessed event happen? Well, all of Gene and Henry’s clients had IBM 5110’s. The 5120, which totally replaced the 5110, was announced in February of 19801. So, TSI must have been started before that. I think that Sue probably made the decision in the last quarter of 1979.
Sue’s commute was not too bad. We lived near I-94 and Highland Park was near I-75. She drove through Hamtramck, the other town that is completely surrounded by Detroit.
Sue’s credenza has, like many other large objects in our house, been repurposed as a place to stack miscellaneous junk smaller items.
I definitely know what the company’s first asset was. Sue purchased a used steel credenza and somehow got it to the office in Highland Park and from there to our house on Chelsea.
While she was still working in Highland Park Sue communicated with most or all of Gene and Henry’s customers. She told those who were using the AIS software without a license that they needed to obtain a license. I don’t know if Gene and Henry charged them or not. If so, hey must have been furious. In any case, Sue offered them a way out of a potential mess, and most agreed to the offer.
The next major event for TSI was the sudden appearance in our house in Detroit of a 5120. Somehow Sue’s dad, Art Slanetz, arranged for this. Sue told me that some guy named Smith went in on the original purchase, but he later decided not to use it. I had no role in this deal.
Those guys without ties must be customers. In those days all male IBM employees wore white shirts, ties, and suits.
We must have received one of the very first 5120’s that were installed in Detroit. I remember that we had a very difficult time to get it to work. The customer engineer (IBM-speak for hardware repairman) had spread out computer parts all over the spare bedroom, which was now the TSI office. He was in there talking on the phone with someone from IBM for several hours. It was nearly 5:00 before he got the computer to work.
Sue used the 5120 to make some necessary changes to the customers’ software. She could then send or bring the updated diskettes to the customers. This was not a great system, but it was better than any feasible alternative. I was never involved with this end of the business. I think that I accompanied her once to Brown Insulation, but that was the extent of it. In fact, the only other reasonably local account was Cook Enterprises, which was based in Howell, MI.
At one point we flew to Kansas City so that Sue could meet with the people from AIS. They were very happy that the customers who had been using pirated versions of their software had actually purchased licenses. They provided her with file layouts and other documentation of their accounting software. Of course we also stopped in to see my parents. We only stayed a couple of days.
Computers were not used for word processing in 1980. My first project was to write and test Amanuensis, a program to store and produce my prospectus and the article that I wrote with proper spacing for footnotes. It did not have a spell-checker. In fact, it lacked a lot of things. Nevertheless, it saved me a lot of time. As far as I know it was the only word processing program ever written for the 5120.
As is described here, I also used Amanuensis to produce big documents for the Benoits. We actually sold a copy of this program to Brown Insulation. It was the first sale of a system that contained only code that we had written. I don’t remember what we charged. I don’t even know if they ever used it. They paid the bill and did not complain about it.
Over the summer of 1980 I wrote the software that is described here for our Dungeons and Dragons adventures. I also wrote a program to keep track of the status of warships in the Avalon Hill game called Wooden Ships and Iron Men. The latter program was never actually used. I could never find anyone to play with.
After we moved back to Connecticut we somehow got a chance to develop an inventory system for Diamond Showcase, a jewelry store with a handful of locations in the Hartford area. I think that the home office was in Farmington.
Diamond Showcase has almost been erased from history. I found only this matchbook cover on eBay.
The company already had a 5120. Perhaps they purchased it to use for an accounting application. The proprietor wanted to use the computer as a multi-location inventory and sales analysis system. He hired someone who ran a small software company (I don’t remember his name) to find people who could do the job. The software guy interviewed some workers at DS put together a half-assed set of specifications. Somehow he heard about us. Maybe it was from IBM, but we did not yet have a close relationship with the Hartford branch.
Sue and I met with the lady at DS who was in charge of the project once or twice. We proposed to do the project for $5,000. Evidently no one else was interested, and so we got it. At that point we might have had business cards and stationery. I wrote up a contract based on one that AIS used.
The more that I think about it the more amazing this seems to me. In the next thirty-five years TSI would be involved in many situations in which we tried to convince people that we possessed the skill and the knowledge to provide what they wanted. Sometimes we succeeded and sometimes we didn’t. I can think of no other occasion on which we succeeded with such sparse credentials. We had no references and no training. Sue’s experience was not close to applicable. I had written some cool programs, but I could hardly show them output from my D&D system. In early 1981 we barely even had a business.
Maybe nobody in 1981 had credentials. Software for small businesses barely existed; we were among the pioneers. Perhaps the software guy vouched for us or at least told them that we were the best people available. At any rate, they signed the contract and gave us a deposit. I went to work.
I wrote all the software for Diamond Showcase using principles that I had internalized reading through the listings for the IBM and AIS programs that Sue supported. The key was to use three diskettes (one for programs, one for detail of transactions, and one for all the other tables) and to process transactions in batches. Although I did not know that I was doing so, I normalized3 all the files.
If you had a box of these you could run a small business.
The system actually worked fairly well considering how little experience that I had. The difficult question in supporting any inventory system is “Why does they system say that I have x of them when there are only y in the store?” This was less of an issue with jewelry. Most of the items are unique, and so the quantity on hand is always 1 or 0. The biggest challenge for a retail jewelry system was to make sure that the user does not run out of room on the diskettes. They only held one megabyte of information, a small fraction of what is used to store a single photo on a cellphone. In 2021 storage on hard drives is given in terabytes. A terabyte is a million megabytes!
TSI’s first installation should have been a momentous event, but I have very few vivid memories of it. I remember that on one of my trips to the company’s headquarters the lady with whom I worked asked me a question that I could not readily answer. She said that she liked the computer and she liked the software. She wanted to know what other printers were available for the 5120. I told her that I was sure that IBM must have other printers. I was wrong. I had to call back to tell her that the one she had was the only one available. I was beginning to learn a little about how IBM did business.
As usual, the good guy with the gun was not able to stop the hormonally delusional young man with an inferior gun.
On Monday, March 30, 1981, Sue and I had just driven the Duster into the parking lot of the DS headquarters (not a store) when we heard on the radio that President Reagan had been shot.
Later, of course, John Hinckley Jr’s2 motive for the attempted assassination—to impress Jodie Foster—was disclosed to the public. For a short period it appeared that America might be upset enough about this outrage to try to prevent a similar incident, but we settled for the usual thoughts and prayers.
1. The strengths and limitations of these systems are described here. There was no way to communicate with them from a remote location.
2. Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. In 2016 he was released from a mental hospital to live with his mother. That stipulation was removed in October 2020.
3. A Wikipedia page explains normalizing of databases. You can read it here. The principles apply equally well to relational databases and those using the indexed-sequential access method (ISAM) championed in the eighties by IBM because of better performance.
Throughout my life I had enjoyed playing board games, especially war games made by Avalon Hill. However, it was always hard to find people to play with. I read an article about Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in a magazine in late 1977 or early 1978. The game sounded very intriguing, but the article did not make it very clear exactly what it entailed. There did not appear to be much to it, but apparently in some locations people became very involved in the game.
On August 17, 1948, my thirtieth birthday, a day on which I was already scheduled to have a big party in the evening, I drove to a toy store, located the basic set of Dungeons and Dragons, and bought it. It was not expensive, and the box was not very heavy. When I shook it, something rattled a little.
When I got home I opened it and was a little disappointed. There was no board and no game pieces. The box contained only five dice of different shapes and colors and a forty-eight-page book of instructions. Each die had a unique number of faces: 4, 6, 8, 12, and 20. These were to be used to determine random results for different types of events. Eventually it became pretty clear that the primary purpose of the dice was to provide some substance to the “set”. All that the game really required were the rules, a great deal of imagination, and some way of generating random numbers.
Ah, but the rules. The basic concept of the game was simple. One person served as the referee (called the Dungeon Master or DM). Before the players arrived, the DM needed to spend some time drawing a map on graph paper and creating an outline of the adventure. Many adventures were traditionally underground, but they could just as well be in a castle, a ship, or anywhere else.
I was hoping for weightless +10 mithral armor in XXL.
The various rooms (or caverns or holds or whatever) might be empty, might contain innocuous items, or might contain treasure. Some of the valuables might even be magical (or cursed, for that matter). However, danger lurked everywhere in the form of monsters, evil-doers, and traps. The DM would most likely need to make on-the-spot decisions about unexpected activities from the players, but the more details that were planned in advance the better. It was also a good idea for the DM to have some “random” events ready in case the adventurers dawdled.
To get the adventure going the players need some way of learning about the dungeon. Non-playing characters created by the DM could often fill this role, or it could be arranged that they could find an ancient scroll or something.
Not this kind of elf.
Players had to prepare, too. Each controlled one or two characters. The characters’ abilities (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity) could be generated using six-sided dice. Their endurance, measured in “hit points”, was also determined by rolls of the dice.
Dwarves were short, tough, and cheap. Negotiating a price was called “dwarfing him down”.
Players were allowed to choose the class (fighter, magic-user, cleric, or thief—more came later) and race (human, elf, dwarf, half-elf, half-orc, or halfling) and alignment (lawful or chaotic, good or evil) of their characters. Magic users and clerics could memorize a spell or two. Some races had special abilities or limitations. Every character was born with a little money with which to buy some weapons, armor, and supplies.
Nobody won an adventure, but it was possible to achieve a goal that made some or all of the characters stronger. It was also possible for characters to die.
Spells were definitely useful, but the magic-users’ aversion to armor led to a high mortality rate.
Players were not required to disclose any of their characteristics to the others, but every character had to persuade the others that he/she would be a valuable addition to the party. Recalcitrant characters could and sometimes did say no.
So far, so good. I constructed a little dungeon, and I invited Sue, Vince Follert, and the Benoits to play it. I tried my best to decipher the rules on movement and battles, but it just seemed like the monsters—even the ones that were just powerful humans—moved in slow motion while the party members dashed around and slaughtered them. After a few adventures the players were so powerful and rich that they could take on almost anything,
After the first few games, I knew that something was wrong. The players enjoyed the games, but the battles were not close to realistic. Outcomes were never in much doubt. I read and reread the rules. You can read them yourself here. Take a look. The rules for time and movement are on p. 9. Can you figure them out?
These were helpful.
I started to frequent a hobby store on Gratiot Avenue. It sold inch-high lead figurines as well as issues of Dragon magazine and some pamphlets containing details of dungeons or whole campaigns that experienced players had designed. I invested in all of these. The purchases of the magazines and pamphlets were a good idea, but the figurines were a mistake. Anyone who spent a lot of time painting figurines wass going to be very upset if the character died, and a crucial element of the game is the belief of the players in the mortality of the characters. It is what gives the edge to the game.
The first edition of the Player’s Handbook was published in June of 1978. I was not able to lay my hands on one until several months after that. The confusion about movement and how battles (called “melee” in D&D) should be refereed was cleared up by this work. I read it from cover to cover many times, and I had at least a dozen pages tabbed for quick reference.
The quality of the writing in this book was much better than the rules for the basic set. The illustrations were also marvelous.
The Dungeon Master’s Guide was published in 1979. I preordered a copy and picked it up the day that it arrived at Comic Kingdom. The clerk told me that all of their copies were sold the first day. I don’t remember what the book cost, but it was definitely worth it. Everything about the game now made sense. The quality of the adventures that I designed improved enormously.
The Dungeon Masters Guide was also great fun to read. At least twenty pages of mine were tabbed for easy reference.
There was still one problem. The original characters that played in our early adventures were were much too powerful. Their participation in those “Monte Haul” games had left them so rich and powerful that they could no longer sensibly play with inexperienced characters. Superman never took Jimmy Olsen on adventures.
The Monster Manual was useful mostly for generating ideas. A DM who used one could show the illustration instead of trying to describe it.
I did not set out to solve this problem, but … In one of the games in late 1978 or 1979 I designed a White Dragon named Frix. For some time I spread fables and stories about his enviable treasures and his awesome super-cold breath. One day a group of the rich and powerful characters assembled a small party and decided to go after Frix.
The adventure started in the usual way. Once in the cave complex, the party ran into a few squads of orcs and the like. They quickly disposed of them and made their way down to the fourth level, which their informant had told them was the abode of the great white dragon. The party found the lair and then burst in without taking any precautions.
I rolled a die to see whether they had surprised Frix. It wasn’t likely. At least one of them was clanging around in plate mail a hundred feet beneath the ground and they talked to one another constantly. So, Frix struck first with his frigid breath. They rolled saving throws, but, alas, they all were frozen to death.
The maps of the city and its environs were about thirty inches on a side.
None of them took this well, but a couple of weeks later Vince, one of the participants, asked me if they could have avoided the peril if they just had asked their cleric to memorize the Resist Cold spell instead of the Cure Light Wounds spell that clerics always used. When I admitted as much, he conceded that they were all idiots and deserved to die.
In a way they became legendary, not for their accomplishments in previous dungeons but for their arrogance and lackadaisical preparation in the last one.
Every building was numbered on the detailed map of the city
I came across The City State of the Invincible Overlord, a publication of the Judges Guild, at Comic Kingdom, and I bought it. It had detailed maps and descriptions of the contents of nearly every business in the city. I bought a lot of 5″x8″ index cards and a box to hold them. I made one card for each business so that I could rapidly find them. From that point on, I started every adventure that I created with the characters at an inn in the city. After the original encounter with the proprietor, another customer, or an employee they could walk to other buildings to purchase gear or ask for information. Setting all this up took a lot of time, but it worked well.
My file had a card for every building in the city.
The next major step was a gigantic one. At some point in late early 1979 Sue obtained an IBM 5120 computer for her business, TSI Tailored Systems. How she managed this is explained here. I took advantage of this to write a few BASIC programs that really enhanced the experience of D&D get-togethers both for the players and for the DM.
The fist program automated the process of generating a new character. The player entered a number. The program used the number as the seed for the built-in random number generator and produced a list of the character’s ability scores. The player could save or reject them. If the scores were accepted, a permanent record was made. This program greatly accelerated the process of getting a new player ready for the first adventure.
The next step was to allow the editing of the player record to reflect advancement to higher levels and other important changes. A sheet of green-bar paper that contained almost all of the personal information needed for an adventure could then be printed out for each player.
The final step was the program to assemble a party. When all of the characters had been entered, a printout was created that had information that the DM needed for each player in an easy-to-read format. This dramatically reduced the time spent paging through the handbooks looking for tables.
The last program was the simplest. It just provided a way of printing up a set of rumors to distribute randomly to the characters.
D&D was a lot more fun with these programs. They cut down on the drudgery and left more time for the adventures. No one ever complained about them.
Our basement was an ideal location for an adventure. The DM sat on a stool behind the bar. Their were couches (well, actually one was the back seat of an old Mercedes) and chairs aplenty for the players. People brought their own drinks and snacks.
Sue sometimes played. Her principal character was a cleric named Sr. Mary Chicos, named after a former nun who worked at Brothers Specifications. She also did some work on an adventure featuring Massai warriors, but I don’t think that we ever played it.
A lot of students from Wayne State’s Forensics Union played. In addition to the people mentioned above, the group included Mike Craig and a friend of his who ate an enormous amount of snacks. In other circles the players “crawled” dungeons, but Mike introduced the phrase, “Let’s dunge” to our group. Jo Anne might have come once or twice. Nancy Legge, Gerry Cox, and Mark Buczko were definitely regulars. Kim Garvin came once. I think that Scott Harris also played at least once.
I am sure that there were other participants. A professor in the speech department attended one adventure, and he brought his son. They chose not to play, but they observed for hours.
I don’t remember too many details of the dungeons that I created. I remember one in which the players discovered a space ship. It was not much fun.
I spent a lot of time on the one that the speech prof attended. The characters needed to arrange passage on a ship to get to an island owned by a witch. Fortunately they did not select the boat with the lowest charge. They might have spent the rest of the time looking for Davey Jones’ locker.
When the party arrived at the island, the witch gave them a quest and promised to reward them handsomely if they succeeded in killing her rival, a frost giant. There were two possible approaches to the cave in which her enemy lived; The Path of the Forlorn was full of traps, and the Path of the Misbegotten was subject to attacks from monstrous creatures. The party chose the monster route. The witch, however, insisted that the group’s most fit participant (as measured in hit points) stay behind with her to keep her company. She was SO lonely. So, the party’s best fighter missed the most importantUr part of the adventure.
My favorite part of the dungeon was the entrance to the giant’s lair. It was a sheet of ice thirty feet long at a forty-five degree angle. It was not easy to escape from this place in a hurry. The group did a good job of dealing with the obstacles, and they won the prize. The poor guy who was left with the witch had to be carried to the awaiting ship by the exhausted adventurers.
I liked to play in the adventurer’s groups occasionally. I had six characters that I remember. My original character was Prufrock the cleric. I think that he had a magic hammer. I had two female characters. Kithra was obviously based on Wonder Woman. Her first purchase was high hard boots. Tontonia was a half-elf with a much less dynamic personality. Urgma was very stupid but a strong fighter who was comfortable taking orders. Pslick was a magic user who also had some “psionic” powers. He was also a wise guy. Gubendorf was a thief. He was so obnoxious that he was killed by his own party at the end of his first adventure.
A teenager named James Dallas Egbert III was in the news in 1979-80. He was described as a “genius” or “child prodigy” who was majoring in Computer Science. For some reason he was living in his dorm room at Michigan State in the middle of August in 1979. Then he “disappeared”.
His parents back in Dayton, OH, somehow heard about D&D and the steam tunnels. They thought that he might have been killed by a D&D cult acting out fantasies in the tunnels. They told their theory to the newspapers and hired a private detective.The news reports emphasized two things. 1) JDE3 played D&D; 2) He and some friends explored the steam tunnels in East Lansing. They speculated that he and his friends were acting out an adventure, and he was killed either accidentally or as a sacrifice to Asmodeus (do NOT say the name out loud or you will immediately summon him, and he is NEVER in a good mood).
Suedomsa backwards.
The detective never found him (but he did find a book deal). JDE3 eventually called the detective and told him that he had taken a bus to New Orleans, where he was NOT developing a D&D campaign based on voodoo or Mardi Gras. The detective tried to talk JDE3 into returning home to Dayton, but that was never going to happen. Instead JDE3 tried unsuccessfully to kill himself twice. He succeeded the third time when he used a gun.
I smelled a rat in this story from day 1. First of all, if he was a computer genius, why was he going to a state-run ag school? What was wrong with MIT or Cal Tech?
Second, why did he not go home for the summer after his freshman year? Most students are eager to compare experiences with their old high school buddies.
A great place to stage an adventure.
Third, I knew a group of guys who messed around in the steam tunnels in Ann Arbor. If I had been running a D&D campaign in those years, a few might have played in it. However, we would never have played in the tunnels. The reason is simple. There is no light. D&D requires lots of reading and mapping. The two activities are totally incompatible. I have never been in the steam tunnels of East Lansing, but I doubt that they are large enough for bugbears, much less giants, djinn, or dragons. Students might have discussed what an adventure in a tunnel would be like, but they would never act it out in such an unwieldy environment. A hero needs room to swing that two-handed sword and enough light to identify his foe.
Finally, it just seemed obvious to me that he had run away. Something must have been going on at home. It turns out that he was gay. When I was a freshman at U-M, my parents suspected me of being gay or on drugs or something because of the way that a friend (without my permission) answered my phone in the dorm. My mom and dad flew up to Ann Arbor to check out the situation. I would bet anything that JDE2 made some kind of threat that caused JDE3 to think that East Lansing would no longer be far enough away from his parents.
A similar take on this sordid tale can be read here.
After we left Detroit I played D&D a few times. When it appeared unlikely that I would have any further use of my materials, I gave them to Sue’s nephew, Travis LaPlante.
The 5110 and 5120 were essentially the same computer. The 5120, which was introduced in 1980, provided a larger display area. It also eliminated the quarter-inch tape device and added a second 8″ diskette drive. Both of these changes were important. The 5110’s display was so small that some people could not use it. Designing a system that could work with only one diskette drive was extremely difficult. If the software required more than one drive, the 5110 customer needed to purchase a stand-alone unit that could house two diskette drives. It was the size of a two-drawer file cabinet.
The 5120 and the printer that both systems used.
Both systems came with random-access memory (RAM) ranging from 16K to 48K. It had two different operating systems. One used APL and one used BASIC. A switch on the front of the console controlled which one was active. Practically all of the customers used BASIC.
IBM marketed at least one application for the system, a construction payroll system. Most of TSI’s customers had licensed that system.
Strengths: The hardware was reliable and durable. IBM supported the hardware with a maintenance agreement. If the software was licensed from IBM, telephone support was also available. In that era this was an enormous advantage. IBM’s systems engineer (hardware support guy) once spent an entire day working on TSI’s 5120 He finally got it to function correctly. If he had not been able to get it to work right, we would have expected a new unit the next day. Systems from other vendors did not offer anything comparable. 5110/5120 customers expected the system to work every day.
Data files were stored in EBCDIC format and were read by programs using IBM’s Indexed Sequential Access Method (ISAM). If the keys to the files were sorted, access to the individual records was relatively fast. Of course, it was important to keep the keys sorted. The standard practice was to sort the keys at the end of any program that added new records. The operators knew to do something else during this process until the beep sounded that meant if was finished (or something had gone wrong).
BASIC was easy to learn, and everything was well documented.
Limitations: Although the system had a fairly fast 16-bit PALM processor, the paucity of the memory made the applications excruciatingly slow.
Only one model of dot matrix printer was available. Its interface was, like all IBM interfaces of this period, not standard. So, it was difficult and expensive for third-party manufacturers to provide an alternative.
There was no hard drive available except the one offered by a third-party vendor named CORE. By the time that this product was released, the 5110/5120 was nearing obsolescence.
It was possible to connect two computers to the external floppy disk unit, but it was difficult to write software that would overcome the inherent disadvantages of two users fighting for the same diskette drives.
The 5120 console weighed ninety-nine pounds!
Yes, we had push-button phones. We were not savages.
The only interfaces were for the printer and the external diskette unit. It was not possible to connect it to phone lines or anything else to the system. If a bug was found in a program at a remote location, the developers had to talk the users through the process of changing the code. This was, of course, both dangerous and frustrating.
If more than a few lines of code was added or changed, someone often needed to visit the customer to install the changes. The alternative was to use an overnight delivery service to send a new diskette.
The BASIC interpreter used line numbers, not statement labels. The highest line number available was 9999. TSI circumvented the lack of statement labels by always using the same sets of line numbers for standard routines. The end of program routine always started at line 6000. The page heading subroutine always started at 9000. Individual lines on reports always started at at 9200. Date functions always used the same numbers.
Born free; everywhere in chains.
BASIC had some limitations. One program could “chain” another, but it was not possible to have two programs in the RAM at the same time.
It was easy to write a BASIC program with an infinite loop. Here is one: 10 GOTO 20 20 GOTO 10
Discipline was therefore required. Some programmers avoided the GOTO statement altogether, but we found it useful in specific instances.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but an R4 could be a rose variety or a rhododendron or a row number or …
The most annoying problem with BASIC was that the variable names were restricted to one letter followed by nothing or a single digit. Thus, the employee number field could be called E in a program or E4, but it could not be called EENUM. This restriction made it absolutely necessary to maintain a list—either in comments in the program or on a separate sheet of paper—as to what every variable stood for in every program. It was also difficult, if not impossible, to keep the variable names consistent among all programs.
I just assumed that the absurdly short variable names were an inherent limitation of the BASIC language, and so I learned to live with it. Fortunately, I only developed one fairly elaborate system on the 5120, and so this did not cause any great problems for me. Sue maintained the systems that were written by IBM or AIS. I don’t know how much it bothered her.
This problem was corrected in subsequent hardware systems, and I had almost forgotten about it when I wrote this.
The 5110/5120 was designed for accounting and other administrative applications. It had absolutely no capacity for graphics. Furthermore, spreadsheets had not yet been invented. What do you want for $18,000?
I seem to recall that a utilities diskette included a game that involved shooting down enemy spacecraft. There definitely was a pseudo-random number generator. There was also a program for printing biorhythm charts.
Unique feature: When a BASIC program was running, the line number that was being executed was displayed in the lower right corner of the display. This provided a little entertainment for the operator when a lengthy process (such as updating a large batch of transactions) was being performed.
