1998 TSI: The Third Crisis

Posted on May 24, 2021 by Mike

Keeping Denise in the fold. Continue reading →

My recollection of many of the events portrayed below was fuzzy. I was not even certain of the year (1998) or the time of year (autumn) until I found a dated document. Lacking a good way of pinning down the details, I needed to guess at or be vague about some things.

Background: For me the period from 1995 through 1999 was the busiest, most exciting, and most stressful of any that I spent working for TSI. It was also the most potentially terrifying period. Our marketing director, Doug Pease_¹, had hit the mother lode and put us in a position to dominate the market on which I had decided to focus our attention back in the late eighties.

Most large retailers, especially department stores, were organized into divisions, and each division was responsible for its own advertising. So, when a large retail organization decided to name AdDept as the preferred system for advertising, we would usually install a system at each division. In 1998 the May Company,² which at the time had seven department store divisions, had already endorsed AdDept. Doug had also negotiated installations for the three divisions of the Tandy Corporation³ and he convinced the people at Proffitt’s⁴ Marketing Group (PMG) to purchase systems for six of their divisions. In addition to these, Doug had also made headway at several other potential clients such as Elde- Beerman, Gottschalks, and Macy’s West.

In short, TSI’s business was finally booming. The challenge was no longer whether the company could generate enough income to meet the next payroll. The question—and it was a very serious one—was whether we could meet our commitments to all of these new installations, almost all of which required significant custom programming.

There were a few other issues as well. The twenty-first century was approaching. AdDept had been made Y2K-compliant from the outset. We also had produced a version of the GrandAd system for the AS/400 that would work in the twenty-first century. We needed to convert all of the software that we used in TSI’s office as well. These undertakings were labor-intensive and required extensive testing. The details of those efforts are described here.

The company therefore faced tremendous challenges in providing the software and support for commitments that I had already made and for the prospective contracts that were almost certainly imminent. Furthermore, the person who had at that point done most of the AdDept programming, myself, would undoubtedly be devoting much less time to coding in the next few years.

I would be doing all the installations and on-site training. I also accompanied Doug on many sales trips. I gathered all of the requirements for new code and wrote the design documents and programming requests. I wrote all the marketing materials and anything else that needed to be written, as well. I also ran the business and extinguished the most serious fires. Last but not least, I did the great majority of the research on new hardware offerings and new software techniques. I still did quite a bit of coding, but I now relied on the programmers for most of it.

Fortunately, I had a team of all-stars to help. Sandy Sant’Angelo handled the support line, which during the late nineties was nearly always busy. She was quite good at documenting problems and making the customers feel comfortable. The programmers were Steve Shaw, Harry Burt, and Denise Bessette. Steve and Harry were both good programmers, and they were both familiar and comfortable with TSI’s programming standards. However, they had little knowledge of details of the AdDept system or the way that retail advertisers worked and thought. Early in 1998 Steve Shaw surprised me by leaving TSI to take a programming job at the Phoenix Life in Hartford.

Denise was extremely dependable. She was also very meticulous in her work habits and thoroughly familiar with both TSI’s standards and most of the basics of advertising. She told me that she did not want to travel, however. Therefore, I could not use her for any of the trips that I made to clients.

The Known Problem: I always tried to keep the employees—especially the programmers—happy. The work at TSI environment was, I think, generally positive. The company had very few rules. There was no dress code at all, although I expected the employees to spruce up a little when customers came to our office for training. I wrote up a short document that listed what we expected of employees. My door was literally always open.

TSI paid the programmers pretty well, and by the mid-1990’s we had implemented good programs of health and disability insurance and a 401K with matching contributions. Although I felt a great deal of stress during this period, I tried to avoid putting pressure on the coders.

I understood that there was one problem that was inherent to TSI and other small businesses: there was little or no room for advancement. I could reward people for good work, and I could try to make their work challenging and enjoyable. However, it they were ambitious and wanted to climb the corporate ladder, there was not much that I could do. I suspect that this is why Steve quit. Similarly, if they were interested in a position with more responsibility, my options were likewise limited.

I tolerated—and even encouraged—a certain amount of creativity, but after Sue left the office (described here) in 1994. I made all the important decisions. It wasn’t that I liked exercising power. I just reckoned that none of the programmers were interested in managing the business. I would have been happy just to code all day.

As good as the staff was, our upcoming workload was so massive that there was very little room for error. I knew, for example, that Sue and I could not consider another big trip until all the installations were stable, which might take years. I also understood that I had to keep the entire programming team intact if possible. As I have explained in other blog entries, I figured that every time that a programmer quit I lost at least six months of my own productivity between the time spent looking for a replacement, training him or her, and correcting all the mistakes. Furthermore, there was never a good time to look for coders, but 1997—just months before Y2K raised its ugly head—was one of the worst.

Harry and Steve were good programmers, but I knew very well that the key member of the team for the next few years was Denise. Losing her would be a catastrophe that I did not want to contemplate. I probably should have worried more than I did.

TSI’s Telephone System: Each desk at TSI had a unit like the one shown at the left. The company had many phone lines, but no one, not even Doug or I, had a direct line. TSI had two phone numbers that outsiders knew about. One line was dedicated to customers reporting problems or asking questions. That line was answered by Sandy.

The other number was in the phone book and on our letterhead and business cards. We disclosed it to prospects, vendors, and a few others. That line was answered by the administrative person.

There were also two rollover lines. If a caller called either the main number or the support number, and that line was busy, the phone would still ring, but someone at TSI would need to press the flashing button for a rollover line to answer it.

TSI relied on this phone system until the business shut down in 2014. Doug and a few others pressed me to get a more modern system in which each person had her/his own line. A couple of times I priced out these options, but I could see no advantage that was worth spending thousands of dollars. Besides, I liked our phones. In my assessment, they had one overarching advantage. They made it much more difficult for employees to initiate or receive calls from the outside. There was also a fairly strong incentive to keep non-business calls short.

Harry and Denise dressed up for a TSI Christmas party.

Denise Bessette: Denise was the first programmer that Sue and I hired in 1984. The details are posted here. She worked full-time for a couple of years and then part-time for quite a few years while she finished her undergraduate degree at Smith College and then earned a masters degree at Trinity College. In 1993 she became a full-time employee again. We let her use Sue’s office, which was better than her previous location, but it was still less than optimal because Sue never removed all of her junk after she stopped coming to the office in 1994. We also gave Denise a substantial raise. I tried to keep her in the loop on what direction the company was going, but I did not set up any kind of a formal process for doing so. I should have, but I didn’t. My excuse was that I was away on trips a lot, and when I was in the office I was exceptionally busy.

I should emphasize that, even though we had worked together for many years, Denise and I did not have much of a personal relationship. She invited Sue and me to her house in Stafford, CT, for supper once in the eighties. We never reciprocated, presumably because our house was always a mess. I doubt that in all of those years Denise and I had talked about anything besides work more than a handful of times.

During the time that Denise had worked at TSI she had occasionally received phone calls from her husband, her mother, or one of her sisters. She might have received one or two calls from other people. In the fall of 1998, however, even I, who would ordinarily pay little or no attention to such a thing, noticed that she was receiving numerous phone calls from a “friend” named Jackie.

Herberger’s: My most vivid memories of this period were when I was in St. Cloud, MN, the home base for Herberger’s a chain of eleven department stores, 1300 miles away from TSI’s office. At the time I was installing TSI’s AdDept system on a small AS/400 in the advertising department there. A more detailed description of the installation is posted here.

The offices were on an upper floor of this store.

I only visited Herberger’s a few times. The occasion that I remember the most clearly was certainly not my first trip there. It might have been the second or third. I remember that it was rather cold, but the weather did not approach the frigid levels for which nearby Frostbite Falls is famous.

In those days the only way to reach St. Cloud was through the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. Northwest Airlines sponsored a shuttle service to the St. Cloud Regional Airport⁵. I can’t remember whether on this occasion I took that flight or rented a car and drove. I am pretty sure that I stayed at a hotel that was within easy walking distance of Herberger’s headquarters, which was on St. Cloud’s main drag, St. Gernaine St. I am pretty sure that I stayed two nights and then flew back to Connecticut on the third evening.

The main thing that I remember about my first day there was that I called the office several times to see if everything was all right. This was beyond unusual for me. On most trips, unless I needed help about some problem that I had encountered, I seldom called more than once. I have always hated talking on the phone, even if it was to people I liked. I liked all of TSI’s employees.

I don’t think that I spoke with Denise on any of those calls. However, I got the distinct impression that something was amiss. Although there was nothing particular that provoked alarm, the feeling of impending dread almost nearly overwhelmed me. I desperately wanted to get back to TSI’s office to discover the details so that I could deal with the situation. Of course, this was not possible. I had made a commitment to get the system up and running at Herberger’s, and I could not abandon the project because of a nebulous feeling.

After my first day at Herberger’s I ate supper by myself as usual. I don’t remember where I dined or what I did afterwards. I might have taken a walk. I might have read a book. I might have watched television. I do remember worrying.

I always got very tired after dinner. Every night I took a shower around 9:30 or 10:00 and then went to bed. I sat in bed for a few minutes reading a book. I almost never got through more than one chapter before the letters would begin to swim around on the page. I would then turn out the lights. Normally I was sound asleep within a few seconds.

St. Cloud in 1997 had newer cars, but otherwise it looked just like this.

Not this night. For a few hours I emulated Bobby Lewis—“Tossin’ and turnin'”⁶. I decided to make myself physically tired. There were not many choices available for nocturnal exercise. I dressed and put on my coat and hat. I then walked around St. Cloud for at least an hour. I did not go far. I just walked up and down the streets. None of the buildings seemed to have more than three stories. The only other thing that I remember noticing was a Maytag or Whirlpool store that sold appliances. I had thought that these stores—mainstays of my youth—had gone the way of the dodo, but they evidently still persisted in St. Cloud in 1998.

I eventually drifted back to the hotel and tried to sleep. I probably dozed off for a while before it was time to prepare for work. I remember that I ironed my shirt while I listened to Vivaldi on my CD player through my Bose headphones.

I was running on fumes that day. I chain-drank black coffee to try to remain alert. I took notes on all of the things that the Herberger’s employees said that they needed AdDept to do. I knew very well that Steve VeZain at PMG had already made it clear to me that no custom code would be provided for Herberger’s. Steve said that they needed to adapt to the system that worked for everyone else. I called in to TSI’s office several times on that second day, as well.

I flew back to Connecticut that night in an even worse mood than the foul outlook that these exhausting trips usually produced. On the one hand I was frustrated because the AdDept system did not work the way that the Herberger’s employees wanted it to, and there was nothing much that I could do to help them. They had no clout with PMG. They were, after all, by far the smallest division, and they were on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line. On the other hand I was also very apprehensive about what I would find out when I went into the office the next day.

The Denouement: On my first day back in the office Denise confided that she had been offered a job as IT director at a fairly small company that used an AS/400. I am not sure whether she would have any employees under her or not. Truth to tell, I did not care much what kind of job it was. My sole objective was to take whatever steps were necessary to persuade her to stay at TSI. I also learned that Jackie, as I expected, was a corporate headhunter for an employment agency.

I tried to talk Denise out of accepting the job. I emphasized how important I thought that she was to TSI. She asserted that she was mostly looking for something new. She had been doing mostly the same job for thirteen years.The best that I could get out of her was that she would think about it overnight.

Denise usually arrived at TSI’s office at about 9:00⁷. The morning following our conversation I went outside to meet her in the parking lot. I was extremely nervous when her car finally pulled into the lot. She got out and immediately informed me that she had decided to accept the other job.

I cannot say that I was surprised, but I was still crushed. I couldn’t face going back into the office. So I went and sat in my car and moped. I felt as bad or at least nearly as bad as when Bill Davey and I just missed qualifying for the National Debate Tournament in 1970 (described here) or when Sue abandoned me to go to Alaska in 1973 (described here). No situation in the intervening twenty-three years came close to evoking this feeling.

I had no idea how to deal with this situation. We had mountains of work. I was in no position to take on more of it myself, and I could only squeeze a little more out of Harry. I had made commitments to several clients. I could not select one or two to work on and dismiss the others. They all had deadlines, and they had given us deposits or were long-time clients that I was not prepared to disappoint.

Sitting in the car was not helping. I drove to the Enfield Square Mall, parked my Saturn, went inside, and walked around. At that time there were some benches inside. I rested on one of them every so often. Eventually a plan coalesced in my mind. It seemed like a good idea; I just wish that I had thought of it earlier so that it would not appear that I was being extorted.

That evening I discussed my idea with Sue. I honestly thought that it would be as difficult to persuade her to agree as it would be to convince Denise. I was wrong. She understood the important role that Denise played, and she agreed in principle with everything that I proposed. She also knew that I was miserable.

I located the original written proposal that I presented to Denise. It was somewhat different from what I remembered. Here is what it said:

Denise as Principal:

Denise will have 25% share⁸ in TSI. The three principals will have monthly meetings to go over the results of the previous month vis-à-vis the business plan and discuss other issues. The 25% share will entitled her to a presumptive bonus of 25% of the profits after employee bonuses and SARSEP contributions. Denise will give up her commissions.
Denise will be given a budget of $125,000 for fiscal 1999. She will have six objectives:
1. Do what it takes to bring our staff up to strength.
2. Work with Doug to come up with a profitable and sustainable business plan for current products: fee schedules for programming and support, etc. The deadline for this is April 1, 1999.
3. Come up with a concrete plan for TSI’s next software (or whatever) product. The plan should include recommendations about whether it should be done inside of TSI-AdDept or in another milieu. The deadline for this is September 1, 1999. TSI will pay for necessary travel. Mike has several frequent flier round-trips to use.
4. Come up with suggestions to ease tension and make work fun for everyone. This involves removing the “Wag the Dog” orientation we now have.
5. Implement remote dial-in support and a LAN (TSI will pay for the hardware).
6. Get someone AS/400 certified or figure a way around it.
Suggestion: Use part of the budget to hire Steve back in a new position. I would like to get five man-days of programming/support from the two of you, but this won’t work if there is not a firm system in place to guarantee freedom from support calls. The easiest way to accomplish this would be to work from some other location (which requires remote dial-in support).

I met privately with Denise on the following day. She was stunned by the offer and very impressed. However, she had already made a commitment to the other company. Moreover, there was another employee at the other company whose fate was somehow linked to Denise getting hired. I don’t remember the details. In any event Denise accepted my offer, I got our lawyers to make it legal, and she called the other company and Jackie. Neither was pleased.

This the first page of TSI’s revised stockholders agreement.

When I spoke with Denise, I made it clear that the monthly meetings would actually include Sue only if Sue insisted on attending, which I doubted would happen often. When we actually distributed annual bonuses, we gave Sue a minimal one and split the profits 50-50. The “concrete plan” became A^xN. I do not recognize the “Wag the Dog” reference, but within a year the company moved into a new office in East Windsor with a remarkably different atmosphere (as described here). The “someone” who became AS/400-certified⁹ was myself (as described here). Denise did not hire Steve Shaw back. Instead she hired Brian Rollet, who was something of a disappointment to her.

Denise and I worked together amicably and productively for another sixteen years. If she had not agreed to my plan, those years would have been been much less pleasant for me. I don’t know if I could have achieved half of what we accomplished together.

1. Much more about Doug Pease can be read here and in many of the blog entries about clients that he persuaded to purchase AdDept in the nineties.

2. TSI’s involvement with the May Company at the corporate level is posted here.

3. TSI’s dealings with Tandy Corporation are detailed here.

4. In the nineties Proffitt’s Inc. purchased all of those chains and turned them into divisions. After it purchased Saks Fifth Avenue, which already used AdDept, it changed its name to Saks Inc. TSI’s relationship with this company is described here. Separate blogs describe the individual divisions.

5. In 2021 this shuttle is no longer in operation. The only commercial flights from STC are on Allegiant Airlines. There are only two potential destinations—Fort Meyers/Punta Gorda and Phoenix/Mesa. Residents who want to fly anywhere else must somehow get to Minneapolis. Northwest Airlines filed for bankruptcy in 2005 and was acquired by Delta in 2008.

6. You can listen to the number 1 single on the Billboard chart for all of 1961 here.

7. Denise asked for this allowance when her son was young. It gave her time to get him off to school or wherever else he was headed. She also had a fairly long drive to Enfield and even longer to East Windsor. She often stayed late.

8. When TSI incorporated in 1994, Sue was given 45 percent of the stock, and I got 55 percent. The revised agreement left me with 40, Sue with 35, and Denise with 25.

9. IBM had implemented a new requirement for business partners. Not only did the software need to be certified, but also someone at each company must be certified by passing a test that was sales-oriented and a test that was more technical. I took both of these tests, as is described here.

1985-1988 TSI: GrandAd: The System/36 Clients

Posted on May 12, 2021 by Mike

The rest of the ad agencies. Continue reading →

We installed at least part of the GrandAd system at all of the companies listed below. A few may have actually been Datamaster clients. My recollections of some installations are very dim. In a few I had little or no involvement

Visitors to O&P went through this red door on Elm St.

Although Keiler Advertising evidently had a famous red door in the twenty-first century, in the eighties the most famous red door in Hartford’s advertising community belonged to O’Neal & Prelle¹ (O&P), the agency that was housed across the street from Bushnell Park in Hartford. Our negotiation was with Bill Ervin², who was, I think, already the president of the agency.

We got this account because of a phone call from Paul Schrenker, the graduate student hired by our marketing company (described here). Paul called dozens of presidents of ad agencies. Bill responded that he was interested in our system. This was probably the only positive outcome from that endeavor.

I seem to remember that O&P bought a model 5364 from TSI. I do not remember doing any custom programming, but we almost always at least customized the invoices that they sent to clients.

I worked mostly with Liz Dickman, who was the bookkeeper. Of all of our agency liaisons, she was among the best to work with. She was able to do the reconciliations by herself more quickly than anyone else. I am not sure who drew the following beautiful schematic of the installation. It certainly is not my handiwork.

Evidently we installed a 5363. A 5364 would not have supported so many devices.

Here are my most vivid memories:

On one visit I had to carry something down to the basement. Halfway down the staircase I felt a stabbing pain in my right knee. It did not last, but it was the first time that I had felt pain there since I recovered from the operation in 1974, as described here.
If I was at O&P at lunch time, I generally bought a couple of tacos from one of the food trucks. I then sat alone on a bench in Bushnell Park and chowed down. One day while I sat with my legs crossed a starling popped up on my right shoe, which was about six inches off the ground. He perched there for at least a minute or two to see if I would reward him for his clever trick. When I failed to do so, he flew away.
I recall Liz informing me that she planned to take the CPA exam as a flyer. She said that she did not study for it, or at least not much. She was legitimately shocked when she later learned that she had passed. Perhaps it dawned on her that she was suddenly overqualified for her job. They made her a vice-president.
The installation really went downhill after Liz departed. The guy who operated the computer called TSI and asked for some training. We scheduled a day for him at our office in East Windsor. He was shocked when we billed O&P for it. Evidently either no one told him that TSI had a contract with O&P that clearly designated how much free training (plenty) they received, or someone gave him some bad advice. O&P didn’t pay the bill, and shortly thereafter the agency announced its liquidation.

I am pretty sure that we sold a model 5364 to Eric Tulin Inc.⁴ of Hartford, CT. It might have been TSI’s developmental system. I can remember spending a few days at the office on Hamilton St. The primary operator was a guy, but I don’t remember too much about him. I must have met with Eric as well, but I don’t remember the occasion.

The agency was not very large at the time. I don’t think that they had more than five or six employees.

I recall even less about Knorr Marketing⁵, which was (and still is) located in Traverse City, MI, which is in the northwest part of Michigan’s lower peninsula. The agency, which must have already purchased a S/36, called TSI one day out of the blue.

We sent them some materials, and even though they had never sen a demo, they purchased some portion of the GrandAd system. We sent Kate Behart to do the installation and training. Because we used almost exactly the same system for our record-keeping, Kate knew the accounting and job costing portions of the system. So, I assume that we did not install the media portion.

Kate must have done a good job. We hardly ever heard from them, but Knorr Marketing sent us a Christmas card for many years.

Another mystery GrandAd client for me was Brannigan-DeMarco of New York. They purchased their hardware from IBM. Sue took care of this account. I am not sure how much of the GrandAd system they used.

Sue worked closely with Angela Vaccaro, who was the primary operator of the system. She called for support every few months. Sue always took care of her problems.

Similarly, I know very little about Sullivan & Brownell⁶ of Randolph,VT. Sue handled everything about this account, too. She visited them occasionally. Sue did not need much of an excuse to schedule a trip to Vermont. She has always loved the whole state.

The only thing that I recall about the account was the fact that the media director was a Black woman. That would not ordinarily be even a little surprising, but this was, after all Vermont. In 1990 there were a grand total of 1,951 Black people in the state, including exactly zero lawyers and judges. In fact, only eleven Black people in total lived in Randolph.

Sue told me that the media director and her husband had a farm in the vicinity. Sue told me that she might have stayed overnight there once or twice.

Using a chain saw the husband carved a fox out of a tree trunk and gave it to Sue. It sat placidly on guard out in the grass just beyond the parking spaces of our office in Enfield for many years. In 2021 it wards off coyotes in our back yard. I took a photo of it. It has seen better days.

I handled most of TSI’s interactions with Knudsen-Moore (K-M), an advertising agency located in Stamford, CT. I thought of this as an important account because it finally gave us a toehold in the southeastern (wealthy) part of the state. I also thought that it was cool that one of our clients did business with both King Oscar and the WWE (then known as the WWF).

The audience for my demo was the seventy-two year-old⁷ bookkeeper whose name was Irene. I must have brought a PC, our 5364, and a terminal that we were evaluating for another client. Its screen was very large for the time. This became important because the bookkeeper had very bad vision. In fact, she later confided to me that the reason that she insisted that they choose TSI’s system was because of that terminal. Ordinarily my strikingly good looks are the deciding factor, but as I mentioned, her vision was poor.

The McMahons never showed up at their ad agency when I was there.

It took us several months, for reasons that will soon be apparent, to get them up and running. During this period the agency changed hands not once, but twice. Its final name, which persists to May of 2021 was CDHM⁸.

The holdups for going live with the system were the balances in accounts payable and accounts receivable. The values in these accounts are generally positive for A/R and negative for A/P. If a vendor bills you $100, and you immediately bill the client with a 10 percent markup, A/P will have a transaction with a value of -100, and the entry in A/R will be +110. There will also be offsetting entries, of course. The point is that every company should be able to justify its A/P with a stack of unpaid bills from vendors and its A/R with a stack of open invoices sent to clients.

I entered in all of the open A/P and A/R into GrandAd. I printed a list of each with totals. The system’s totals did not agree with what Irene’s hand-written worksheets said were the current balances. Not only that; her balances, which were reflected in the company’s official general ledger, had the wrong sign! The A/P showed a positive balance, and the A/R showed a negative balance. According to these figures the agency’s vendors owed them money, and they were in debt to their clients!

Irene still insisted that her figures were right. I asked for a meeting with the president, Bill Hoag. The bookkeeper attended, as did a couple of other people. Their accountant was not present. I explained the situation with words similar to those of the previous paragraph. She insisted that her numbers were correct because she had checked every entry. She knew this because there was a little dot next to each figure. Much screaming ensued.

The lady had been using the “balance forward” method. After each transaction a new balance is calculated. This is OK, but at least monthly this balance must be checked against the list of invoices. She had NEVER done this. I later looked over her sheets. They were replete with errors. She simply could not read her own handwriting.

The irony of the situation did not strike me until much later. If someone had caught this egregious error earlier, we would not have won the contract. She recommended us solely because of the big screen on the terminal, remember?

How in the world could an agency with books in this deplorable condition be sold twice? I don’t know.

They asked the bookkeeper to retire. The guy that replaced her was, in some ways, worse.

I am pretty sure that his first name was George. I don’t remember his last name, but I do remember that he insisted that any communication to him include the title “Esq.” Now, I don’t pretend to know who gets to use that title, but I would be willing to bet that not many of them lived at the YMCA, which is where this character lived. George got into arguments with us all the time, and he was abusive to TSI’s employees.

For the first and only time, I finally called the agency’s president about George’s behavior. He said that he would look into it. He called me back less than hour later. He said that the guy had not been in all week, and he was now officially terminated.

The next week the president told me that they had hired a new person. I think that his name was Roger. He was very easy to work with, and he had the record-keeping straightened out in short order.

I drove to CHM an least half a dozen times. I never saw Vince or any other McMahon. It was a big disappointment.

Sue handled the account of Charmer Industries of the Astoria section of Queens. The company distributed wine and liquor products. This was probably a referral from Quique Rodriguez, an IBM rep with whom we had a good relationship.

Sue and I drove there on, as I remember it, a Sunday, carried their computer and printer into the building, and made sure that they were working. Then we drove back to Rockville. I found the whole drive within the city terrifying. I wanted to stop, get out of the car, and kiss the earth when we were back in Connecticut. I have been to NYC many times, but I have never driven inside the city limits.

Charmer had a lot of companies. One specialized in the design of point-of-sale products in bars and liquor stores. Over the years it went by a number of names, including ACC Marketing and the Sukon Group. These were the people who used our system.

Our final liaison in the nineties was Ed Wolfe. As I recall, the company later decided to purchase a small AS/400, the system that replaced the S/36. The AS/400 is described in some detail here. I took the train to New York a couple of times to help with the setup of the new system. Ed was a nice guy and a good client.

Doherty-Tzoumas occupied this building on Dwight Street in Springfield.

I have always thought of Doherty-Tzoumas of Springfield, MA, as a bizarre advertising agency. Dianne Doherty⁹ was the president. She was totally unsuited to running this agency or any other business. Her husband was a very prominent lawyer. I think that he must have set her up in this business, perhaps for tax reasons. I can only speculate.

Her partner, Marsha Tzoumas¹⁰, knew her way around advertising and the business world at least a little, and she was very nice. I felt a little sorry for her.

The agency certainly tried hard to succeed. It always seemed to be a beehive of activity. Quite a few employees had been hired. They liked to hold “focus groups”¹¹ for their clients’ products or services, an idea that I had never previously encountered.

I worked with Marsha and the agency’s bookkeeper to set up the system, and for the most part it seemed to go rather smoothly. However, when we showed the reports for the first monthly closing to Dianne she was overwhelmed.

Dianne hired a financial consultant to help her run the business. He might have been the company’s accountant, but that is not my recollection. I was in a few meetings with him. Most of them were fine, but in one meeting we were discussing the general ledger. Dianne made a very peculiar request. She asked if there were just two or three accounts that she should concentrate on. The request was, in my opinion, absurd. There might be a few that she could pretty much ignore, but to try to focus on any small subset of a company’s books was unthinkable. Most small businesses fail, and there are many paths to failure.

Nevertheless, the consultant took the bait and named a few accounts. I can’t even remember which ones he chose. I assume that cash was one. It is generally a good idea to know how much cash you have. He probably also picked A/P and A/R.

At any rate I knew in that instant that this business was doomed. I was right. In 1991 we received a letter from Dianne’s husband Paul proclaiming that the business was being liquidated. It was the only such letter that we ever received from an ad agency. They owed us less than $100, and so we did not consider suing for it.

I remember that on one occasion Marsha mentioned that she was looking for a good book to read. I recommended Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. I wonder if she took my advice.

In 1987 Rossin Greenberg Seronick and Hill (RGS&H)¹² was the hottest agency in Boston, MA. The president, Neal Hill¹³, was not an advertising guy. Although I never met any of the other three partners, I am sure that they all had a good deal of advertising experience.

The agency had enjoyed two years of explosive growth. It wanted a computerized system for word and data processing. Neal and Ernie Capobianco¹⁴, the director of finance, interviewed us and all of our principal competitors. Their choice of the GrandAd system was a real feather in our cap. We were confident that we could do a great job for them, and we hoped that it would open the Boston market, which we had previously never been able to crack, for us.

The holdup was the word processing element. Neal loved Wang’s approach to word processing, and he thought that DisplayWrite/36 (DW/36) was inferior. However, no ad agency software had ever been written for Wang’s operating system. In fact, I had never encountered anyone who used it for anything other WP.

When Neal told us that they had decided to use our system, he asked what we would recommend for word processing. I said that I was not an expert, but the future was in PC’s. Furthermore, if they planned to use the S/36 only for GrandAd, a 5362, which could support up to twenty-eight locally attached devices, would be more than sufficient.

WordPerfect running in DOS did not look like the answer.

My assessment turned out to be correct, but in 1987 buying PC’s with good word processing software (the most popular at the time was WordPerfect) and connecting them would have been a formidable task. Personal computers in those days were still really personal.

Neal insisted that one system should address all the needs. IBM persuaded Neal that a model 5360 with DW/36 would serve their needs.

Neal approved the purchase of a 5360 (the washer-drier model) directly from IBM.

In the meantime I received a phone call from a salesman at Wang. He wanted us to convert our software to run on Wang’s equipment. I informed him that this would be a monumental task, and, although we had dozens of successful installations on IBM hardware, we had absolutely no experience with Wang’s approach. He told me that if we agreed to convert, he had an agency lined up that would use our system. I asked him if he was referring to RGS&H. When he confirmed it, I told him that they had already signed a contract with us. This was news to him.

The system that IBM proposed included terminals for almost all of the employees. The ones with PC’s got 5250 emulation adapters. Our end of the installation went fine. We did a great deal of custom coding for them. They had spent a lot of money on the system, and they reasonably insisted that it do exactly what they wanted.

Then the bombshell exploded. Microsoft let the world know that Neal Hill had written a letter to them. In it he bragged that RGS&H had poached the copywriter and artist from the agency that had handled advertising for Lotus Development, which at that time was considered Microsoft’s biggest competitor. Microsoft had not yet assembled its Office package, and Lotus 123 and Approach were very popular applications. Neal said that RGS&H knew what Lotus was up to, or words to that effect. He also sent them two plane tickets from Seattle to Boston.

I could sympathize. Evidently no one checked Neal Hill’s work either.

This episode caused a major scandal that has been widely written about in legal, advertising, and business circles as well as in the local press. In fact, if you google the agency’s name you will get several pages of articles about it. There are so many that is very difficult to find any other information about the agency.

Neal resigned in December of 1987. Ernie was named as the interim president. Our system was fully functional by this time. Ivan Dunmire served as our liaison. He did an excellent job.

TSI indirectly got swept up in this brouhaha. The articles in the local press mentioned that RGS&H had recently purchased a computer system that was characterized either as a mainframe or as a system that was much too large for the company. So, despite the fact that the people who actually used our software appreciated greatly what we had done, we never had the good reference account in Boston that we had hoped for.

Here are some of my recollections of my experiences with RGS&H:

You can’t make it in thirty minutes if you are afraid to exceed 10 miles per hour.

When I was driving Ernie to lunch one day he complained that my car smelled like tobacco smoke. It must have been Sue’s. Nobody previously had mentioned it. Evidently I was “nose blind” to it.
One of the two contenders for the most harrowing experience of my life (the other, getting caught in the Blizzard of ’77, is described here) occurred when driving back to Rockville. It was snowing lightly, and the traffic was moving at a fairly steady pace on the Mass Pike when I reached Exit #9 for I-84 near Sturbridge. To my surprise I-84 was nearly empty. There were no tracks in the road at all. I could clearly see the reflective markers on both sides of the road, and I used them for navigation. There really was no place to stop between Sturbridge and Rockville. The Celica and I passed no one, and we were only passed by one car traveling at perhaps 30 mph. A mile or so later I saw a car that had slid into the median; I assume that it was the one that had passed me. I did not consider stopping. When I finally reached the exit for Rockville, I had to guess where it was; the asphalt was covered with several inches of snow and there were no tire tracks. I did not think that my car would make it up the steep hills in Rockville, but it did. Sue was very worried; there were no cellphones in those days.
After we moved the office to Enfield in 1988, I usually drove to Springfield, took a Peter Pan bus to Boston, and walked a few blocks to the RGS’s offices. By that time “&H” had been dropped from the agency’s name.
I loved working with Ernie, Ivan, and the other people at the agency. There were no quarrels or misunderstandings.
I remember that I usually walked to McDonald’s for lunch and ate a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese and a Big Mac.
In the nineties Ivan called us a few times for support. By that time PC networks were becoming widespread, and people were touting the idea of “client-server” systems, a term that simply meant that the data was on one system used by everyone, but each person’s computer had its own set of programs. However, Ivan said that many of the people at the agency did not understand this. They thought that the term designated a system constructed to provide better service to the agency’s clients, and they wanted to know why RGS did not have one.

I tried to recruit Ivan to work for TSI, but he turned us down. I am not exactly sure what role he would have played at TSI, but I am pretty sure that he would have done a good job.

Our other installation in Boston, Rizzo Simons Cohn (RSC), was an even bigger fiasco. I was surprised to discover that Sue has almost completely repressed the memory of The Sign of the Three.

We had been contacted by a firm called Computer Detectives (CD). The guy on the phone told us that his company had been hired by the agency to find a computer system for them. It turned out that CD was a two-person company, the guy with whom we talked and his wife. His name was Larry Ponemon¹⁶. I don’t recall hers. We dealt almost exclusively with Larry.

Sue and I went to supper at a Chinese restaurant with them. The both ordered moo shu pork; this is the only thing that Sue remembered about them. They were very surprised when we told them that we had never really had a vacation.

We showed them the system, and they liked what they saw. We gave them a proposal for the GrandAd system running on a S/36 model 5363.

Larry called us to tell us that they had recommended our system to RSC, but the agency preferred to run its system on 3B2, a UNIX computer manufactured by AT&T. They asked us if we could convert our system to run on it.

We researched whether the S/36 version of Workstation Basic¹⁷ would work on a 3B2, and we were assured by the company that wrote and marketed it that it would. We told CD that we were pretty sure that it would, but we would need to adjust our quote to cover the conversion costs. We did so.

We then got to meet another consultant, who, among other things, sold and marketed AT&T computers. We told him that we were accustomed to working with IBM, and we trusted its commitment to support. If he sold the system to RSC, we wanted to know whom we would contact when we had problems or questions. He said that he was our contact. Remember that there were no cellphones, and this guy practically lived in his car. We would need to leave messages. The best that we could hope for was a beeper. Then we would need to depend on him to find someone who was willing and able help us. We were used to dialing 1-800-IBMSERV from anywhere. Someone ALWAYS answered.

The CD people were there at the meeting. They and the AT&T guy assured us that we and the agency’s users would get all the support that we needed.

We converted the software to work on Unix without an inordinate amount of difficulty. That, however, did not mean that it would efficiently do everything that RSC wanted in their environment. We knew nothing about how the operating system would perform when numerous users were working on the same files at the same time. Sue spent several days at RSC trying to get the system to work, but she ran into one roadblock after another, and no one was available to help her.

After a few weeks of this foolishness, the agency got fed up. CD had not disclosed to RSC, who had paid them handsomely to conduct the search, that they were being paid a “finder’s fee” both by us and by the AT&T guy. RSC had never voiced any preference for hardware; that was just a lie. Evidently they had told RSC quite a few whoppers, too. RSC sued CD, and Sue testified for the agency. AT&T took the hardware back and refunded at least part of the cost.

RSC reopened the software search. We submitted the same proposal that we had previously given to CD. Since we had already been paid for the UNIX version, we charged nothing for the GrandAd software or for the customizations. The other contender was a New York company (I can’t remember the name) against whom we often competed. Its software ran on UNIX.

I called the finance guy at RSC, Jonathan Ezrin¹⁸, and asked about their decision. He informed me that they had chosen the other vendor. I asked him what the basis for the decision was. He responded that mostly it was the cost. The answer astounded me. I asked him what the other software company had bid. It was about $10,000 higher than ours. I asked him how they could have considered this less than our bid. He said that to be fair they had included the cost of the software in our original proposal when making the comparison.

I assured him that we were not going to give that money back. I then told him frankly that theirs was the stupidest line of reasoning that I had ever heard, and I slammed down the phone.

RSC dissolved in 1990, less than a year after that phone call. I don’t know what happened to CD. I found no trace of them on the Internet, although Lavinia Harris has published a series of novels about a young couple who call themselves “computer detectives”.

I remember visiting Fern/Hanaway¹⁹ of Providence, RI, a few times. The agency had a System/36 that they had bought from IBM. I think that we installed one or two modules there, but I don’t remember which ones.

IBM must have told Arian & Lowe (A&L)²⁰, an advertising agency of sorts in Chicago, IL, about TSI. Sue said that she went there once. She remembers that the floor of their office would have been good for dancing, but the only thing that she remembered about the company was that their main client was the Beef Board. They mostly produced point-of-sale posters and signage.

I installed some modules of the GrandAd system there and flew out for a couple of month ends. I remember several very strange occurrences.

The Director of Financial Operations for the agency was Neta Magnusson²¹. We generally had lunch together. She always had more than one martini. I could never have concentrated in the afternoon if I had imbibed a small fraction of what she downed. I stuck with Diet Coke or iced tea.
A&L used its S/36 model 5360 for word processing. One time when I was there working on the GrandAd system, they somehow lost some WP documents. A few people blamed me for this. I protested that I had not done anything to any documents. Fortunately I knew enough about how DW/36 worked that I could also demonstrate that I could not possibly have done anything.
I ordinarily stayed at a Holiday Inn that was a short distance from A&L. On one trip I had to stay an extra day. The Holiday Inn had no availability for that extra night, but they found me a place to stay and called a cab to take me there. The cab driver said that I definitely would not want to stay there. Instead, he took me to another place that was in a rather rough part of town. However, the room was OK, and it was only one night. I was, however, happy to be out of there the next morning.
The agency’s was in downtown Chicago. I had to take cabs back and forth to O’Hare. One time I somehow left my glasses in the cab. Believe it or not, the next time that I went to A&L I stopped at the taxi dispatcher. My glasses were in the Lost and Found box safe and sound.
One of the cab drivers spoke no English at all. His girlfriend sat in the front seat and translated for him.
Another cab driver picked me up at A&L. I wanted to go to O’Hare. He asked me for directions. I actually rode with a cab driver in Chicago who did not know how to get to the airport! Fortunately, this was one of my last trips to A&L; I could have given him instructions blindfolded.
The favorite expression of the system operator at A&L was “Have a good one!” I realized that this was cheerful and completely innocuous, but for some reason it really irritated me.
My favorite part of the trips to Chicago was the prospect of having an Italian beef sandwich, either at the airport or bought from a street vendor.

It seems appropriate to end with the bittersweet tale of Charnas Associates of Manchester, CT. TSI and IBM scheduled a presentation to the agency at the IBM office in Hartford. The presentation was scheduled to take two hours. I went to the office early and loaded our GrandAd demo system onto the 5360 at IBM. I also went over my notes for the presentation.

The turnout was unbelievable. Around twenty people showed up from the agency. I was always happy if we got one; I had done worse than that.

I had a lot of experience at this. The format varied by only a little. Someone from IBM acted as the host. He or she was always dressed impeccably and spoke glowingly about how wonderful IBM’s systems and support were and what a close working relationship IBM had with independent software developers like TSI. Then they turned it over to me.

Not this time. The IBMer went around to each and every person in the room and asked them what they would like the computer to do to help with their jobs. After each answer he would rush back to a whiteboard and add it to the list of items that were already on the board. The he would ask them to evaluate how important this was to them. He was hoping that they would attach a monetary value to it, but he was willing to settle for peace of mind or saving time. He dutifully recorded the values as well.

This went on for at least an hour and forty-five minutes. Then he spent a few minutes praising the System/36 before he let me talk for a couple of minutes. I could not possibly do my presentation in less than a half hour. So, I had to forget about my slides and my demo and try to talk about the big picture. The worst part was that damnable list on the whiteboard behind me. Needless to say, our software addressed less than half of the wish list. Of course no one suggested “Help us find which clients are unprofitable and why” or “Help us improve cash flow”.

I was so angry at the IBMer that I could have punched him. If I had not sworn after that fight in the fifth grade with Tom Guilfoyle that I would not engage in fisticuffs, I might have.

We followed up on this, but we never heard from Charnas.

A few years later in 1989 I was scheduled to give my first AS/400 demonstration of the AdDept system that I was still in the process of installing at Macy’s in New York. TSI did not own an AS/400 yet, and so I had made a backup tape at Macy’s. I planned to install Macy’s programs and data, dummy up the data so it was not recognizable, give the demo, and then erase the programs from the disk.

I never finished the first step. Something about the tape made the AS/400 system at IBM hang up. Commands could not even be entered at the system console. I worked with these incredibly reliable machines for twenty-six years. This was the only time that I saw something like this happen.

The IBM people were furious at me. They were certain that the problem occurred because our programs were written in BASIC. I calmly explained that the programs never got restored. Something happened during the restoring process.

Nobody from IBM attended my demo. I went to the demo room to do a song and dance with no accompaniment. Only one person was there, and she was not even one of our invitees. She identified herself as a media buyer at Charnas who had heard about the event from one of her clients. I explained how the GrandAd system worked and which agencies were using it.

She told me that Charnas had a S/36. She did not know the model. I asked her how big it was. “Oh, it’s big!”

She said that they used it only for word processing, and everyone hated it. That guy from the first demo had sold them a 5360 with no software except DisplayWrite36!

I don’t remember what happened after that too clearly. I am sure that I went to Charnas’s office in Manchester at least a few times in the early nineties. I think that I installed an abbreviated media system for them. Then I got heavily involved in the AdDept system.

Charnas apparently went out of business in July of 1992.

While I was looking for information about the agency I came across the book shown at the right. It was commissioned by Robert Bletchman, an attorney from Avon who died in 2008. His obituary is here.

There is only one copy of the book on this website. The title is How to Achieve the Release of Unidentified Flying Object Information from the United States Government.The first reader with $50 can claim it. Shipping is free!

The publication date for this book is in 1985. I am pretty sure that this effort antedated Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM show on WTIC radio by approximately ten years.

1. O’Neal & Prelle went out of business in 2000.

2. Bill Ervin died suddenly in 2003. His obituary is here.

3. Liz Dickman is now the CEO of Integrated Physicians Management Services in East Hartford. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. Eric Tulin Inc. changed names and ownership a few times before giving up the ghost in 1991.

5. Knorr Marketing’s website is here.

6. In 2007, as reported here, Tom Brownell apparently transferred his client list to a group of his employees. They changed the name of the agency to 802 Creative Partners and moved the headquarters to Bethel, VT.

7. By coincidence 72 is my own age as I write this in May 2021. To be honest, if I tried to keep a manual ledger, I probably would not be able to read my handwriting either.

8, The agency’s website is cdhm.com.

9. Dianne Doherty now goes by Dianne Fuller Doherty. She resides in Longmeadow, MA, in 2021. After the agency’s failure she devoted her life to helping other small businesses, especially those run by women, get started. Her story is described here.

10. Marsha Tzoumas is now known as Marsha Montori. In 2021 she is the Chief Marketing Officer at Six-Point Creative Works, an ad agency in Springfield. Her LinkedIn page is here.

11. I used focus groups in my short story (described here).

12. RGS&H went through five name change. Its final incarnation, GSOD, Inc. dissolved in 2007.

13. Neal Hill landed in Canada. His LinkedIn page is here.

14. Ernie Capobianco telephoned me in the early 1990’s. At the time he had just started working at Valentine-Radford, a big ad agency in Kansas City. He arranged for me to meet with some principals and the IT guy. I also visited Ernie’s apartment in Johnson County. I think that I caught him at a bad time. His LinkedIn page, which skips over his time at RGS&H, is here.

15. Ivan Dunmire lives in New York City. His LinkedIn page is here.

16. I think that Larry Ponemon now runs the Ponemon Institute, which has something to do with privacy, security, and computers. His page on the organization’s website is here.

17. Workstation Basic was designed to emulate the Datamaster version of BASIC running under DOS and later UNIX. More information is here.

18. Jonathan Ezrin apparently now lives in Plymouth, MA. He does not have a LinkedIn page.

19. Fern/Hanaway was dissolved in 1998.

20. It appears that in 1991 A&L was taken over by Daryl Travis. Various versions of Arian, Lowe and Travis (no Oxford comma) existed after that, but I think that the operation in Chicago did not survive for long. The Beef Board account represented a high percentage of its billings.

21. I think that in 2021 Neta Magnusson lives in Geneva, IL, a suburb on the west side of Chicago.

1983-1988 The IBM System/36

Posted on May 8, 2021 by Mike

A true multi-user system. Continue reading →

A 5360. The box on the top left is the diskette magazine drive.

IBM’s introduction of the System/36 (S/36) in May of 1983 was not a monumental event for TSI. From our perspective the new system seemed more like a marginal upgrade of the System/34, which had always been much too pricey for anyone who would talk to us. The new system had only one basic model, the 5360. The starting price for one of these was still $140,000. It was also gigantic and had special electrical requirements. It was clearly designed for a small data processing department, not a small business without one.

The biggest advantage of the System/36 over any system that we had worked with was that it supported a fairly large number of terminals and printers. This was because it could run a number of jobs at the same time. It also supported batch processing, which meant that time-consuming jobs need not tie up any workstations.

We appreciated these benefits. In fact, we drooled over them. However, no prospective customer of ours ever had a six-figure budget for hardware.

The 5250 screen showed one color, green.

The peripherals were also rather expensive. IBM in those days ignored standards used in the rest of the industry. It set its own standards, and they were all proprietary. So, cheaper hardware from other vendors would not work with IBM systems.

Although the price went down through the years, a 5250 terminal cost around $2,000 when the 5360 was introduced. The cheapest printers, which used dot-matrix technology, were in the $5,000 range.

Both ends of twinax cables were male. A device with two female ends was needed to connect two together

The cabling was also not cheap. The system used twinaxial cables for direct attachment of these devices. Most competing systems used serial or parallel connections. Twinax was decidedly better, but it was also more expensive.

The local devices were connected in a serial fashion to a controller. Up to seven devices could be connected on one twinax line. Each device had two female twinax connections on the back, either in one T-shaped unit or with two short cables. One was called the “gozinda”; the other was the “gozouta”.

So, if the S/36 had four devices named A, B, C, and D. A would be connected to the controller by a twinax cable, B would be attached to A by a twinax cable, C would be attached to B, and D would be attached to C.

A switch on device A, B, and C needed to be set to allow pass-through to the next device on the line. On device D that switch needed to be set to denote that it was the last device on the line.

For device D to communicate with the S/36, all of the connections must be functional, and all of the switches set correctly. It reminded me of Christmas tree lights in the old days.

The S/36 also came with a serial port. Since a modem could be attached to this device, it would be possible for support people at IBM or the software vendor (or anyone else, for that matter) to sign on from a remote location. This was, of course, our dream; it would make support so much easier. The announcement brought it a little closer to reality.

The hard drive capacity varied from 30 MB to 400 MB. In the twenty-first century, of course, those quantities would only hold a handful of photos. However, to most software vendors in the eighties this meant that total storage was no longer a big concern. However, the default backup device was a magazine that held only ten 8″ diskettes. Each diskette had a capacity of only 1MB each. This was a rather obvious limitation on the practical storage.

It was possible to attach an 8809 1/2″ reel-to-reel tape unit to address this. I could not find a price for these monsters. It may well have been the case that if you had to ask the price, you could not afford it.

The System/36 had two processors. The main processor (MSP) executed the code; the control processor (CSP) managed the work for the main processor. The CSP was four times as fast as the MSP, and they worked perfectly in tandem. The S/36 could perform an amazing amount of work at very fast speeds with embarrassingly puny processors. It was also extremely reliable.

Some actions, such as IPL¹ and backing up files, needed to be initiated from the system console. The system console on the 5360 was built in to the top of the box. Your system operator needed a wheelchair? Life was rough all over.

The System/36 supported five programming languages: RPG II², COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, and Assembler. RPG II, a simplistic column-based language, was the most popular. Wikipedia says that this was because it was the least expensive³. The BASIC language was similar to the one used on the Datamaster. I never heard of anyone who programmed in FORTRAN or Assembler on a S/36.

BASIC programs could not be compiled. Therefore, a copy of the BASIC interpreter needed to be loaded into memory for each program that was running. Nevertheless, because the CSP was so efficient, TSI’s benchmarks showed that there was no noticeable difference in the speed of interpreted BASIC programs and compiled RPG II programs performing the same tasks. So, we never considered converting our program to anything besides S/36 BASIC.

IBM also positioned the System/36 with its DisplayWrite/36 software as a word processing server. We found it to be inferior to the Datamaster product in most ways.

The file structure of the S/36 was somewhat different from the Datamaster’s. Programs and other executable items such as BASIC procedures and system procedures were stored in “libraries”. Libraries were somewhat like directories or folders on a PC. However, there was no such thing as a sub-library.

Data files needed to have unique names. They did not reside in libraries. In order to identify which files belonged to which application, the names were preceded by a short identifier and a period. In GrandAd all the media files started with “M.”, and the other files started with “T.”.

The S/36 did not have a relational database⁴. However, the fields in each file were defined in the system using field names, positions, and length/type designations. These data definition specifications were called DDS. Programs could access files using the same ISAM techniques with which we were already familiar. However, IBM also offered a product named Query/36 that allowed someone who know how the files were named and structured to write queries in a manner that was similar to SQL. These queries could then be saved and executed on demand.

Query/36 was a valuable debugging tool. TSI required all of our clients to buy it.

IBM announced the 5362 in 1984. It was much smaller than the 5360—only about as large as a two-drawer file cabinets. It also had no special electricity requirements. It used the same operating system as the 5360, which was called SSP. It came with one diskette drive and up to 120MB of hard drives. A QIC (1/4″ cartridge) external tape drive was available. A 5250-type terminal plugged into the first twinax spot served as the system console. Fewer devices could be attached, but none of our clients ever reached the limit. Best of all, the starting price was only $20,000, about the same as two Datamasters and a hard drive.

Many advertising agencies in the northeast could afford this level of investment. It took some time for TSI to convert the ad agency programs. I remember spending many days at IBM’s office in Hartford working on this. After tat we needed to change the focus of our marketing efforts to larger ad agencies. At this point IBM had no system to offer to the many whose needs would be satisfied with one Datamaster with diskette drives.

We were happy with this announcement, but it was a disappointment that IBM had totally abandoned the market that had produced the majority of TSI’s sales.

The 5364 (or System/36 PC), which was announced in June of 1985, was IBM’s belated attempt to recapture that market. The starting price of $5,995 was quite attractive. For some reason the system console had to be an IBM PC, XT, or AT with a special card inside. The S/36 part was the same size and shape as an AT. It contained a 5 1/4″ diskette drive that was compatible with neither the attached PC nor any previous model of the S/36. Compatibility was not a high priority for IBM.

This is what the system console looked like with the PC on top of the 5364. Manute Bol found it very convenient.

This bizarre arrangement was very difficult to explain to a prospect. Why would a super-reliable S/36 be coupled to the least reliable hardware ever to wear the IBM logo? It did guarantee that at least one IBM PC was installed at each location, I guess. However, most installations probably did what we did—attach the oldest, slowest machine available as the system console, and then use it only when necessary.

The 5364 had two severe limitations. In the first place, only four devices (counting the system console and the printer) could be attached. So, the S/36 customer could really only attach two more displays or one display and a printer. Still, that would suffice at most small ad agencies and at TSI. We immediately ordered one.

The other limitation was, in some ways, worse. The 5364 came with only 256K of RAM. Each session could use up to 64K. However, batch jobs counted as sessions. If one person started some lengthy reports or other process, the system could possibly reach the point where jobs needed to be swapped between memory and disk. This could severely impair the system’s performance.

The announcement of the 5364 created a good deal of business for a company named Black Box. They sold a box with slots for one 8″ and one 5 1/4″ diskette and software to make image copies from one to another. We bought one, and I used it a lot.

This is a 5363 with both a diskette drive and a QIC tape drive.

In 1987 IBM finally fixed all of the problems, at least the ones that most concerned us. The 5363 was a reasonably priced machine that was suitable for almost any small business. If it had been announced two years earlier instead of the 5364, we could have sold a lot of them.

I could not find anything either on the Internet or in our basement that listed the price of one. I don’t remember that anyone balked at the cost. I also could not discover how much memory it had, but I remember distinctly that it was plenty. It could handle at least seven devices, too, and you could get one with a built-in QIC tape drive.

We enthusiastically ordered one for TSI’s office and tried to get our Datamaster customers excited about it.

By the middle of the eighties most office workers had some kind of personal computer on their desks. They did not want someone to install a terminal next to it as well. But how could they gain access to the S/36 without a terminal? There were no networks worth mentioning in the eighties, and there was nothing like USB. The only way to reach the server was through a twinax line, and IBM did not share its knowledge of how the display and printer connections worked. IBM considered anything that it produced was proprietary.

IBM and many third party companies brought 5250 terminal-emulation packages to market. The idea was to be able transform the PC into a terminal on demand and then change it back. Although the other vendors had to reverse-engineer the 5250 interface, they still were able to produce competitive products that were cheaper and had more features than what IBM offered. They generally consisted of a three pieces:

A hardware card that fit into an expansion slot on the motherboard of the PC. That’s right. You had to take the cover off of the machine and add a card that had the brains needed to make the PC act like a 5250 card. You might also need to physically flip switches on the care to configure it. Then you had put the PC back together again. What could possibly go wrong?
A dongle (sometimes lovingly referred to as a “pigtail”) that screwed into the interface on the part of the card that stuck out the back of the PC. It provided a gozinda and a gozouta for the twinax cable(s).
Software to run on the PC.

When they first appeared, the cost of these packages was well over $1,000, nearly as much or more than a PC or terminal. However, the emulators had one very substantial advantage. The inexpensive printer attached to the PC could also be configured as a S/36 printer. This not only saved money and office space; it was also much more convenient.

For a few years the companies selling these packages did a land-office business.

1. IPL stands for Initial Program Load. It just means the starting process for the system. IBM had three-letter abbreviations of everything, including a three-letter abbreviations (TLA).

2. RPG is short for Report Program Generator. I could never understand why anyone used it.

3. IBM required separate licenses for each programming language that was used.

4. Two IBMers, Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce, codified the Structured Query Language (SQL) used in relational databases in the seventies. IBM rejected it because the Indexed-Sequential ISAM structure that it used in its computers had much better performance. About three decades later the company changed its mind.

1981-1985 TSI: A4$1: The Beginnings

Posted on April 6, 2021 by Mike

Anything for a Buck: Getting started. Continue reading →

I have pretty clear memories of most of the clients¹ from the very early days of TSI in Rockville, but I did not remember how we managed to develop the software for the first few. All of them except one either bought a new Datamaster or already had one at their offices.

The only computer to which TSI had access was a 5120. Both the 5110/5120 and the Datamaster used the BASIC programming language, but there was no easy way to convert code from one system to the other. If we did not develop the systems for new customers on the 5120, how did we write the code? I was pretty sure that we did not park ourselve in the client’s offices for weeks on end. For one thing, that would inhibit cursing, and it is not really possible to write good code without giving vent to a great deal of foul language. For another, we would have had to meet the client’s dress code every day. I would have certainly remembered that.

Sue reminded me that IBM in those days endorsed the policy of having the software developer take delivery on the customer’s hardware. The system would then presumably arrive at the customer’s location a short time configured and ready to use. Needless to say, this approach lasted only a few years, but it definitely gave struggling developers like us the opportunity to write a lot of software and simultaneously to put aside enough money to buy a system of our own.

This was accounting in 1980. By 1990 the columnar pads were an endangered species.

TSI’s first Datamaster client¹ was our accounting firm, Massa and Hensley. Looking for a system to do time and material billing, they had purchased the tabletop model of the Datamaster. We met with them and designed a system that used three diskettes: JCPROG, which held all the programs, JCDATA for the keyed tables, and JCDET, to hold the transactions. The system had the following tables:

A table of client-related data that was keyed by a three-digit client number.
A table for each job opened for a client. The key was a concatenation of the client number and a five-digit job number.
Two job cost tables. One had every transaction; the other had the summary of costs by category. This arrangement violated the rules of normalization, but it facilitated some requirements. By the standards of the day the detail file was gigantic.
An employee table that was keyed by a three-character code.
A table of cost categories that also had three digit keys. The categories were of two principal types: time and materials. The entries in the time categories consisted of hours worked on a job. The entries in the materials categories were dollar amounts.
A rate table with a key consisting of the employee number and the category number. It might also have had a date so that they could increase rates to keep up with inflation.

The JCDATA diskette also had a table for a batch of transactions. This table might have been keyed by a letter so that more than one batch could be open at the same time.

My recollection is that there was only one menu on the JCPROG diskette. The user would place the program diskette in drive 1 and key in GO JCMENU. GO was a system command (ass opposed to a BASIC command) and JCMENU was the name of the program that displayed the menu of options.

Employees at both Massa and Hensley and Harland-Tine filled out forms like this every day. The category numbers were printed on the form. The employees knew by heart the client numbers and job numbers on which they worked.

Every day the operator keyed in a batch of transactions. The source documents were time sheets from the employees and other forms for billable materials. The program checked to see if the JCDATA diskette was in drive 2. If not, a message was displayed on line 24 of the screen to put it in. The entry and editing programs validated each field (client number, job number, employee number, category number) as it was entered. It printed a record of the transactions as they were entered. Transactions could be edited or deleted. When everything seemed correct, the program to update was run. The user was told to remove the JCPROG diskette from drive 1 and to insert JCDET. The records were then written on the history file on JCDET. Summary records at the job level were also written.

There might have also been a program to produce invoices to send to clients. Mass and Hensley may have opted just to produce a cost sheet for the jobs that they wanted to bill. I don’t remember.

We finished this project pretty rapidly, and everyone liked what we had done. Previously they would have had to rewrite and calculate costs for the information from the time sheets onto cost forms for each job. So, this was an ideal project for an early eighties software system. The savings in time and the increase in accuracy of costing and billing were immediate and substantial.

The users must have called TSI for support a couple of times, but I cannot ever remember when we needed to “put out a fire” for them.

TSI’s standards fit on one page, but they were strictly enforced.

Since I was doing the bulk of the programming, I implemented a set of standards for all of the programs. The goal was to make it as easy as possible to understand and debug them.

Many BASIC programmers eschewed the GOTO statement and use the RENUM command when they have changed their programs. I never renumbered the programs. Instead ,certain types of statements ALWAYS were in the same range of line numbers:
- Line 1 was always OPTION BASE 1, LPREC. That meant that all counting started with 1, not 0, and all numbers had as much precision as the system could handle.
- Line 250 always opened the specs table, and subsequent lines read in whatever specs were used by the program.
- Lines 10000-10999 opened the tables used by the program.
- The main loop of the program started on line 15000.
- The exiting routine started at 60000.
- Program-specific subroutines and functions were located on lines in the 70000-89999 range.
- Headings for reports were subroutines that started at 90000.
- Detail lines on reports were subroutines that started at 90000.
- Reusable functions were 95000-99998.
- Sections of code were separated by comment lines consisting of asterisks or dashes.
Every program had a meaningful number.
- 1-99 was for programs to insert new records into tables or to work on existing records.
- 100-199 was for lists of items in tables on the screen.
- 200-299 for transactions.
- 300-399 for printed lists of items in tables.
- 400+ for reports.
- The program number was in the upper right corner of every screen and every report.
- Program listings and variable cross-references were placed in accordion files by client and program number.
Variable names were consistent and meaningful. CLNUM was used for client number in every program. Looping variables were always I or J. Counting variables started with N. NEE=NEE+1 would be used to count the number of employees selected.
In this version of BASIC all files were accessed by a number between 1 and 255. We consistently used the same number for a file. The printer was always #255.
Although BASIC allowed reading in all of fields at once, thereby assigning values to all of the variables with the corresponding field name, we never did this. If we had, we would have not been able to use the same field names for the same concept in different files. Instead, we read in only the fields that we needed by their position in the file. The disadvantage was that if we decided to change a field, e.g., to make it bigger, every program that referenced that file needed to be changed.
Disk space was precious. If a customer ran out of space on a diskette, it was a catastrophe. To save space all numbers except codes were “packed” to fit nine-digit numbers in five bytes in every layout. Dates were stored as six-digit numbers in the form YYMMDD. This all worked fine until the late nineties when we, as well as everyone else, needed to address the Y2K problem.
The screen layouts were consistent, and the behavior of Cmd keys² was also consistent.
- F2=Online help for every screen.
- F3=Orderly exit.
- F4=List of items in a table.
- F12=Cancel and return.
The screens validated every field as soon as it was entered. If it was not accepted, the reason for the problem appeared in bold print on line 24, the alarm sounded, and the cursor remained at the field. This worked very well for the 5120 and the Datamaster, but when a single computer had many terminals attached, it became important to minimize traffic going to and from the server. Our programs on the System/36 and AS/400 therefore validated the entire screen at once. Problems were still reported on line 24 of the screen, the alarm still sounded, and the cursor was positioned at the source of the problem.

By and large these standards serve us well. We never really abandoned any of them.

This rather simple project was memorable not so much for what we did but for what it led to. Our accountant, Dan Marra, had a client named Harland-Tine, a new advertising agency in downtown Hartford. The two principals were Dave Tine³ and Susan Harland⁴.

I have dozens of vivid memories of this installation. At our first meeting Dave introduced himself as the president of the agency. He did not say what his partner did, and, in all honesty I never saw her do anything but cook. I think that they might have attracted clients by wowing them with her culinary skills.

Dave said that the agency desperately needed to become more organized and efficient. He said that he turned to IBM for help, and both the IBM rep and his accountant had told him that he should talk to us. He envisioned using the computer for all of the administrative tasks of the agency. We spent a couple of days talking with people there. A large part of what the agency did was analogous to what Massa and Hensley did, but there was a whole other side to their business. They also purchased media (newspaper and magazine ads and radio and television commercials), which they marked up and billed their clients. Sometimes they created and produced these projects in-house, but most of the time some or all of the work was done by other companies or freelancers. There were a lot of other miscellaneous things that they also billed—public relations consulting, billboards (always called “outdoor” even if it wasn’t), direct mail campaigns, and “collateral”, which covered virtually anything else that promoted products or services.

They also wanted a billing system that could handle every type of work that they did. They wanted fairly standard accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger systems. Their payroll was handled by an outside service.

In the early 1980’s Hitchcock not only manufactured chairs, but also had several retail locations.

The agency’s ultimate objective was to analyze the profitability of each client. Producing the reports for this was a very complicated assignment. Each client had negotiated a separate agreement with the agency. Harland-Tine billed some clients for items that others got free. For example, the agency’s largest client, Hitchcock Chair, was billed a monthly fee but did not pay anything extra for media expenses. They only paid what the publication or station charged the agency. So, if Hitchcock ordered a lot of media in a month, Harland-Tine did a lot of work with no reimbursement at all.

In addition, some jobs were billed in advance, some when the job was completed, and some in stages. So the profitablity reports, which we called “cost accounting”, needed to match the period in which income was counted with the period in which expenses were incurred.

We did not have the wherewithal to put together a detailed proposal. Instead we outlined in fairly broad terms what we would do for them. We broke it out by module, but we knew that it was really all or nothing. Their most important objective required all of the pieces. Our proposal was a great deal for them. We were desperate, and we did not want them to start looking around.

We saw ourselves in half of what agencies did.

Sue and I immediately noticed the resemblance of this agency to TSI. They were another company that would do anything for a buck! We decided that when we designed the system for Harland-Tine, we would also make sure that it could be used by TSI as well. We did not purchase media on behalf of clients, but pretty much everything else that the agency did had an analog in the way our company did business. For example, we did not advise about public relations, but we did consult about connectivity and hardware decisions.

I did a little research and discovered that there was a paucity of computer software for advertising agencies. Moreover, there were many agencies within driving distance, especially if New York and Boston were included in our sphere of influence. I figured that the best way to make TSI profitable was to sell a base package with customization to a lot of agencies. We had to start with one or two happy and successful clients. We resolved to make Harland-Tine the first.

Detailed recollections of the installation itself can be found here.

1. We never called the people who paid us money customers. We thought of our business as more service than product. We never installed a system that did not include at least a modicum of customization.

2. There were no function keys on the Datamaster keyboard. Instead there were 24 active Cmd keys in BASIC programs. The user held down the Cmd key in the panel on the left and the appropriate numeric key on the QWERTY portion of the keyboard for the 1-12 Cmd keys. For 13-24 (seldom used by TSI) the user held shift and Cmd and pressed the appropriate key (less 12). Shift Cmd 1 was 13, Shift Cmd 2 was 14, etc.

3. Dave Tine’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Susan Harland died in 2000. She and Dave Tine opened the Connecticut Culinary Institute in 1987.Her obituary is here.

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Tag Archives: AS/400

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1981-1985 TSI: A4$1: The Beginnings