Tag Archives: BASIC

1988-2014 TSI: The Programmers

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Supporters and coders. Continue reading →

TSI’s first, last, and best programmer was Denise Bessette. For three decades she was one of the most important people in my life. More details about her relationships with TSI, me, and the rest of the crew can be found here.

During the years that Denise worked only part-time most of the programming burden fell on my extremely narrow shoulders. By 1987 it had become too much. We needed to hire a full-time programmer. I placed ads in the Hartford Courant and the Journal-Inquirer. It was not a good time to be hiring. The state’s unemployment rate was heading toward a record low of 2.8 percent, and the demand for programmers far exceeded the supply. I understood that a small firm like TSI would be at a disadvantage when competing with giants like the insurance companies. Besides, our office was in a converted barn, and we were not able to offer any benefits to speak of.

Sandy in the kitchen in TSI’s East Windsor Office.

A few people responded to our ad. The only one that I had any interest in hiring was Sandy Sant’Angelo, whose name was Sandy Scarfe when she started at TSI. She had taken a few programming classes. She worked for the Springfield (MA) Public Library system. A major part of her job there was helping to set up the new computerized system for keeping track of the books. This was not very close to anything that we did, but at this point my choices were to hire her or start the recruiting process over. I chose the former.

Sandy turned out not to be a great coder, but she had other traits that I valued highly. She learned how to use the computer systems rather quickly, and if a project was well-defined, and I provided her with a somewhat similar program to use as a model, she was eventually able to save me a little time. What I liked the most about her were her dependability and her attitude.

Harry Burt, Lucia Hagan, Chris Bessette, Sandy, and Denise at the summer outing in Old Saybrook.

Unfortunately, the great bulk of our work in the nineties was quite complicated, and it became more and more difficult for me to find appropriate projects for her. One thing that I had noticed was that she was good at talking to the users at our clients’ installations. She had a cheerful demeanor, and she was pretty good at getting to the bottom of problems.

At the time TSI’s office had two telephone lines1, a generic number that we published in our promotional materials and a support line that we provided to our clients. I decided that Sandy’s primary responsibility should be answering calls on the support line. If they were simple questions, she could deal with them immediately. Otherwise, she recorded them. At first we kept track of the problems on paper, but soon we devised a simple system for recording them in a database available to all the programmers.

Denise, Sue, me, Sandy, Lucia, and Harry. Chris or a restaurant employee must have taken this photo.

This system worked pretty well. The key question that we asked was whether the problem was holding up the client’s work. If it was, the problem was automatically escalated. In nearly all cases these problems were addressed the same day.

I did not often work closely with Sandy. Actually, no one did. Her telephone voice sounded fine on the other end, but for some reason it really carried inside the office. I had to move her desk away from the programmers’ area.

Although I had hired Sandy, when Denise took over application development, she became the boss of all of the programmers. After a few years, Denise, who knew Sandy’s limitations, decided to eliminate her position. The meeting in which she was the terminated was very hard for me to witness. Sandy broke down and cried. I understood that Denise had made a business decision, but I doubt that I could have done it. By then I thought of Sandy as part of the TSI family. Nevertheless, I never considered overruling Denise’s decision.

Sandy, me, and Harry at the door to the TSI office in East Windsor after a blizzard.

I don’t have a lot of vivid memories of Sandy. She got married after she came to work with us, and she seemed happy. Her attendance record over the years was nearly spotless. She also attended all of TSI’s summer outings and Christmas parties.

I only recall her expressing a strong opinion about one thing. She loved the Harry Potter books. Her endorsement, however, was not sufficient to prompt me to dip my literary beak there.

Sandy was the person who alerted the rest of the office about the attacks on 9/11/2001. Everyone else in the office was shocked at this, but I had spent more time in airports than the rest of them put together. The airport security by that time was unbelievably lax. I had concocted in my mind at least three ways of sneaking a gun aboard a plane. It was also no surprise to me that plenty of people in the world who despised the United States for its arrogant and interventionist foreign policy and its unquestioning endorsement of anything done or said by Israel.

I find it personally embarrassing that I know so little about Sandy, a person with whom I worked for more than a decade. I just let her live her life as she wanted to and expected her to come in every morning. I can never remember her asking for anything.

After assigning Sandy to answering support calls, I reckoned that we needed another programmer. The Internet was still in its infancy, and so the process again involved expensive want ads in the local papers. Before finding someone who fit the bill I hired two different people, neither of whose names I remember.

The first was a woman in her twenties or maybe early thirties who already had programmed in BASIC at another company. I hired her. I was pretty excited about the prospect of working with her. It seemed likely that she might be able to get up to speed in record time. On the first day she appeared in the office at 8:30, TSI’s starting time. I immediately put everything aside to help her understand how we programmed and to go over some of the peculiarities of the hardware and operating systems.

If I had a sick pet, I would also ask permission to go home, but I don’t think that I would quit my job.

At some point she must have received a phone call. It only lasted a couple of minutes; I thought nothing of it. However, just before lunch she told me, “I’m sorry, but this won’t work. My dog is sick, and I need to be with him.” I don’t remember what I replied, maybe nothing.

I immediately initiated another job search. This time I hired a guy in his twenties who claimed to have done some programming for a previous employer. I spent a couple of weeks training him, and he seemed to be making little or no progress. I began to doubt that he had ever written a program, or at least one that did approximately what was required.

I have only a vague recollection of what he looked like or anything about his personality. I do remember that he was into the martial arts and worked out. He was in very good shape.

I probably would have worked with him for another week or two before deciding, but we had a twinax connectivity problem. As is explained here, the individual terminals and PC’s were connected to the server via twinax cabling. Each station was dependent upon the cabling, pigtails, and settings of the other devices on the line. Some of our cables were very long. We ordered these custom-made from a company in New Britain. They were expensive. Moreover, the company needed a little time to make them, and it was located forty or so miles from TSI’s office.

It was an “all hands on deck” situation until we got the situation resolved. Everyone was checking connections. I asked the new programmer to connect one of the cables to one of the devices. I showed him how their were two holes on the “pigtail” and two pins on the end of the cable. The pins, of course, fitted into the holes. Once the connection was made, a cap on the end of the cable could be turned so that it was impossible for the cable to come loose. I honestly thought that it was impossible for anything to go wrong. I had done this many times, and nothing had ever gone amiss.

Those two pins are not supposed to lie flat next to each other.

We spent an hour or so trying to get the line to work, but we had no success. I eventually examined the connection that this new fellow had made. The pigtail was tightly attached to the cable. I unfastened it and looked inside the head of the cable. Both pins were bent at a 90° angle, one to the right and one to the left. They resembled a pair of arms stubbornly crossed on someone’s chest. I would have bet that no one was strong enough to do this. To this day I had no idea how he accomplished this feat.

I was so angry that I had to retreat into Denise’s office for a few minutes so that no one could see me. I decided on the spot to fire him, but I waited until the end of the day to do it.

I thought at first that we would need to order another custom cable. However, we found a spare cable, and with a few adjustments to our wiring scheme, we were able to get the connectivity resumed within a half hour.

Casual Corner’s headquarters as viewed from South Rd. The pond was usually full of geese.

Twice when I advertised for a programmer, I received applications that I could not believe. One was from the lady who was IT director at Casual Corner3, a large retail chain. Their home office was in Enfield. My customary jogging route took me right past their complex. The IT department even had an AS/400! Casual Corner did not advertise much, but with and “in” we might even get an AdDept installation out of it. I tried to contact her, but she never scheduled an interview.

The other guy was retired. He had been an IT director at a large company. He came in and talked with me. He said that he would work cheap. He just wanted to write code. I don’t know whether he would have been a good programmer or not, but my primary interest was elsewhere. At the time we were just beginning to try to work with IT departments, and the process always left me frustrated. I thought that having this guy on TSI’s team might help me learn how managers of IT departments made decisions.

It was a close call, but I decided not to make him an offer.

I think that Steve might be setting up TSI’s F10.

Instead I hired a much younger guy, Steve Shaw. He had been an RPG programmer at Riverside Park4 in Agawam, MA. He picked up BASIC pretty quickly, and I was able to give him reasonably challenging projects. I really liked working with him. When he started his coding was a little sloppy, but the quality improved quickly. When I told him this, he seemed slightly insulted.

While he was working at TSI Steve acquired a multi-unit property in Massachusetts. I could not understand why he wanted to be a part-time landlord. To each his own.

Steve was something of a daredevil. He purchased a jet ski while he worked for us. At some point he disclosed that he had been in a motor cycle accident in which he lost a number of teeth. I wrote a little song to cheer him up. My sister Jamie and I performed it for him in the office. It was a smash hit.

I found a copy of the lyrics:

Home, brain, nerve, heart (teeth not in photo).

On corn cobs I’d be gnawin’.
I could graze upon your law-n.
It is my firm belief.
My dentitions would be so neat.
I’d devour piles of roast beef,
If I only had some teeth.

Oh, I could eat a pie.
I’d chew up all the steaks that you could buy.
I’d masticate on pork chops bye the bye.
If you object,
I’ll bite your thigh.

From ear to ear I’d be grinnin’.
Young girls’ hearts I’d be winnin’.
I’d steal them like a thief.
I would floss away my tartar,
and stop actin’ like a martyr,
If I only had some teeth.

Music by Harold Arlen; Words by Mike Wavada
TSI’s Christmas party with the Edward Owen Company at the Nutmeg House: Jamie Lisella, Steve, Doug Pease, Ken Owen, Denise, Sandy, someone, me, someone else.

Steve only worked with us for about four years. I appreciated that he might see it as a dead-end job. However, the work was, I think, potentially very exciting. We were solving problems that no one had addressed before for large corporations that everyone has heard of. I tried to talk him into staying, but there was no way for me to argue that he could ever climb the corporate ladder at TSI. We did not have a ladder.

The next programming hire was Harry Burt2, who was almost exactly my age, forty-something. He had a degree in math, and he had programmed in BASIC. He had been a vice president at a bank in Simsbury (I think) that had had closed under fairly suspicious circumstances that did not involve Harry. I hired him and terminated the job search at the end of my interview with him.

Harry mostly did programming projects for us. However, I also assigned him to monitor the work of Fred Pease in the huge Y2K project, which is described here. Fred was a college student who had never had a job before. The plan was for him to work part-time at TSI for the summer. He wanted to set his own schedule. By his own omission he tended to stay up late playing video games. Sometimes he stayed up all night.

That much was OK, but Fred constantly changed his schedule without telling Harry or anyone else. Harry had to ask him every morning how long he was going to work. He usually said “Until 11:30” or “Until 12:30”. The last straw was when he said “Until something-thirty”.

Fred’s work was also slipshod. I decided that I needed to take the project more seriously. If I was going to need to check every program anyway, I decided to do it all myself. Frankly, I did not want to assign such a tedious and unrewarding task to any of my good programmers. I did not want risk losing them. I took it on as a sort of penance; I should have seen it coming back in the eighties.

Sandy and Harry are on the left. Myself (hat), Denise and Chris are on the right. This photo is from our cruise on the Connecticut River.

Harry (who was NOT hairy—I thought of the Fuzzy Wuzzy rhyme whenever I saw or heard his name) was a great fit for TSI for at least a decade. After a couple of years I began to worry that Harry might realize that there was no path for advancement at TSI and decide to look for work elsewhere. After all, he was definitely overqualified for his job.

I decided to give Harry a small percentage commission on our software sales every month. I think that this was probably a good idea. He could see that he was profiting from our delivery of new software.

While he worked for us he also taught college-level math classes in the evenings. At some point in the twenty-first century Harry quit in order to become a full-time teacher . He told Denise, who was his boss, that he was having trouble dealing with the pressure at TSI. The environment did not seem pressure-packed to me, but from my office — even with the door open — I could not hear any conversations.

I liked Harry a lot. For a time we were the only two males in the office, and it was very nice having someone with whom I could discuss a football game. Also, since we were almost exactly the same age, we had many of the same cultural landmarks.

Harry is between Doug Pease and Denise. A little bit of Sandy is visible on the right. I think that this was the day of our Christmas dinner after the trip to Hawaii.

Harry’s best friend was Vinny, his barber. Harry often told amusing stories about Vinnie or recited humorous quotes. I devoted a fair amount of effort to buying appropriate (and usually light-hearted) Christmas cards for the employees. One year I actually found one that featured a barber named Vinny.

Harry had a 24/7 tan. I assume that he went to a tanning studio. He did not seem like the kind of person who would do that, but you never know. One of my proudest achievements was to compare tans with him on my return from Hawaii. For the first and only time, my arm was darker than his.

Denise recruited and hired all of the new programmers who worked in our office in the twenty-first century. By this time we were using Monster.com for hiring. It was cheaper and better than newspaper ads, but it was still a time-consuming practice that tied up TSI’s most productive employee.

August 16 is National Airborne Day.

Brian Rollet was the first person that Denise hired. I remembered that he started while I was in Hawaii for the sales/vacation in December of 1975 (described here). I brought everyone back souvenirs for the employees. For Brian, whom I had never met yet, I purchased a hula-dancing bobble-head doll.

Brian was an Army vet. In fact, he was Airborne. Had I been doing the hiring, this would have given me pause in two different areas. 1) Why would anyone with a marketable skill like programming ability volunteer for three years in the Army? 2) Why would anyone jump out of a perfectly good airplane?

He also had a pretty long commute. He lived in Ware or Belchertown — one of those towns near the Mass Pike. There is no way to get to East Windsor from that area without driving through Springfield.

Denise was most upset about one of Brian’s most unprofessional traits — dozing off in the afternoon. She asked me what I would recommend. I told her that the obvious solution was caffeine. Who ever heard of a programmer anywhere who did not consume immense amounts of caffeine at work?

Brian, Harry, Denise, and Sandy at Mystic Seaport.

My second choice was to advise Brian to work something out with Harry, who was in the adjoining cubicle. If I were in Brian’s situation, I would have asked Harry to throw an eraser at me whenever he saw me nodding off. That would have worked, wouldn’t it?

When Denise called him on the carpet about it, Brian’s solution was to eat only salads at lunch. That might have helped a little, but Denise finally had to let him go. I don’t think that she was too satisfied with what he produced while he was awake anyway.

She confided to me that she would never again hire anyone who had been in the military.

Denise’s second hire, Michael Davis, worked out much better. He got up to speed very rapidly, and Denise really enjoyed working with him, and she definitely got to depend on him. Unfortunately, he did not stay at TSI very long. He moved to Pittsburgh, where he had family or a girlfriend or something.

Lucia Hagen, Harry, and Michael.

The good news was that he liked the work at TSI well enough to work for us remotely for a period after he moved away. So, the transition was not too difficult. Of course, he could not answer the support line from Pittsburgh.

Michael’s boat.

My most vivid memory of Michael was on our summer outing at (I think) Rocky Neck State Park. He took me out on his small sailboat. People from Kansas do not often get opportunities like this. Of course, he did all the sailing. My only job was to duck my head down by my knees when he decided to swing the sail around.

I remember that after Michael had been at TSI for a year or so he decided to buy a new car. Well, not a NEW car, but a NEWER car. He chose a Volkswagen; I don’t remember the model. The few times that I shopped for a car I never considered buying a used one. I would be too afraid that I was just buying someone else’s problems. Nevertheless, Michael seemed satisfied with his purchase.

Sean Finnegan.

I don’t remember much about Sean Finnegan7. In fact, I had to ask Denise about him. He worked for TSI for two months in 2010. He was apparently a pretty good programmer, but he had difficulty talking with clients on support calls.

Jason Dean8 lived in the Springfield area. Before coming to TSI he had worked in Friendly’s IT department. He joined us in October 2007 and was still employed when we closed down the company in 2014.

Denise got along with Jason nearly as well as she did with Michael. She was very satisfied with his attitude and performance.

I did not really get to know Jason too well until Denise started working remotely in 2013. One thing that I quickly learned was that he was a terrific bowler. He had bowled at least three 300 games, which blew my mind. He had quite a few bowling balls. He told me that getting the ball to spin correctly depended on both the surface of the ball and the surface of the lane. So, different balls were needed depending on the condition of the lanes..

I was very surprised to learn that Jason’s bowling balls had only two holes. He did not have a hole for his thumb.

Jason knew my bridge friends Bob and Shirley Derrah from bowling in Springfield.

Jason and his wife were, in my opinion, fanatical about coupons, Groupons, and all other ways of obtaining discounts. They were always shopping for bargains. They switched their cell service from Verizon to T-Mobile to save on phone charges. However, the T-Mobile phones got no signal in their apartment. They got their money back, but it was a big hassle.

Jason had a son when he started working at TSI. His second son was born quite prematurely, and it was touch-and-go for a while, but he pulled through and was quite healthy the last that I knew. The family also had three rescue cats who were too eccentric for my tastes.

In his middle school in Springfield Jason had twice been a spelling champion. He was the only other person whom I have ever met who competed in the national spelling bee.

Jason and his family loved Disney World. They spent every vacation there, and they always stayed in the same Disney hotel. They monitored the situation very closely and always made reservations on the first day that the discounted fares were offered.

Jason had an older brother who lived at home with his parents. He spent most of his time in the basement playing Worlds of Warcraft. Although he had never worked, Jason insisted that he was a brilliant guy. He urged Denise to consider hiring him. I don’t remember the details, but he never came to the office. I am not sure that he could drive.

Jason actually contacted the Dr. Phil show to try to get them do do an intervention to help his brother get out of his shell. His parents vetoed the idea.

Jason and his parents were very conservative. He could not believe that Obama had defeated Romney in 2012. He told me that he suspected that there had been voting fraud, but he readily admitted that he had no evidence.

1. By the time that we moved the office to East Windsor, CT, in 1999 TSI had eight phone lines.

2. In 2021 Harry Burt is teaching math at Naugatuck Community College. His LinkedIn page is here.

3. Casual Corner closed all of its stores in 2005. Since then the headquarter building in Enfieldhas been used by Brooks Brothers, which also is now in bankruptcy.

4. Riverside Park was acquired by Premier Parks in 1996, a couple of years after Steve started at TSI. The name was changed to Six Flags New England.

5. Steve Shaw sent me emails a couple of times. In the one in February of 2000 he reported that he was working at the Phoenix, and they had sent him to classes on Websphere and Java. However, we never got together. Because he has such a common name, It was difficult to locate him, but I finally found his LinkedIn page. You can see it here.

6. I think that Brian Rollet lives in the Ware, MA, area in 2021.

7. Sean Finnegan’s LinkeIn page is here.

8. Since TSI closed in 2014 Jason Dean has worked at ESPN as Application Support Analyst III. His LinkedIn page is here.

1994 TSI: The Second Crisis

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The I in TSI comes to stand for Incorporated. Continue reading →

This entry requires quite a bit of background.

When we were still living in Detroit, Sue Comparetto founded TSI Tailored Systems as sole proprietor. I helped her occasionally in the early days, but for the most part she did it alone. She never had any employees or, as far as I know, a business plan. She inherited a handful of accounts from her former employer. At first she had an office in Highland Park, a small and dangerous city surrounded by Detroit. Then, when TSI somehow obtained an IBM 5120 computer, she set up shop in the spare room in our house in Detroit.

Having the computer in Detroit allowed me to learn BASIC. Having access to the programs and listings from AIS, the company that wrote most of the software that Sue supported, allowed me to learn how business programs could be structured. We were self-taught. I had taken exactly one college-level programming class at Michigan in 19661; Sue had none. Neither of us had ever taken an accounting or marketing class. In fact, neither of us had ever even sold or helped market anything.

The partnership’s logo as it appeared on the first set of ring binders.

When we moved back to Connecticut, Sue registered TSI as a partnership. We worked together, but we never really agreed on who was responsible for what. I considered myself much better at programming than Sue was. I therefore expected to do the bulk of the coding (including software for TSI to use) and for her to handle nearly everything else. The way I thought of this was: she does the phone stuff; I do the computer stuff.

The first additional task that I felt obliged to take over was marketing. In Detroit Sue had never needed to find new clients. She was given a bunch of them, and she hoped that IBM would provide her with additional leads. When we moved back to Connecticut, however, we lost the ties with the Detroit IBM office, and it was difficult to make new arrangements. We had only a few clients and lousy credentials.

I copied company names and addresses from the Yellow Pages.

We scrambled to get a few custom programming jobs. I did nearly all the design, coding, implementation, and training. I pulled together a mailing list from phone books at the library and wrote letters to businesses that I thought might be interested in systems designed for our clients. We never made a lot of money this way, but it did generate some business. Eventually, IBM also gave us some leads.

We hired a receptionist/bookkeeper, Debbie Priola, and a programmer, Denise Bessette. The former freed up time for Sue almost immediately. The latter consumed quite a bit of my time for a couple of months, but eventually she helped a lot. Unfortunately, she decided to return to college and cut back on her hours at TSI. More details about the early years of TSI can be read here.

Enjoyable but frustrating.

Both Sue and I found most of the decade of the eighties to be enjoyable but frustrating. The programming was fun and very challenging. Almost all of TSI’s customers appreciated our approach. However, we never came up with a good way of monetizing our efforts. The ad agency system, GrandAd, did better than the “anything for a buck” approach that we had been forced to use in the beginning. However, our market was effectively limited to agencies that were within driving distance and were too large for a PC system. In that reduced market, it was difficult to make enough sales to get by. Eventually there were so few reasonable prospects remaining that a change in strategy was essential.

I was convinced that our future lay in selling AdDept to large retail advertisers across the country. There was no real competition, and there seemed to be a good number of prospects.

What about “sell”?

I don’t think that Sue agreed with this change in focus. She had always favored local businesses over large corporations when purchasing something, and I am pretty sure that she also preferred dealing with smaller businesses over dealing with corporate executives. The fact that both of our first two AdDept clients declared bankruptcy and left us with tens of thousands of dollars of noncollectable invoices reinforced her attitude.

Sue had always been a night person. I was the opposite. I always was out of bed by 5AM or earlier. I usually became very sleepy around 9:30PM. I then took a shower and read a few pages of a book in bed. I was almost always asleep within a minute or two of turning off the lights. I stuck to this routine for decades, and I still do in 2021.

At some point in the eighties Sue developed a sleeping problem. She liked to watch late-night television, but she almost always dozed off in her chair. She slept very fitfully, waking up with a start and then falling back asleep. This went on for a long time—months, maybe years. Finally she went to a doctor. He prescribed a sleep study. It was not a surprise that it confirmed that she had sleep apnea. For reasons that I have never understood Sue was reluctant to purchase and then use the sleep machine. The models sold in those days were big, expensive, and ungainly. Even so, breathing well while sleeping is critical to good health.

I suspect strongly that this long period in which she was not getting enough oxygen when she slept impaired her performance at work and elsewhere. She regularly came in to the office late—very late. She was late for appointments. She missed appointments all together. The books were never closed on time. She repeatedly put off providing the accountant with tax information, even though the company’s operation was not a bit complicated. There were many other issues, but the worst thing, from my perspective, was that she made employees call the people with whom she had appointments in order to make excuses for her.

To the best of my knowledge none of the people whom I listed relapsed even once.

In 1987 or 1988 Sue gave up smoking. At almost exactly the same time, Denise did, too. So did Patti Corcoran, Sue’s best friend, and, halfway across the country, my dad. This was like a dream come true for me. I had never taken a puff, but for years I had worked in smoky offices and had taken Excedrin for headaches. When TSI’s office was declared smoke-free, my headaches went away forthwith, and they never returned.

Sue, in contrast, had a very difficult time quitting. She put on quite a bit of weight, which amplified the sleep apnea problem. She was also more irritable at work and at home.

I must mention one other factor: Sue never throws anything away. Okay, if it has mold on it, or it is starting to stink, she will discard it. Otherwise she stuffs things for which she has no immediate use in bags or boxes.

When I first met Sue, she was renting one room in the basement of someone’s house. It was not cluttered at all. She seemed to have no possessions except a water bed, a record player, and a few albums. By the early nineties we had a house of our own with two rooms that had no assigned function, a garage, an attic, and a full basement. All of them soon became full of junk. Both of our cars had to park outside because the garage was wall-to-wall miscellany.

  • Fire hydrants!
  • Junk.
  • Really old junk.
Sue is not the only hoarder in her family. These photos were taken in the lot behind the Slanetz Corp. office.

TSI’s headquarters in Enfield was nearly as bad. Sue’s very large office was the worst. Strewn about were boxes and paper sacks full of correspondence and memorabilia. Her desk was always completely covered, and post-it notes were everywhere.

In the rest of the office stood several file cabinets. Of course, every business must retain records, and one never knew when the company might get audited. It was also critically important to maintain good records about contacts with clients and prospects, and our business, in particular, needed up-to-date listings of programs, which we had by the thousands. So, we had a lot of important paperwork.

No more mainframe announcements, please.

However, in TSI’s office could be found many other things, which by any measure were totally useless. One day I undertook to throw away the announcements that we constantly received from IBM about its products. These documents formed a stack about four feet high. 90 percent of these missives were about mainframe products. There was absolutely no chance that we would ever work with any of these machines. Even the remaining ones (all of which I intended to keep) were seldom of any value because the information might have been contradicted by a subsequent notice.

Sue asked me what I was doing, and I told her. She immediately got very upset and even started to cry. She just could not stand for anyone to make the decision to discard anything that she considered hers. I realized at that moment this was a reflection of a very serious problem. I put all the notices back in the file cabinet.2

1994 was a good year for J2P2, too.

1994: It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

The business was finally taking off. Our new salesman, Doug Pease, was demonstrating that he was ideal for the job. The nationwide retail recession had ended. The retail conglomerates with money (or credit) were gobbling up smaller chains, and in most cases this worked to our advantage. We were approaching a position in which we need not ever worry about competition. Most of us were working very hard, but we were getting new clients, and it was exciting.

The problem was Sue. She was hardly involved in any of this at all. Her behavior was becoming really unprofessional. Doug complained about her often. She kept hiring assistants, and they kept quitting. I could not find out where we stood financially because our books were so out of date.

On a couple of occasions I was stretched so thin that I asked Sue to take trips to clients for me. I did not think that technical expertise would be involved. I just needed someone to find out what the users needed. The first one was to Macy’s East in New York. Sue never told me what happened, but the people at Macy’s told me years later that they had made voodoo dolls representing her and stuck pins in them.

The other trip was to Foley’s in Houston. Sue flew all the way there and then realized that she had brought no cash. Her credit cards had all been canceled by the issuers. Fortunately, she had a checkbook, and Beverly Ingraham, the Advertising Director at Foley’s, cashed a check for her.

In May of 1994 Sue and I took a very important road trip to Pittsburgh. We met with Blattner/Brunner, an ad agency (described here), and Kaufmann’s, a chain of department stores (described here). Both of these sessions went quite well. When we returned to Enfield, I was required to spend a lot of time working on the proposal for Kaufmann’s. It was the most complicated and difficult one that I had ever done, and if I did not do a good job of analyzing and estimating the difficulty of each element, we could suffer for this for years.

So, I asked Sue to follow up on Blattner/Brunner while I was working on Kaufmann’s. Sue had been there for the session in Pittsburgh. There was no one else I could turn to. She completely fumbled the ball. I was quite angry, but I knew that it would do no good to nag her about it.

On the other hand, I appreciated the fact that she was the founder of the company. These opportunities never would have happened if she had not started the ball rolling back in Detroit.

The day finally came when I just could not take it any more. I told her to go home and not to come in to work any more. There was no argument and no tears. She told me that I was making a big mistake and just left.

No one else thought that it was a mistake.

Within a day or so I approached Sue with the following arrangement: TSI Tailored Systems Inc. would be registered as a Chapter C corporation.

I would be president and have 55 percent of the stock, and Sue would would be treasurer with 45 percent. We would hire a new accountant to handle the corporation, and the bookkeeper would report to me. It would be my responsibility to make sure that the books were closed on time, and the taxes were paid on time. I would also do our personal taxes. We would fund the corporation with the difference between our accounts receivable and our accounts payable. If it needed cash (as it did a few times), I would loan as much as necessary to the corporation at a reasonable interest rate.

Sue was not happy about it, but she agreed to this. She did not even argue about the salary amounts that I set.

Amazon sells these.

Our new accountant’s name was Sal Rossitto2. He guided us through the transition. He advised us to set up an Limited Liability Company3, but I insisted on a true corporate entity that issued stock to its owners.

Setting up the new corporation was fairly straightforward. We had to open a new bank account. I found it to be a fairly simple matter to close the books every month within a day or two of the end of the month. We also set up a 401K with matching funds, a profit-sharing plan, and a good health and disability insurance plan from Anthem. None of this was difficult.

I am not sure who took over handling of the payroll after Sue left. TSI eventually hired Paychex to do it. Denise collected the time cards from the employees and submitted the requisite forms to Paychex.

Our accountants loved our Nov. fiscal year. They could work on our taxes in a less busy season.

I made one very good decision. We set our fiscal year to run from December 1 through November 30. We paid bonuses and made contributions in November. This gave all the employees the entire month of December to spend or save for tax purposes.

Dissolving TSI was a much more complicated task. Sue and Sal met often over the course of several months to unravel issues in the partnership’s books. I remember, among other things, some kind of ugly situation with regard to sales tax in California regarding the way that the installation at Gottschalks occurred. At the end of this process Sal confided to me that he now understood why I wanted to set up a real corporation.

The new logo as it appeared on invoices and letterhead.

We also ordered new letterhead. Ken Owen worked with me on the logo. I eliminated the stripes and the lean of TSI. The color around the TSI was pure blue. The colors to the left of that block went from a very light blue gradually darker almost to pure blue. The effect worked better on the computer screen than it did when printed.

For me the most important thing was to reestablish blue as the company’s color. It started with a light blue as shown at the top of the page, but over the years it had somehow evolved into something that was more green than blue. I hated it.

The next few years were boom years for TSI. I worked my tail off, and my travel schedule was a killer. I didn’t care. We had finally turned the corner, and the future looked very bright.

Life at home, however, was very difficult. Sue was obviously unhappy. She probably thought that I intended to dump her. I still loved her; I just did not want to work with her any more. I was quite sure that the company would do better without her.

displayed no interest in finding a job. This surprised me. She had had quite a few jobs since I met her. She really liked a few of them. She could summon up a great deal of enthusiasm about new projects, and she loved meeting new people. I could think of several occupations that she would fit very well.

Instead, she leased some space in an old office building in a questionable part of downtown Springfield, MA. She then fixed it up and rented it out to dance teachers who needed a place to give lessons. I don’t know how much of our money she lost on this venture. I am not sure that she even kept records of it. She certainly didn’t ask my opinion about it.

On weekends we still drove to Wethersfield to visit our old friends, the Corcorans, regularly. That helped quite a bit.

At one point Sue awarded herself a vacation. She drove to New Orleans to see a guy that she knew from high school who was into social dancing. She stopped at some other places along the way. I never asked her about what happened on this trip. When she returned she did not offer any details.

Eventually things got a little better. After the trip to Hawaii (described here) in December 1995 the situation became more tolerable for both of. At least we had some money to spend and save for the first time ever in our relationship.

1. The course that I took as a freshman at U-M taught a programming language that was unknown outside of Ann Arbor. It was called MAD, which stood for Michigan Algorithm Decoder. We wrote our programs on 80-column punch cards.

2. Perhaps you are wondering why I gave in without an argument. It was because I recognized quite early in our relationship that Sue was expert at playing the “Why don’t you …? Yes, but …” game described by Eric Berne in his best-selling book Games People Play. A pretty good write-up of the “game” is posted here. This is also the reason that I did not press her about the sleep apnea.

2. Sal Rossitto died in 2002. His obituary is here.

3. The purpose of an LLC is to protect the “members” from being personally responsible for debts and obligations undertaken by the company, but it is not as completely separated as a true corporation.

1988-2014 TSI: The IBM AS/400 and its Follow-ons

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An amazing system. Continue reading →

In the eighties IBM sold two mini-computers1, the System/36 and the System/38. It was hard to understand why. They both supported the same programming languages (RPG, COBOL, and BASIC), cabling, and peripherals. They both were aimed at small businesses that used them for traditional “business” applications—as opposed to graphics or calculation-intensive jobs. There was a large overlap in the targeted customers for each system. Both systems were even designed at the same IBM facility in Rochester, MN.

For several months rumors abounded in the trade magazines for these products that IBM would soon announce a new computer to replace both of them. The code name was Silverlake.

The announcement was made on June 21, 1988. I attended a briefing at the IBM office in Hartford. The name of the new system was AS/400. The “A” stood for “application” because every program ever written for either the S/36 or the S/38 would run on the new system. Neither the S/36 nor the S/38 could be upgraded to an AS/400, but the new system accepted all of the software and most of the peripherals. The thrust of the pitch was that IBM was providing the “best of both worlds.”

A System/38.

This claim was possible because the “native” environment of the new operating system was based on the System/38. The new system also supported a “System/36 environment” that allowed programs written for that system to run with no changes. Since the native environment was much more efficient than the S/36 environment, software developers were expected to migrate their code to the native environment as soon as they could.

My immediate interest was in the price of the low-end systems. I was bitterly disappointed. The least expensive model, the B10, cost much more than the 5363, which was a perfect fit for most of our target market. Once again, IBM just refused to address the millions of small businesses that could be served very well by an economical system that could handle a handful of simultaneous users. In 1987 IBM had finally introduced such a system. With this announcement just one year later a perfectly good solution was replaced by a much more expensive and unproven one.

So, from the perspective of selling to local advertising agencies and other small businesses, the announcement was a nightmare. However, as is described here, Macy’s gave TSI no choice but to embrace the AS/400. They wanted to hire us to develop a system for them, but they had no interest in purchasing obsolete hardware.

IBM’s approach eventually worked out in our favor. The AS/400 had many outstanding features that were not available on the System/36.

The B10 was the size of a two-drawer file cabinet. The B60 required four racks. All were announced in 1988.
  • The new system’s operating system was built over a relational database. I am not sure that most people in the S/36 community knew this at the time because IBM did not even mention it at the announcement meeting, and the database was not even given a name (DB2/400) until much later. All anyone knew was that it sure had fast file access.
  • The defining feature of the operating system was inherited from the System/38: Single-Level Store. I never have understood this completely, but the effect was that the main processor did not care whether programs or “pages” of data were already in memory. The task of managing storage was managed by other processors. So, the problem that occurred on the System/36 when too many jobs were running simultaneously would not occur on the AS/400. Moreover, the compiler on the AS/400 took advantage of this setup to make the programs run much more efficiently under normal conditions as well.
  • For our purposes the big advantage of the AS/400 was that BASIC programs on the AS/400 were compiled, not interpreted. This meant that we could externalize routines that were performed by many programs, and one program could call several other programs that could run simultaneously as “batch” jobs without tying up any terminals. These were huge advantages.
  • The BASIC interpreter that was invaluable for debugging was NOT eliminated.
  • The AS/400 operating system was designed to be able to take advantage of future hardware advances. Because potential customers were more concerned about solving their immediate problems, this was not a great selling feature. However, it was definitely a great “keeping” feature. Ever program that we wrote in 1988 still works on hardware marketed by IBM thirty-one years later!
  • The first announcement did not require this, but eventually every AS/400 came with a 1/4” cartridge tape drive. This eliminated the nightmare of having to convert repeatedly from one storage means to another.
  • Priority could easily be assigned to certain jobs.
  • A modem could be attached for faxing. Our AdDept customers used these for insertion orders until we devised a better way of handling them.
  • The system could be attached to an Ethernet or Token Ring network.
  • IBM’s query tool was a big improvement. We insisted that all of our clients licensed it, and I personally trained at least one employee in its use. That worked fine unless the person who had been trained left the company or was reassigned. We also offered support for designing and helping with queries, but we charged a monthly fee for this service.
  • Printing was much more flexible. Even laser printers attached to PC’s could be used for printing reports. I learned PCL, Hewlett-Packard’s printer language, so that I could design customized reports with fonts and simple graphics (borders and the like could be generated on HP printers. This was very popular with our customers.

Although some things continued to frustrate me about the AS/400, I grew to appreciate it more and more. It was not designed for tiny developers like TSI, but it allowed us to produce software with features that went way beyond the capacity of any model of the System/36. By the time that the E models of the AS/400 were released in 1992, the low-end systems represented very good investments for the companies who were interested in TSI’s products and services.

On the other hand, IBM’s approach meant that independent developers who marketed to the end users directly rather than to IT departments—and there were a lot of us—had to devised a way to survive until IBM provided us with a reasonably priced product. Those four years were very difficult for TSI. The company survived, but the grim reaper’s shadow was on our door quite a few times.

TSI’s B10 had a diskette drive and a QIC tape drive.

Over the course of twenty-six years, TSI had at least four AS/400’s (or follow-ons. named iSeries or System i) All of them worked spectacularly well. We hardly ever called IBM for either hardware of software support. We purchased or leased all of them at big discounts because we were developers. On the first one, a B10, I prudently scraped together enough cash2 to order the maximum amount of memory and disk. It was adequate for development purposes, but if one of our clients had tried to run its business on it, it would have been embarrassing. For one thing the operating system itself required almost half of the unit’s disk space! Subsequent releases of the OS required much more disk.

Still, we lived with it, and we came through on the other end.

How well did the strategy work for IBM? In 1988 IBM was one of many competitors in the mini-computer market. The others were DEC, Hewlett-Packard, Data General, Wang, and a host of other companies. By the mid-nineties all of the competitors had conceded the entire market for reasonably priced multi-user computers to IBM. All of them except HP went out of business, and even HP (after several mergers) now makes and sells only PC’s and printers. This stunning event went almost unnoticed by most so-called experts. They blamed poor management by these companies for their demise. Were they all stupid? No, the AS/400’s were demonstrably superior.

Lou Gerstner.

The mini-computer market still exists, but almost no one talks about it, because IBM has hidden its premier product inside hardware with other brands. The only thing that IBM left for the AS/400’s legions of devotees to cling to was the letter i. When Lou Gerstner took over the reins of IBM in 1993, he put a heavy emphasis on services, which were very profitable, over hardware and software, which evidently were not. So, Gerstner never liked the AS/400 approach because the IT departments that used it had little demand for IBM services. For example, at some point in the twenty-first century I visited Macy’s IT department in a suburb of Atlanta. Dozens of IBM employees went to work there every day. One extremely large office contained desks for them and no one else. Macy’s had several AS/400’s or i series systems there. One person managed them all, and he worked for Macy’s, not IBM.

Users of TSI’s software systems loved their AS/400 computers, and they never purchased any services from IBM beyond maintenance contracts.

The AS/400’s operating system (OS/400) employed strict typing of objects. Every object had one and only one type, and it was unchangeable. On a PC a developer—or even an end user—can change the type (as designated by the three-digit “extension” after the period). For example a text file named sample.txt can easily be changed to a comma-separated-values file sample.csv. Users could even make up their own extensions.The operating system might warn the person that changing the extension might make the file unusable by certain applications, but it would still allow it.

The AS/400’s native environment, in contrast, had a limited number of well-defined object types, many of which had equally rigorous subtypes:

  • Database files could be physical or logical. A logical file is equivalent to what is called a “view” in SQL.
  • Programs had subtypes for each supported language. A new language called CL3 was added.
  • Menus were lists of options displayed on the screen, usually with a command line at the bottom. Each option had a number.
  • Commands were routines that could be invoked on any command line. A command was essentially a shortcut for calling a CL program.
    • The names of the commands supplied by the operating system. were consistent throughout: VVVAAANNN, where VVV was a three-character abbreviation of a verb, AAA was an optional three-character abbreviation of an adjective, and NNN was a three-character noun. For example, DSPSYSVAL was the command for Display (DSP) System (SYS) Value (VAL).
    • Most commands had parameters. For example, the GO command required the name of a menu object as a parameter. GO BACKUP caused the system to display and execute the menu object named BACKUP. Pressing F4 after keying in the command displayed a data entry screen for all of the parameters.
    • TSI created a large number of commands in
  • Several other object types, such as line descriptions and spool queues, were used by the system software. Most system objects of all types (except commands) began with the letter Q.
  • BLOBs were objects that did not fit any of the other types. They included all types of images, video, sound, etc. They were added in later releases.

Users could not create new object types or subtypes, but new ones often appeared in new releases of the operating system.

Every object had a name, which was limited to only ten characters. A letter was required for the first character. The other characters could be letters or numbers. A few special characters were also allowed. The names were NOT case-sensitive.

Every object resided in a library, which was itself and object with a ten-character name. This was a departure from the S/36, where data files were not assigned to libraries. On the AS/400 two objects in the same library could not have the same name.

On the S/36 and for a short time in the S/36 environment on the AS/400 TSI used periods in the names files that were associated. For example, files that began with “M.” in the GrandAd system were media files. In the native environment of the AS/400 such files caused a problem for some third-party programs that users might wish to employ to create customized reports. So, TSI changed the names so that the first one or two characters served to group files.

Third-party programs and programs written in other languages also had difficulty with integers that were left-padded with blanks4, as BASIC programs have always done. TSI changed all of its programs to pad integers with zeroes instead of blanks. So, when the value of a three-digit number was 15, it was written on the AS/400 database as 015, not (blank)15.

1. The terms mini-computer and midrange computer referred to multi-user systems that were not powerful enough to run the business applications of major corporations. The System/36 and System/38 were certainly mini-computers. At its introduction so was the AS/400. The twenty-first century models, however, were more powerful than the mainframes of the eighties.

2. I suspect that TSI actually leased it.

3. CL stood for Control Language. CL was the easiest language ever. It was simply a list of commands to be executed in order. Since CL programs were compiled, they could be called from other programs written in any language.

4. I considered this an intolerable bug in the software developed and marketed by the other company. I encouraged the person trying to use the software to complain to whomever claimed that the product would work on AS/400 files. Eventually, we changed our files and programs to forestall a brouhaha.

1983-1985 TSI: GrandAd: The Datamaster Clients

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A good fit for several agencies. Continue reading →

IBM’s Datamaster was widely disparaged in the technical press. PC’s and Macs were the rage. The reasons for this evaluation were persuasive, if a little superficial.

  • A Datamaster cost a lot more than a PC.
  • The Datamaster’s programs only ran on Datamasters. Many hardware vendors were offering PC’s that were “IBM compatible”.
  • The Datamaster could in no way run PC programs.
  • The Datamaster’s peripherals—displays, printers, keyboards, and hard drive—were very limited.
  • The Datamaster’s specs were inferior. The processor looked very slow.

Nevertheless, the Datamaster was a very good computer for TSI. It was extremely easy to program, and it was very good at the two tasks for which it was designed—data processing and word processing. It was also quite reliable. PC’s crashed all the time. Some of our clients used their Datamaster’s for years without ever making a service call to IBM. Those who did were uniformly satisfied with the attention that they received.

For the ad agency application there was one other overriding advantage. Up to four Datamasters could use the same hard drive. This allowed the media department and the accounting department to have access to the same data. In the early eighties personal computers were totally personal. Reliable networks were many years away.

Yes, the Datamaster was horrible at other tasks such as spreadsheet, and it had absolutely no capacity for graphics. However, most of the people who owned and ran small businesses in the early eighties were interested in addressing business problems. They did not care much about system specs, and the fact that IBM sold and supported the system was of paramount importance to them.

I am almost positive that our third ad agency client was Communication & Design (C&D)1 in Latham, NY, just north of Albany. The principals were Fran (a guy) and Theresa Lipari2. The agency purchased two Datamasters and a hard drive. I am pretty sure that by this time TSI was in IBM’s Business Partner program as a Value-added Remarketer (VAR), and C&D bought the hardware through us. We only needed to make minor adjustments to the software system that we installed at Potter Hazlehurst, Inc. (PHI).

It was a long drive, but unless there was snow on the highway, it was never stressful. Best of all, the sun was never in my eyes.

Nevertheless, I made the drive to Albany quite a few times. There was no avoiding personal involvement at several stages in these installations. The transition from manual ledgers to computerized accounting systems was never trivial. The first few monthly closing processes never went completely smoothly.

For several years I worked very closely with the woman most involved with C&D’s system. She was definitely the bookkeeper. She might have also been the office manager. I found her to be intelligent and very easy to work with. I am therefore embarrassed that I cannot remember her name. I recall clearly, however, that she was a big fan of the New York Giants football team. She had even bought vanity license plates for her car that said “NYGIANTS”.

When she left the agency, she was replaced by a woman who was as tall as I was. I don’t remember her name either, but I think that it was French, maybe Bissonet.

I also dealt with the media director when they implemented the media system. I don’t remember her name either, but she was, I am pretty sure, also a principal in the business. She explained to me about inserts3—the advertising pieces that were stuffed into the middle of a newspaper, usually on Sundays and Thursdays. From a database perspective they had pages like direct mail pieces but schedules (lists of newspapers and dates) like newspaper ads. Since we were already using the same set of files for direct mail and newspaper ads, it was not too difficult to set up ad types for inserts.

I remember meeting with Fran after the whole system had been in place for a while. He told me that the media director had started her own agency, and she had taken some of his best clients with her. I never encountered any business that was as “dog-eat-dog” as the ad agency business.

I generally drove up to C&D early in the morning and back at night. I sometimes stopped for supper at a restaurant in East Greenbush. I generally listened to WAMC, the powerful NPR station in Albany. Once I heard—for the first time—the entire recording of The Phantom of the Opera. On another occasion I listened to Lt. Col. Oliver North defending his actions in the Iran-Contra hearing.

A couple of times I stayed overnight. A Howard Johnson’s hotel was right across the street.

Perhaps our easiest installation ever was at The Edward Owen Co. in Canton, CT. The owner was Ken Owen, who was a few years younger than I was. We had (and still have) similar interests. He majored in the classics at Harvard, which prepared him well both to teach Latin and/or Greek somewhere or to take over the family business after he graduated. He chose the road more taken.

The company was named after Ken’s grandfather, who had built the business up to be one of the most successful in the Hartford area. Ken’s father had apparently undone most of that. When we worked with the company Ken had only a part-time assistant and a resident artist who was not on the payroll. His father, who taught Latin at Avon Old Farms school, stopped by occasionally.

It was an easy installation because Ken was the ideal client. He understood and could explain exactly what he wanted. Furthermore, no one else had their fingers in the pie.

Ken and I initiated a lifelong habit of greeting each other on Exelauno Day4 (March 4). Sue and I also went to visit him, his wife Patti, and their two sons a few times. He drove to our house for one of our Murder Mystery parties, too.

This requirement alone would leave me out.

Ken was a serious runner. The advertising agencies in New England sponsored a mile run for CEO’s every year. He easily won whenever he entered. I often asked him for advice about running, although what I did he would probably call strolling. I was never close to being in his league.

I don’t remember the name of the artist who worked there, but I vividly recall the nice drawing that he executed for us. It showed three people in choir robes singing from three different hymnbooks labeled “accounting hymns”, “media hymns”, and “production hymns”.

We also asked Ken to help us with the one and only advertisement that we ran. It appeared in one issue of AdWeek New England. That experience is described here.

We created one new module for Yellow Pages advertising. The unique thing about Yellow Page advertising was that the agency only ordered it once. It then ran year after year until someone canceled or revised the ad. Ken’s father said that it was the best kind of advertising. All you had to do was open the envelope every year and endorse the check. Unfortunately, none of our other clients ever had a used for this module.

Ken’s business near Route 44 was next to a strip mall that contained a Marshall’s. We did not have stores like that east of the river. I often popped in there to see if they had anything cheap in my size.

Ken’s company is still in business. He moved the company to Sheffield, MA, which is south of Great Barrington. He also changed the focus of his efforts to, of all things, custom programming. The company’s web page is here.

As you can probably guess, Group 4 Design, which had offices on Route 10 in Avon, CT, was not a full-service advertising agency. They did not place any ads, and, in order to avoid charging sales tax, they were careful not to deliver anything tangible to their clients.

In other ways, however, they were like an ad agency. They billed the time spent by employees, and they could use the job costing and accounting functions designed for ad agencies. So, we treated them as an advertising agency without a media department, an approach that seemed to work well.

This was Group 4’s headquarters. Google says it was permanently closed, but Frank still lists himself as president..

I am not sure who the other three members of the “Group” were, but when we worked with them the firm was definitely run by Frank von Holhausen5. Once the system was up and running he seemed satisfied with it. The only thing that I can remember about him is that he was in a dispute with the state because his company had not been charging its clients tax on Group 4’s services. At the time the state had a tax on services6 and the only services exempted from the tax were legal and accounting. Frank complained, “They want to tax my brain!”

I worked almost exclusively with Joan Healey, the bookkeeper. She had difficulty with the first few monthly closings, but after she understood the process, Group 4 was a good reference account for TSI.

Adams, Rickard & Mason (ARM), an ad agency in Glastonbury, CT, used the GrandAd system until it merged with another agency in 1988. I never met any of the principals. In the negotiations and the initial installation we dealt with the head of finance for the agency. His name was Dave Garaventa7.

We met at the house in Rockville. Debbie Priola and Denise Bessette were in the office working. Sue and David and I sat around a table in the office. We were going over some reports that he wanted included in the system. Four of the five people in the room were smoking. After about an hour of this I felt horrible. I excused myself and walked outside to get some air.

At the time of the installation ARM was in the process of moving into offices that someone at the agency had designed specifically for them. Visually, they were quite striking. However, half of the building was on stilts. the area beneath it was used for parking, However, in the winter that half of the building was always cold because it was surrounded by cold air on all sides.

All of the employees were forced asked to take a pencil-and-paper multiple-choice test to determine whether they were “left-brained” or “right-brained”. The results were interpreted as a multi-colored strip that was displayed beneath names on offices and desks. I am not sure why the agency did this. I researched hemispheric specialization pretty thoroughly in college. This was bogus.

Our software maintenance contract with ARM was the same one that we had with every other client. We offered free telephone support during business hours, which were clearly explicated in the contract.

My fingertips were on the keyboard, not each other.

Weekends were sacred to me. I had virtually no time available during the week to program. I spent those days driving around to clients and prospects, training Denise, setting up her work, and writing proposals and documentation. On Saturdays and Sundays I worked on the custom programming that I had promised our clients from before dawn until I got very sleepy in the evening.

On one Sunday morning the phone rang. It was Dot Kurachik (or something like that), the bookkeeper at ARM. I worked with her for almost an hour and solved her problem. I sent her a bill for $75, our minimum charge at the time. She refused to pay. I talked with her boss, and he overruled her.

Cronin and Company of Glastonbury, CT, might be TSI’s only Datamaster client that is still functioning as an ad agency in 2021. Our primary contact was Mike Wheeler, who was, I think, the head of finance. He seemed very level-headed. We did only a little custom work for them.

Cronin did not have this door when I spent time there.

The main computer operator’s name was Jeannine Bradley8. After using the GrandAd system for several years, Cronin was persuaded to convert to a different software system. We did not get an opportunity to bid on this. We would have proposed a System/36 or an AS/400.

Jeannine called our office about something (I don’t remember what), and she confided to me that they now thought that they had made a mistake when they bought the new system.

I don’t recall any strange or funny stories about this account. The employees always seemed straightforward and competent to me.

The strangest of all of our installations was at Donahue, Inc., an ad agency in Hartford. We did not sell them a Datamaster. They somehow obtained one that had been purchased by Harland-Tine back in the early eighties. The installation at Donahue began in the first months of 1988. It was TSI’s last Datamaster installation.

You could say that Donahue Inc. was “old school”.

Donahue’s building did not look like it housed an ad agency or any other business. It looked like an old school, which is close to what it was originally used for. It was the custom-built home of the Cathedral Lyceum9. That designation was clearly etched above the front door.

I don’t remember ever talking to a principal there about what they hoped to accomplish with their system. Their goals, which were explained to me by a woman whom I hardly saw again, were relatively modest. They just wanted to automate their billing and accounting.

The only person whom I dealt with after that was the bookkeeper, a young inexperienced guy. He knew nothing about computers and very little about either bookkeeping or advertising. He and the Datamaster and the printer shared office space with the agency’s kitchen, which was on the ground floor of the building. The first few monthly closings were a nightmare.

Did I mention that there was no heat in the kitchen? The two of us sat there wearing overcoats and stocking caps. The person not operating the Datamaster wore gloves. People wandered in, got a cup of coffee, and quickly retreated to the area of the building that was heated.

The young man who did their books and operated their Datamaster confided to me that his goal in life was to become a real estate agent for Century 21. He really thought that their trademark blazers were cool.

Darby O’Brien.

Darby O’Brien Advertising (DOB), a full-service ad agency in downtown Springfield, MA, was not actually a Datamaster client, but I included them is this blog because they used the version of the software designed for the Datamaster. Darby10 insisted on using a Wang PC sold by one of his clients, a store that sold and repaired computers. We grumbled about this plan, but supporting their system this way turned out not to be too difficult for us.

A Wang PC.

They needed to purchase a license to use Work Station Basic11, a DOS-based product that supported all of the syntax used by the Datamaster’s version of BASIC. We also charged them for converting our code to a format that the Wang12 PC could use, but that took less than a day. In the end they probably paid more for a demonstrably inferior product. Unlike the Datamaster, a Wang PC could run other applications such as Lotus 123, but to my knowledge it was never used for that purpose.

When we installed the system, the accounting person was Caroline Harrington. For some reason Caroline resigned her position at DOB and came to work for us. Sue must have arranged this. I certainly did not recruit her.

In the eighties DOB’s offices were behind one of these two doors.

The agency’s building was in a rough part of town. It was less than a block away from the stripper bars. I was still relatively bullet-proof then, but I did not like to be there after dark. We did go there at night once, and we had a great time. The agency threw a party, and they invited all of their clients and vendors.

A very good live band played oldies from the fifties and sixties. The highlight of the evening was when they played the Isley Brothers’ hit, “Shout!” Everybody (except for me and my monkey) knew when to get down low, when to raise up, and when to shout. I hate rituals, but this one sort of made me wish that I had gone to at least one mixer.

The restrooms in the DOB offices were easy to find. The door to the men’s room was decorated with a three-foot high picture of Elvis Presley. The ladies’ room had a similarly sized portrait of Marilyn Monroe.

1. The ampersand was important. It was emphasized strongly in the agency’s logo.

2 .The Liparis’ last name was pronounced Lih PAIR ee, unlike the island just off the coast of Sicily, which is pronounced LEE pah ree with a trilled r. I am pretty sure that Fran and Theresa reside in Plymouth, MA, in 2021.

3. I later toyed with the idea of using inserts as the basis of a new business for TSI. Details are here.

4. Ken told me that “Exelauno!” is the Greek word for “March forth!” Google translate does not agree. I sold my ancient Greek dictionary at the end of my senior year. So, I can’t look it up. The origin of this custom is documented here.

5. Frank von Holhausen is now listed as the founder and Chief Design Officer at Forge Design & Engineering of Oxford, CT. His LinkedIn page is here.

6. Frank’s lament and the difficulty that TSI confronted in determining how much of what we did was service and how much was product acted as a key plot element in the short story that I wrote in 1988. The details are here.

7. Dave Garaventa died a year or so after we installed the system.

8. In 2021 Jeannine Bradley lives in Cromwell. She might still work at Cronin. She was promoted to accounting manager in 2012.

9. The Lyceum was built in 1895. You can read about it here.

10. Darby’s agency is still in business, but it has changed locations a few times. The latest headquarters is in South Hadley. He tells his own story here. I can’t believe he let them photograph him wearing a Yankees hat in Massachusetts.

11. Workstation Basic is described in some detail here.

12. Wang filed for bankruptcy protection in 1996.

1981-1985 TSI: The Office and Employees

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Who did what in the early days of TSI. Continue reading →

When we moved into the Elks Club’s front house in January of 1981, Sue and I possessed an IBM 5120 computer, a lot of hope, and not much else. Our new dwelling had a spacious place for an office and two extra bedrooms in case we needed to expand. I think that we set the 5120 up in the office with a table and a few chairs. I don’t remember where we obtained the furniture. Sue probably scavenged odd pieces from somewhere. I remember that Sue eventually had a big wooden desk in the spare bedroom.

Downtown Rockville: Crystal Blueprint is on the right.

We also had little in the way of office supplies. Fortunately, Crystal Blueprint & Stationery, a nicely stocked office supply store was in downtown Rockville within easy walking distance. I remember walking there often to pick up a copy of the local newspaper, The Journal Inquirer, from the metallic yellow box, and some index cards or an accordion file from Crystal Blueprint.

That shopping center1 also contained a grocery store called Heartland Food Warehouse and a men’s clothing store, Zahner’s.

Our first EVP.

Our first employee was Nancy Legge, a debater at Wayne State who came to visit us in Rockville during the summer of 1981, as described here. She stayed with us for a week or so after her traveling companions left. We put her to work stuffing envelopes for a mailing. I don’t remember if we paid her, but I do remember giving her the title of Executive Vice President of Sales Promotion.

Our first full-time employee was Debbie Priola, who had been employed by one of our Datamaster clients, National Safe Northeast. In 1982 (I think) Sue hired her to answer phones and to do bookkeeping and other clerical functions. I do not remember that Sue interviewed anyone else for the position, but she might have.

Debbie drove to Rockville every morning from New Britain. She was a smoker. Throughout most of the eighties so was Sue. So, I learned to live in a smoke-filled environment.

By the time that we hired Debbie we certainly had access to Datamasters. We may have kept manual books for a month or two, but we soon used the Datamaster for Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, and General Ledger. Sue was in charge of all of this, and she also did the payroll.

Debbie was really into celebrities. She brought copies of People and Us magazines to work and read them at lunch and during slow periods.

Debbie possessed a trait that I found unbelievable. She was a very good artist. She explained that she saw shades of colors rather than objects. I was (and still am) the exact opposite. I hardly even notice what color things are. I had no problem working in the same office as Debbie, but our radically divergent views on so many things might have made it difficult for me to work closely with her on projects. Fortunately, I don’t remember ever having to do it.

I found it in the basement.

I remember that for Christmas one year Debbie bought me a book about Laurel and Hardy. I guess that she must have heard me praising W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers and concluded that I liked all old-time comedians. I don’t.

After she had worked for us for a while she got a new boyfriend, who, I think, was trying to start a business of some sort. At some point—I think that it must have been 1985—he prevailed on Debbie to loan him some money. She did, but part of what she gave him was TSI’s money. Sue discovered the discrepancy when she closed the books at the end of the month. She confronted Debbie in private. Debbie promised to pay it back, and she did. At that point Sue fired her.

I had never fired anyone, and up until then neither had Sue. In my opinion she did a very good job of handling this difficult situation.

In the eighties the best way to reach prospective employees was a help-wanted ad.

We finally had enough business in 1984 to justify hiring a programmer. This time I placed ads in the two local newspapers, the Hartford Courant and the Journal Inquirer, which covers the eastern suburbs of Hartford. I don’t have the text of the ad, but I am sure that we described it as a starting position and requested applicants with some programming experience. It also mentioned that familiarity with BASIC or the Datamaster would be a plus, but we did not expect anyone with such a background to respond. We interviewed two people in our office. Both were women in their twenties.

If it had been left up to me, I would have hired the other lady (whose name I long since forgotten), but Sue was very impressed with Denise Bessette, who was married and lived in Stafford. Denise either called us after the interview or wrote us a letter that indicated that she really wanted to work for TSI. So, we asked her to come in again, and I agreed that we should hire her.

At the time Denise was working for Royal, the typewriter company. At the time Royal was trying to break into the personal computer market. She wrote small programs to demonstrate to prospects the potential of the system. The programming language that she described to me was incredibly primitive, probably to compensate for the memory and storage limitations of the hardware. In those days it was difficult to get a PC to do anything more complicated than a simple game.

At one time Royal was a major employer in Hartford.

I assured Denise that the programming environment that TSI used was much more powerful and was also much easier to use. I don’t think that we even talked with anyone that she worked with at Royal. She may have just been a contractor there. I am certain that I talked with no one. Sue might have.

Denise also smoked. In the eighties the pernicious addiction seemed to be more prevalent among young women than young men. Almost everyone whom I knew who smoked and was my age or younger was female. I don’t know why.

For a while TSI had four employees, and the other three all smoked. During this period I experienced headaches pretty often. I carried Excedrin with me wherever I went.

Before we hired Denise we had bought a Datamaster with a letter-quality printer. When she was in the office, I let her use the computer. I worked on it before she arrived—I was usually in the office by 6AM—and after she left. When Denise was in the office, and I was not training her or explaining a new project, I wrote out new programs by hand or edited program listings. If the weather was good, I went outside in the courtyard behind the house to work in the sun on a card table.

At night I printed listings of programs. I had written a Datamaster routine that accepted a list of program names and created a text file with a list of commands that could be executed to print the listings for the designated programs one after another. Occasionally the paper would jam. When I awoke I fixed the jam and then had it resume printing. I could work on the computer while the printer was active.

Our listings, by the way, were on continuous 8½x11″ paper. We filed them by program number in accordion files for the client. When I visited the client I brought the accordion files in a sample case.

I spent most of the first few months of Denise’s employment helping her learn BASIC and the tools available on the Datamaster. Within six months she was up to speed, which I defined as meaning that her efforts were saving me more time than I spent explaining, checking her work, or redoing what she had done. Six months may seem like a long time to reach the break-even point, but most programmers whom we hired never ended up saving me time.

Denise primarily worked on TSI’s software for ad agencies. It was difficult enough to teach someone the agency business. There was no need to get her too involved in the vast array of other businesses that are described here.

Denise had a very young child, Christopher (NOT Chris), when we hired her. When he got a little older she brought him to work occasionally.

Denise wanted to be a Smithie.

After she had worked for us for a few years, Denise asked us if she could shift to part-time. She wanted to finish her college education and get a masters degree. She told us that she had applied to prestigious Smith College in Northampton, MA, and had been accepted to study math and economics.

At this point Denise was a very valuable member of the TSI team. She understood how I approached projects, she appreciated the need for consistent programming structures, and she had learned enough about advertising to make many decisions on her own. I informed her that TSI would take as many hours as she was able to give us. However, I knew that it was likely that I would need to hire another programmer, which meant, in the best case, six months of reduced productivity from our #1 programmer, me.

Denise and I worked together for thirty years. Giving in to Sue on the decision about who should be our first programming hire was probably the best choice that I ever made. My life would have been unimaginably different if we had hired the other candidate.

Our third full-time employee was Kate Behart, who lived somewhere west of the river near Hartford. We wanted to hire someone to help with marketing and administrative tasks that neither Sue nor I wanted to control. I don’t remember interviewing her. Sue must have done it.

We later learned that Kate had changed her name. It was originally Sally Stern. She didn’t get married, and she was not in the witness-protection program. Rather, because she did not get along with her father, she did not want to be associated with him.

Kate was into some New Age stuff. We later discovered that she also used the first name Saige in some of her activities in those areas.

Kate was picky about what kind of chair she used. We let her pick one out, but she brought in a pillow to sit on when she used it.

I guess that this is a thing.

I never saw any of Kate’s cats, but she was definitely a cat person. She told all of us that she liked to pick them up and smell their fur. I can understand that impulse better now, but at the time I had never owned a cat. I am not sure that I had even petted one.

The most peculiar thing about Kate was her interest in Connecticut Lotto, which the state instituted in 1983. She had bought a book that contained strategies for playing the numbers. She allowed me to read it. I told her that it was utter hogwash. Although she was a pretty smart person, she seemed to believe the book’s claim that “hot” and “due” numbers existed. These games are incredibly bad investments. If they weren’t, states would not rely on them for revenue.

I upset Kate quite a bit once. We drove to Boston together to make a presentation to a potential client. I used the phrase “guys and girls”. She was greatly offended. She considered the term “girls” demeaning. Maybe so, but once the word “guys” left my mouth, I could think of no better way to compete the thought. No one says “gals” any more.

Kate once sent a letter to an ad agency in New Jersey on TSI stationery. She did not ask me to approve it, and, in fact, I had no idea that she ever wrote letters to prospects on company letterhead. This one made some claims about a software company based in Dallas that specialized in ad agencies. Some of the statements were not true. Kate evidently misunderstood something technical that I had said in the office.

The president of the offended company sent me a letter complaining about Kate’s letter. It threatened legal action. I was shocked to learn what she had done. I told Kate that I needed to approve all correspondence and told her that the company was threatening to sue us, which they were. Kate was suitably contrite. I sent out a letter of apology to both the prospect and the software company. We heard no more about it.

Kate worked with us for several years. I don’t remember why she left, but I think that we parted on amicable terms.

Our phones looked like this, but they had a few buttons on the bottom

My strong impression of the first few years of TSI was that Sue spent them on the phone, and I spent them on the computer. By the time that we hired Denise we had ordered a second phone line and installed Contel telephones. I think that we still had only two receivers, one in the office and the other in the spare bedroom, which had become Sue’s office. There was a rollover feature from one line to another, as well as a way to put clients on hold. My recollection is that we used this system until we moved in 1988.

We were never able to communicate directly with our Datamaster clients’ computers. If a problem needed to be fixed immediately, we had two choices: drive to the client’s or talk someone through keying in program changes over the phone. Sue drove to F.H. Chase pretty often, and I was on the road in the Hartford area several days a week. One car—the Duster—was no longer enough.

This car looks very familiar. I think that my Celica was this color, and Sue’s was darker.

In 1982 we both went shopping for cars. We decided to purchase Toyota Celicas. At the time there was a self-imposed quota by Japanese auto manufacturers. There was only one person at the first Toyota dealership that we visited. He was sitting at a desk reading a newspaper. He did not budge when we entered. We had to walk to his desk to get his attention. He told us that they had no cars. He wasn’t even interested in talking with us.

Eventually the market loosened up a bit, and we were both able to purchase new cars. The idea of bargaining for a better price was never even a consideration. Both cars had standard transmissions. Sue’s had air conditioning. I would never have paid extra for such a frivolous feature in an Arctic state like Connecticut. I don’t remember precisely what either car looked like, but I remember that I loved to drive mine.

TSI still used continuous multi-part forms for billing and statements for as long as we stayed in business.

Sue established a relationship with a gentleman at Desco Data Systems, the company in East Windsor that provided the computer used by Sue’s sister Karen at their father’s company. I don’t remember his name, but he specialized in custom forms. He did a good job in providing us with web-mounted letterhead and multi-part invoices. We recommended him to all of our clients, and most of them used him for their custom computer forms. I never heard a bad word about him, and our customers were not shy about complaining about problems.

Jim Michaud in action!

Our IBM customer engineer was Jim Michaud, who lived in Rockville. I remember that he came to our office on several occasions, but I cannot remember why. I cannot remember any serious problems that we ever encountered with any of our Datamasters. Maybe there was something that he needed to do when we initially took delivery on systems for our clients.

I also remember that Jim had two cars with vanity license plates: ICANOE and IKAYAK. They both had roof racks.

1. Crystal Blueprint stayed open in that location until 2018. Heartland and Zahner’s (which still operates stores in neighboring towns) moved out much earlier. I remember walking into Heartland one day and being shocked by its half-empty shelves. It closed shortly thereafter.

2. I think that Jim Michaud is still active in the sport of white-water canoeing. He has a Facebook page devoted to his photos. An interview with him in 2015 is posted here.