In the late nineties Denise and I had decided that we needed to investigate ways for TSI (or at least the two of us) to develop a new product or service and to modernize, if possible, our work on the AS/400. In late 1999 we learned about PartnerWorld, a convention for IBM’s business partners that was scheduled to be held in San Diego in late January of 2000. We decided to attend. Our objectives were two-fold: 1) to hear about IBM’s approach to the Internet; and 2) to meet other vendors with whom we might team up. I also bought two tickets for the San Diego Opera’s performance of Verdi’s Il Trovatore on Tuesday, January 25. We decided to spend the last day at the zoo.
This must be in SD. Everyone in New England wears a coat in January.
On Sunday, January 23, Denise’s husband Ray drove her to Bradley International. I met them there and took a photo or two. Since we gained three hours en route we probably landed in San Diego in the afternoon. The airport was surprisingly close to Seaworld, Coronado Island, and downtown. I was accustomed to fairly long drives from airports to downtown locations. We boarded our rental car at Avis. The weather was fantastic throughout our stay.
Click to enlarge.
I had booked rooms for us at the Best Western Inn by the sea in La Jolla, which was about a twenty-minute drive from the airport and the conference center. This was an excellent choice. It was a nice hotel that was reasonably priced and within walking distance of La Jolla cove. I seem to remember that Denise and I walked down to the beach as soon as we had gotten settled. There we saw both a beautiful stretch of sand and a large group of seals or maybe sea lions. Both species liked to hang around in the vicinity.
I found no notes about this trip. I found about ten photos that I took with disposable cameras. I must have had two and switched halfway through the trip; there are two different sizes of photos.
I bought a copy of Frommer’s guide to San Diego. I know that I used it to find the hotel because there was a business card marking the page for it. It said the prices were “moderate”, and they included a continental breakfast and free parking. A map was evidently torn out of the back of the book.
The business card was from Yvonne Carl, whose job was “Customer Advocate” at The 400 Group in Dedham, MA. By the time that I wrote this entry in 2023 I had no recollection of her or the group. When I tried its website, I was treated to a large and graphic ad for a combination flashlight and male sex toy.
The conference: On Monday we drove to the gigantic conference center and parked in the basement. When we registered we each received a faux leather black duffel bag, some printed materials, and an orange PartnerWorld tee shirt. Mine, for some reason had “Morpher” on the back. Denise’s had something equally meaningless.
The first event was the “kickoff” in a very large auditorium. I don’t know how many people were there, but the total attendance at the conference was about 4,000. Lou Gerstner, IBM’s celebrated Chairman, did not attend, but he sent a video. His message was that IBM was now all about e-business, by which he seemed to mean using the Internet directly or indirectly for commerce. IBM wanted everyone to use its servers and, more importantly, services. Another big emphasis was on the object-oriented programming called Java1 and JavaBeans2, both of which were developed by Sun Microsystems and licensed to everyone at no charge.
Sam Palmisano,
I remember two speakers. A lady who was in charge of marketing claimed that IBM “owned” the term e-business3. This was in reference to an advertising campaign that had associated IBM with the term. The other was Sam Palmisano, the number two guy at IBM, who must have thought that he was addressing the IBM sales force. He was very upset at EMC and Sun Microsystems, who were evidently using former IBM employees—of whom there were a large number—to undercut IBM on some accounts. He used the phrase “kick butts”, which seemed totally out of place for a gathering of people who had worked with IBM for years.
Denise and I usually split up to attend other presentations. In the only one that I remember a panelist said that in hiring you should always get the best person available. This was undoubtedly good advice, but I had learned that it was also crucial to find a way to keep them no matter what happened to your business.
AS/400 sign-on screen.
We also visited some exhibits that were sponsored by third parties. At the time we were on the lookout for ways to provide a GUI4 front end for AdDept that we could implement without a great deal of work. We did not find anything of interest.
One of our major objectives was to make contact with people from other companies with which we could partner for mutual benefit. We were disappointed in this endeavor. IBM was not interested in helping its partners find partners. It wanted its partners to tell their customers to buy IBM computers and services.
Sinbad.
Entertainment: I think that the comedian Sinbad performed on Monday evening. Denise and I attended. He began by telling the audience that he was a Mac guy. At the time Apple was not yet a major player in either servers or the Internet. Its computers were good for designers, but most people in business had little use for them. I was not very impressed with the rest of Sinbad’s routine either. I don’t think that he understood the nature of the audience.
On Tuesday evening we went to the San Diego Opera to see Il Trovatore. I remember being disappointed that the members of the orchestra did not take time to throw a baseball around during the overture. I also remember being very tired. In the last act I had to fight off drowsiness, and I was unable to prevent various Warner Bros. characters such as Sylvester and Bugs Bunny from appearing on the stage.
I remember that Denise and I were very impressed with the soprano who sang Leonora5. She rightly judged the arias to be beautiful. I also was surprised. I had listened to the opera several times and had never before been so impressed with these pieces.
On Wednesday Denise and I attended a party in the conference center. The music was supplied by what was left of the Beach Boys. Mike Love and Bruce Johnston were definitely there. Brian Wilson and Al Jardine were not. The other members of the band on the stage were much younger than Love and Johnston, who were both pushing sixty.
You won’t find any pictures of Mike Love without a hat. Bruce Johnston is on the left
There was nowhere to sit. Perhaps they expected people to dance, but this was a group of uber-geeks, predominantly male. Many may not have even heard of the Beach Boys. A few people may have danced, but I never would unless I had at least ten beers. I was at least nine short of that mark.
Two old guys singing about hot rods and surfing seemed weird in the twenty-first century. None of the magic of the performance that I witnessed at the concert at U-M (described here) remained.
Private experiences: I remember having two suppers with Denise. We went to a Mexican restaurant in Old Town one evening. I am pretty sure that we also went to a Chinese restaurant in La Jolla. I don’t remember where we ate lunches or breakfasts. Denise probably skipped some of these meals. When we ate together we almost exclusively discussed what we could do to enhance the business.
I don’t see any ear flaps. They must be seals.
We also spent some time walking up and down the beach and viewing the seals from a safe distance. The entire experience was at once exhilarating and disappointing. We were already starting to focus on using the Internet for insertion orders. We both had moderate confidence that we could make it work, and we were excited about the challenge. It was disheartening that we found nothing of value with regard to modernizing AS/400 applications.
The zoo: We spent the entire last day at the famous San Diego Zoo. We saw a very large number of animals, but the foliage used to establish the settings for the animals and the ambience of the zoo was nearly as stimulating.
I took dozens of photos with disposable cameras. This type of camera was totally inappropriate for a visit to the zoo. It had no ability to zoom or adjust the focus. They were not stored digitally. I had to take photos of the photos with my digital camera. That process lost some of the resolution. However, fuzzy memories are better than none.
I think that these photos are from our second visit to the panda exhibit. There are two photos from the first visit, too, but the panda is almost completely hidden by shrubbery.
The only fairly distinct memories that I have of the experience involved the panda exhibit. We began our visit there, and on that occasion we stood in line for a long time. When we finally got to the viewing area, the panda was very visible. We came back in the afternoon and got a better look.
The lady who ran the Bird Show.
The Big Cat Show.
We went to at least two shows. One of them involved birds that flew around but always returned to the trainer on command. The other featured a couple of big cats.
Here is a selection of the other photos in no particular order.
Two grouses. The dark one is facing left. The light one below it is facing right.
I thing that this is a sun bear.
Giant tortoises.
Elephants.
Flamingos.
Warthogs.
Orangutan?
Some sort of pig.
Who knows?
Crocodile?
Condor or eagle.
Polar bear.
Giraffes.
Zebra.
Dig those ears.
Horace, the Bactrian camel.
I don’t remember the trip back to Connecticut.
Epilogue: The result of TSI’s search for an Internet product was AxN. The story of that project begins here. In the spring of 2006 Sue Comparetto and I returned to San Diego for a short vacation. That trip is described here.
1. I had read ten books on Java, and I did all of the exercises in each. I could do what they asked, but I could see no way to do most of what I wanted to do. On the AS/400 (and presumably on other machines as well) a Java Virtual Machine needed to be installed and configured. IBM put all of this stuff under the rubric of Websphere. The implementation on the AS/400 had horrendous performance compared to programs in the native environment.
2. JavaBeans are classes that encapsulate one or more objects into one standardized object (the bean). This standardization allows the beans to be handled in a more generic fashion, allowing easier reuse of code.
3. I liked to tell our clients that TSI was working on an Internet-based system for convents and monasteries. We planned to call it “Monk E-Business”.
4. GUI stands for “graphical user interface”, which means using screens that take advantage of all of the properties of personal computers. AdDept’s screens were still text-based, which made them less attractive but not necessarily less functional for the tasks that they performed. GUI front ends took advantage of the mouse and displayed information using colors, images, and such things as check boxes, radio buttons, text boxes, and pull-down windows.
5. We were right to be impressed. I discovered twenty-three and a half years after the fact that Leonora was played by Sondra Radvanovsky. At the time she was an up-and-coming star. Within a decade so she was an international diva recognized both for her singing and her acting ability. She gave several legendary performances at the Metropolitan Opera.
The AS/400 hardware, the OS/400 operating system, and the and DB2 database were introduced in 1988. The AdDept system that TSI developed for the administration of the advertising departments of large retailers was one of the very first systems developed … Continue reading →
The AS/400 hardware, the OS/400 operating system, and the and DB2 database were introduced in 1988. The AdDept system that TSI developed for the administration of the advertising departments of large retailers was one of the very first systems developed on and for the AS/400. At the time TSI was an IBM Business Partner for its GrandAd system on the System/36. Earlier TSI had been one of the first software companies to be recognized as an IBM Business Partner for the Datamaster.
Prior to the late nineties the only requirement for a company to become a Business Partner was to have some successful accounts that were using its software or services. At times it was a huge advantage to be an IBM Business Partner. At other times IBM employees treated the partners as competition.
At some point the concept of Value-Added Retailer (VAR) was introduced. VARs were at first allowed to order and sell systems for which their software or services had qualified as adding value to the sale of IBM equipment. Too many bad sales by VARs prompted IBM to take away the ability to take orders from smaller companies such as TSI. Instead they were assigned to a “Super-VAR” who vetted and placed the orders for them. In 1999 TSI was assigned to a company called BPS, which shortly thereafter renamed itself Savoir.
The next, but by no means last, set of restrictions imposed by IBM was to require any company involved in sales of IBM equipment to have at least one employee who had passed proficiency tests for the the equipment. At the outset there were two levels with separate tests, one for sales personnel and one for technical.
My partner Denise Bessette and I judged at the time that it was critical to the future marketing of AdDept and any other future product that we continue to participate in IBM’s partnership program. I knew more about the hardware offerings than she did, and so I was chosen to study up and take the technical test. It made little sense for a different person to study for the sales one, which was reportedly much easier.
I think that I must have taken the exams in the first half of 1999 or late 1998. I have a lot of notes from the second half of 1999, and there is no mention of them.
IBM still publishes Redbooks. I think that WAS was in version 1 in 1999.
IBM published study guides for both exams. One or two Redbooks may have also been on the syllabus. I remember that there was a considerable amount of technical material about several things with which I was not at all familiar. One was the cabling required to connect two AS/400s. The other was setting up partitions on a single AS/400 so that each partition had a separate file system. It was more complicated than it sounds because each device needed to be defined in each partition that used it. I remember practically nothing about either of these topics, but we did encounter partitioning at Dick’s Sporting Goods (introduced here).
I spent as much time as I could bear going over the course material. Hardware and operating systems have never really been my thing. It took a lot of discipline to force myself to understand the details of things that we would never use.
The day arrived on which I was scheduled to take the tests. I drove to an office in Farmington that specialized in administering exams for corporations. I had already consumed one 20-ounce bottle of Diet Coke before I arrived, and I brought another with me.
I gave my registration document to the receptionist. She asked me which test I wanted to take first. I selected the sales test. I seem to recall that each test lasted for about ninety minutes. All questions were multiple choice. I was required to enter my answers on a PC.
The sales test was not too difficult; I reported back to the receptionist ten or fifteen minutes before the deadline. She told me that I had passed.
I told her that I wanted to take a break before taking the technical test. I went to the men’s room and sat in the lobby. I drank my second Diet and tried to clear my mind. Then I took the second test.
It was much more difficult than the first. A few questions were beyond my ken. I skipped them. I read all of the others carefully and only answered after I was fairly certain. I used up nearly all of the allotted time. I was pretty relieved when the receptionist assured me that I had passed both tests.
It doesn’t look familiar.
So, I was certified by IBM as knowledgeable about both the sales and technical aspects of the AS/400. If I ever had physical certificates, I certainly have not seen them for a decade. TSI’s Sales Manager Doug Pease told me that his contact at Savoir had told him that almost nobody ever passed the technical exam on the first try.
I am not sure how much good my success did us. I am not sure that TSI sold any new hardware at all in the rest of the time that we were in business. We might have ordered an upgrade or two through our Super-Var.
On the other hand, we did get to go to the PartnerWorld convention in San Diego. That adventure has been described here.
By the mid-eighties Sue and I really needed help with marketing. We had some good products to sell, and our service was fantastic. However, our salesmanship was poor. I could often persuade people that I could develop a solution to a difficult problem, but I was not very good at persuading them that TSI’s product and approach were better than those of our competitors.
The first person whom we engaged to represent us was Joe Danko, who lived on Cape Cod. At first the relationship was on a commission-only basis. Later we considered hiring him as our salesman, but we decided against it. The details are described here. Joe was never actually an employee, and we never paid him for his services. I don’t know how much effort, if any, he put in on our behalf.
Trust me; Paul was nothing like this guy.
We hired some consultants to help us. They, in turn, hired a graduate student named Paul Schrenker, to sit in Sue’s office in Rockville when she was on the road. We provided a list of presidents of ad agencies and their phone numbers. In only a few cases was it a direct line, but, even so, quite a few people agreed to talk with him. Ad agency executives were all about relationships. Whether Paul was a potential client or a potential vendor did not matter that much; many agency heads were always on the lookout for connections. So, a surprising number of advertising executives accepted a cold call from a graduate student who knew a lot about biology but very little about any aspect of the business world.
The Patriots debacle was not O&P’s finest hour.
One of the ad agencies, O’Neal & Prelle in Hartford, agreed to an appointment, and we eventually closed the sale. Paul did not participate in closing the sale, but he did make the first appointment.
TSI severed its relationship with the consulting firm. We decided instead to hire a full-time salesman, and we approached it in the same way we had recruited programmers and administrative people—by placing an ad in the newspapers. I think that we interviewed a couple of people. One stood out, Michael Symolon. He seemed excited about the job, and he was quite well-spoken. He was a graduate of Central Connecticut. He had worked in marketing for five years at Triad Systems, a company that specialized in software for dentists.
What about TSI?
I think that we hired Michael at some point in 1987. His LinkedIn page, which can be found here, was no help in this determination. Although he included previous and subsequent employers, he left TSI off of his list of experiences. We paid him a pretty good salary as well as commissions.
I remember that when he first began to work at TSI Michael was gung ho about setting up a nationwide sales organization. He advised me to schedule annual trips to exciting destinations exclusively for the most productive reps of our software systems.
Michael.
This attitude shocked me a little, but he eventually revised his expectations when he discovered how complicated the GrandAd product was. Our competitors could undercut us on price on the hardware, and there was not much that we could do about it. The key to selling was almost always our willingness to customize the system for the prospective client. The idea of setting up a network of sales agents seemed unworkable to me. If I could not deal with the people personally, how could I assess what changes were necessary and feasible?
We gave Michael room to be creative in his approaches, but I was not ready to discuss how to celebrate sales generated by imaginary salesmen.
9.5 rounded up.
Terri Provost left the company shortly after Michael was hired. Michael interviewed and hired Linda Fieldhouse to take her place as administrative assistant/bookkeeper. Both of them are described here. Michael assured me that Linda was “at least a nine and a half.”
I am pretty sure that Michael and I went on a couple of ad agency sales calls together. I remember driving up to Vermont with someone—it probably was Michael. When I got out of the car I realized that I was wearing the pants for my pin-stripe suit with my blue blazer. We did not get the sale, but I don’t think that my fashion faux pas was the cause. Vermont is not known for haute couture.
I also remember that Michael accompanied me to Keiler Advertising once. Evidently he had once dated Shelly, who at that time was in charge of bookkeeping there. Michael was very embarrassed by the incident. I did not ask him for historical details.
I don’t remember him closing sales of any new GrandAd clients.
We took Amtrak from Hartford’s Union Station to NYC.
Michael also came to New York City with me for at least one very important presentation to Macy’s in 1988. He was almost a hero, as is described here.
Michael invited Sue and me to supper one evening at his house in Farmington. We got to meet his wife and kids. It was a very nice house, but I don’t remember any details.
I am sorry to report that Michael was at the center of TSI’s first great crisis, which is described here.
I ran into Michael at Bradley International one day in late 1988. He told me that he was working for a company that sold advertising software to magazines. I told him that Macy’s had finally signed the contract, that I had been working my tail off to get all the software written and installed, and that TSI would send him his commission check as soon as we got the final check from Macy’s. There did not seem to be any hard feelings.
For a couple of years TSI muddled along without a salesman and with very little effort at marketing. Those were very difficult years in a number of ways. By the spring of 1991 the AdDept system had two pretty substantial accounts, and we felt that it was time to start marketing it seriously nationwide.
Meanwhile, our ad agency clients seemed perfectly content with their current hardware and showed no interest in converting to the AS/400, the system that IBM had introduced in 1988. It is described here.
We hired a young man named Tom Moran to help with marketing. He was a very nice guy, but he knew next to nothing about computers, advertising, retail, or, for that matter, marketing. He was definitely eager to learn, and he was willing to follow up on leads, which was the most important thing. Plus, both Sue and I liked him.
I remember going on two trips with Tom. The first was for a meeting with Hecht’s in Arlington, VA. Sue, Tom, and I drove down to the Washington area. A Motel 6 on the Maryland side of DC kept the light on for us, and I am happy to report that no murders were committed (or at least none reported) there that night. It was the first and last time that I stayed at a Motel 6.
The three of us met with Barbara Shane Jackson, who was in charge of Hecht’s patchwork PC system and her boss, the advertising director, whose name I don’t remember. Tom did not contribute much, but it was a good meeting on the whole. In the end we got the Hecht’s account.
The RAC was held at the Hilton in downtown Chicago.
Tom and I also attended RAC, the Retail Advertising Conference, in Chicago. It was a huge pain to get everything prepared for our booth there. We had to rent an AS/400 from IBM and to hire union employees to set everything up. Nevertheless, we did manage to get our demo computer system working by the time that the attendees came to visit the vendor area.
Some vendors who were familiar to us were there. Camex, the company from Boston that specialized in programming and selling heavy-duty Sun workstations for the production of ads, had an exhibit that was ten times as large as ours and had a dozen or more people. Tapscan, the broadcast software company. was right across the aisle from our booth. One young lady who worked there must have accidentally left her skirt at home. It appeared that over her black pantyhose and high heels, she was wearing a wash cloth that she purloined from her hotel room.
Most of the conventioneers were drunk or at least tipsy by the time that they reached our area. We made one contact with the ad director of Hess’s, a department store chain with headquarters in Pennsylvania. Tom gave him a copy of our sales materials and got all of his contact information. Unfortunately, almost as soon as we had begun correspondence with him, Hess’s was acquired by another retailer, and his position was eliminated.
The convention would have been a complete fiasco except for two things. The first was that I got to introduce Tom to the indescribable pleasure of Italian beef sandwiches purchased from street vendors in the Windy City.
The other redeeming event was the appointment that I had made to do a demo at the convention for Val Walser, the Director of the Advertising Business Office at The Bon Marché, a department store chain in the northwest. The programs worked without a hitch, and she was very impressed with what the system could do. She even invited us out to Seattle for a presentation to the relevant parties at the IBM office there.
Tom accompanied me on that trip, too. Our plane landed in Seattle very late, well after midnight. We checked into our hotel, but we only managed to get a couple of hours sleep. We went to the IBM office, where I checked that all of the software was working correctly. By this time I had been chain-drinking coffee for several hours, and still I felt very sleepy. This was an important presentation, and I had to be at my best.
The demo seemed to go pretty well. Everyone was attentive. The people from the IT department were asking tough questions, which usually boded well for us. I was so tired that I could barely concentrate. As we were putting away our materials I realized that I had been drinking decaffeinated coffee all day.
Nevertheless, I convinced Val and the other important parties. We put together a hardware and software proposal, and they submitted a requisition to the IT department, which also approved it. However, the powers that be at Federated Department Stores1, the mother ship, vetoed it.
This episode taught me that TSI needed someone who could navigate his way through the bureaucratic structure to find out what the hold-up was. Tom was not ready for this kind of responsibility. In the end, we decided that we could not afford someone who just tagged along for demos. In fact, we were really in the position where we could not afford anything.
Fortunately, we were able to use the Hecht’s installation as an entrée into the May Company, which at the time had about ten divisions. Not long after that I persuaded Foley’s in Houston to install the system, too. I also convinced Neiman Marcus in Dallas to get the system.
A grainy photo of Doug in an airport.
Those sales gave TSI both a solid base of accounts and enough revenue that we again looked for a marketing person in 1993. We found what we were looking for in Doug Pease, who had actually worked in the advertising department at G. Fox, the local May Company chain.
At first I had hoped that Doug could do some of the demos, but I soon gave up on that idea. I knew exactly what the system did, what it could potentially do, and what was beyond us. The programmers were generating a lot of code every week, and so these lists were in a constant state of flux. Besides, I had a great deal of experience at public speaking, and Doug did not. I don’t think that I would ever have trusted anyone with the demos.
Doug was a real bulldog once he had a hot lead. He was extremely good at following up on everything. In his first year we closed extremely profitable sales to Lord & Taylor, Filene’s Basement, and Michaels Stores.
Susan Sikorski
In April of 1994 I received an email from a woman named Susan Sikorski, who worked at Ross Roy Communications, Inc. in Bloomfield Hills, MI. The company at the time had eight hundred employees (!) and seven satellite offices. They wanted a production billing system that would feed their Software 2000 accounting system and some internally developed applications.
A few years earlier I would have considered this opportunity a godsend. We had already written interfaces for Software 2000 accounting systems for two AdDept clients. We loved to do interfaces, and the more complicated they were the better. However, we were so busy with programming for clients that Doug had landed that this was my response:
Unfortunately, as I looked over your package, I realized that our system does not really measure up to your requirements. We would have to make very substantial modifications to meet even the minimal requirements. Since we specialize in custom programming, this would not ordinarily be a great issue to us, but at this time we would not even be able to schedule the work for many months. So, I guess that we will have to mass.
And it was almost certainly a good thing that I was forced to make that decision. In 1995 Ross Roy Communications was purchased by the mega-agency called Omnicom Group. If TSI had been chosen for the project, I strongly suspect that the plug would have been pulled on it before the system became fully operational. Susan found a new job at Volkswagen in 1996.
Meanwhile, in the next few years Doug managed to get TSI’s AdDept system into all of the remaining May Company divisions, as well as Elder-Beerman, the Bon-Ton, Stage Stores, two Tandy divisions, Gottschalks in California, and all but one of the five divisions of Proffitt’s Inc., which later became Saks Inc..
Doug and I took many sales trips together. The most memorable one was in December of 1997 to Honolulu to pitch Liberty House3, the largest retailer on the islands.
Doug using a client’s AS/400 for something.
We had a little free time while we were there. Doug and I used it to climb to the top of Diamond Head together. He was an enthusiastic mountain biker, he had been a soccer player in college, and he was quite a bit younger than I was. I was in pretty good shape from jogging. So, neither of us held up the other.
Sue accompanied us to Honolulu, and after Doug returned home, she and I had a great time on four different islands, as is described here.
The other trip that was the most memorable for me was when we flew to Fresno, CA, to pitch Gottschalks, a chain of department stores in the central valley.
In those days you could save a lot of money by flying on Saturday rather than Sunday—more than enough to pay for a day’s food and lodging and a car rental. Doug and I considered going to Yosemite on our free day, but there was a problem with the roads there. Instead we decided to drive along the coastal highway from north to south to maximize our views of the coastline.
Somebody else’s photo.
I did not have a camera, but Doug did. His was a real camera of some sort. I was not yet into photography, and I had not brought a disposable camera on the trip. Doug took lots of photos. In fact, he ran out of film. When we stopped for lunch he bought some more film.
Doug took a lot more photos on the rest of the journey, or so he thought. When we got to Fresno he discovered that he had no photos at all after lunch. I don’t remember whether he forgot to load the camera after he took out the film. Maybe he did not wind it, or there was a technical problem. That was not the worst of it. He also somehow lost the first roll of film when we stopped for lunch, and it also contained the photos of his newborn child taken before we left.
But, hey, we got the account.
I guess that Doug is unloading new equipment in Enfield.
Doug and I almost never disagreed about what the company should be doing. However, near the end of his tenure he came up with an idea that I just could not sanction. He wanted us to start a new line of business in which we contracted for large chunks of advertising space from newspapers at a discount and then resold it to small businesses at a profit. Maybe he could have sold a lot of space; maybe he couldn’t. In any case such an undertaking would leverage no TSI products or services and none of the skills that the rest of us possessed. In short, he was asking me to backstop a new source of revenue for him. I declined to do so.
Doug and I made a great team. I gathered specs and did the demos. He attended, met the players, and subsequently followed up on everything. When the prospect had signed the contract, he made sure that all the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed and ordered the hardware if they bought from TSI or a business partner.4 By 1999 we had more work than the programmers and I could handle. I told him to stop selling new software systems until the programming backlog could be reduced to a more manageable level, which would not be for at least a year. He made the imminently reasonable decision to look for another job.
After TSI moved to East Windsor in late 1999, we hired one more AdDept salesman, Jim Lowe. His previous experience was with a company that marketed hard cider. The challenge was to get retailers to give them adequate shelf space. It was retail experience, but not exactly the kind that we had dealt with.
Jim was a smart guy, and he could have been a good salesman for us. We went on a trip together to Wherehouse Music in Torrance, CA. Wherehouse was a large chain of music stores in California. Jim and I stayed in a nearby Holiday Inn the first night. We used MapQuest to find to the Wherehouse headquarters the next morning. At the very first turn MapQuest advised us to turn right. This seemed wrong to me, and I turned left instead. We reached the building in less than ten minutes. I don’t know when we would have arrived if I had turned right.
It was a very strange meeting. Rusty Hansen, whom I knew from Robinsons-May, had told them about us. We never got to meet with him or anyone else who seemed to know what they wanted. We did get to meet the president of the company, who was wearing jeans and a tee shirt. I never did figure out what this whole episode was about. The company went out of business within a couple of years.
Jim only worked for us for a few months. He took an offer that was very similar to his old job. Before he left he helped me with a mailing that produced some good leads. I sold the last few AdDept systems to some of those retailers by myself.
Jim’s advice to me when he left was that TSI should concentrate on AxN, which is described here. I don’t think that he ever really understood that the horse must precede the cart. We needed retailers to be sending us insertion orders in order to be able to send them to newspapers.
Bob in Denise’s office.
Bob Wroblewski was, as I recall, a relative of Denise’s husband. In November of 2003 Denise came up with the idea of paying Bob to get the newspapers signed up.
I got to know Bob on a trip taken by the two of us to California to persuade Rob-May and Gottschalks to use AxN. We both misjudged how well the two demos went. The people at Gottschalks seemed excited; Rob-May was somewhat cool. However, Rob-May soon came around, and I never did persuade Stephanie at Gottschalks to use AxN.
Here is how the marketing process worked. After a retailer’s advertising department that scheduled its newspaper ads in AdDept agreed to use AxN for insertion orders, it provided us with a list of its newspapers with contact information. I wrote a letter to each paper asking them to subscribe to the service. The letter was printed on the retailer’s letterhead and was signed by the advertising director or ROP manager at the newspaper. However, it was sent by us along with a contract that I had signed. The monthly rate was approximately what the newspaper charged for one column inch in one issue. This was a negligible fraction of what the advertiser spent. Then Bob called each one and persuaded them to sign up.
I don’t know (and I don’t want to know) what Bob said to the papers, but he had a very high success rate. He also earned quite a bit for himself in commissions. At one time we had over four hundred newspapers that subscribed for the service!
Bob’s wife died while he was still working with us. I drove to Providence, which is where he lived, for the wake.
1. Federated Department Stores owned many large chains that were all very promising potential AdDept clients. The rejection of The Bon Marché’s request may have been a blessing in disguise. In January of 1990, shortly after this meeting, Federated filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It could have been really ugly.
2. Susan Sikorski is apparently working as a consultant for Avaya in 2021. She is featured as a graduate of Wayne State on this webpage.
3. We learned later that the advertising department at Liberty House had approved the purchase of the AdDept system, but the order was never placed because in March of 1998 Liberty House filed for Chapter 11, and the funds for new systems were frozen.
4. TSI was throughout its existence a certified member of IBM’s Business Partner program. However, because of the size of the company we were bit allowed to sell IBM hardware directly. Instead, we needed to pair up with a “managing Business Partner” who actually could place orders. We dealt extensively with several of these companies—Rich Baran, BPS, Savoir, and Avnet. There may have been others.
IBM’s introduction of the System/23 Datamaster in June of 1971 was a tremendous opportunity for TSI. In fact, if the announcement had been a month later, I probably would have given up on TSI and looked for a job.
The Datamaster was one of the very few systems in the early eighties that offered small businesses of all shapes the opportunity to automate their operations. There were competitive hardware systems, of course. Some of them offered more processing bang for the buck, but none of them had the three magic letters I-B-M on the hardware. IBM had a well deserved reputation of delivering high-qualiity system with unmatched service. “No one ever got fired for recommending IBM,” was a popular saying.
What we did not realize until we got our hands on it was that the Datamaster was extremely easy to program. Of all the systems that we worked with, I enjoyed working on a Datamaster the most. We delivered an enormous amount of code to meet incredibly diverse requirements in a very short period of time.
We depended on IBM for most of our new clients. The exceptions were Harstans Jewelers (described here) and advertising agencies (described here and here). I am uncertain of the order in which we acquired the new clients. The order in which I have listed them here may not correspond to the order in which we did the projects.
In most cases we took delivery on their systems in our office in Rockville and then carted them to the user’s location when the systems (or at least the most important modules) were ready. Once this started we always had at least one system in the office until the time that we bought one for ourselves.
Paul Prior sold Ledgecrest in the eighties or nineties, but it is still in business in 2021. It is now called Ledgecrest Health Care Center.
One of the most memorable clients was Ledgecrest Convalescent Hospital, a nursing home in Kensington, CT. The proprietor was Paul Prior1, one of the most interesting people whom I have ever met and one of the few clients whom I got to know pretty well.
When Sue and I first met Paul I was quite intrigued by his business. Paul’s goals were not much different from those of any other small business. He wanted to bring his company into the twentieth century. Most of the applications that interested him were fairly standard,—patient billing and accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger.
The last was his top priority because a high percentage of his receipts came from reimbursement from the government. The amount that the state reimbursed the business depended on his keeping a close eye on expenses. A mistake could cost thousands. So, the objective was to produce a system that allowed Paul to keep Ledgecrest’s expenses within state guidelines year after year. Anything over the legally prescribed “caps” would be disallowed.
The important thing was for him to learn where he stood while he still had time to do something about it. He needed to project his spending fairly accurately beginning in the middle of the year or even earlier. This sounded to me like something that would be valuable to all of the nursing homes in Connecticut. I had high hopes of marketing it to the dozens of nursing homes in the state, and I did. That effort is detailed here.
Paul also ran a second company called Priority Services. It provided Meals on Wheels to aged and disabled people.
After we won the contract and delivered the first part of the system, Paul told me how much he enjoyed working with the system. For reasons that I did not yet understand he had done all of the initial data entry himself. As usual he was drinking coffee from his dirty cup. He never washed it because, he said that it protected him from a weak cup. That was the day that he identified for me the feature in our systems (I forget exactly what impressed him) that convinced him to hire us. I chuckled when I informed him that our systems did not actually have that feature. He must have mixed us up with someone else.
Not for Paul.
Paul told me that he had been drafted in the fifties and took part in the Korean War. I don’t use the word “fought” because he told me that as soon as he got close to combat he “went over the hill”, was apprehended by MPs, and then spent some time in the brig.
When he got his discharge (I didn’t press him for details) and came home, he discovered that his older siblings had taken control of the family business that had been founded by their parents. According to Paul, everything was a mess. Bills were going unpaid, and the standards of patient care had dropped precipitously. Meanwhile his brothers and sisters were living high on the hog.
Paul somehow chased them out and took over the management and eventually the ownership of the business. He went to each creditor and arranged a plan for paying all the bills. Eventually he reestablished the reputation of the institution. I was very impressed by this. Nobody had ever related for the origin story of his business.
While I worked with Paul on getting reports from the G/L system to provide the information needed to maximize his income from the state, I got to meet the other three people in the office, all of whom were female. The first was named Dorie. She served as secretary and reception. She also paid all the bills. I don’t remember the second lady’s name. She was, among other things, in charge of Priority Services. The last was Paul’s daughter, Kathy, who helped out part time. I think that she was engaged to be married.
I don’t remember exactly what the system that we designed for Priority Services did. I think that they recorded who was to receive meals on specific days, and the computer printed delivery routes. I seem to remember that it also did billing. One day Paul asked the lady who ran this system to get me a cup of coffee. She asked me how I liked my coffee. I requested just a little bit of sugar and no cream.
Much too sweet for me.
The beverage that she brought me back was so sweet that I could not drink it. She explained that she could not find any sugar, and so she substituted a packet of Sweet’n Low. That didn’t seem like enough to her, and so she poured in a second envelope. From that day forward I drank my coffee black. I eventually learned to appreciate the bitterness.
The last system that we got working was accounts payable. I spent one session with Dorie in which I tried to learn how she did things. I asked her how many bills they had in accounts payable. She responded “None.”
I mansplained to her that I meant how many invoices that she had not paid yet. She insisted that she had none. Eventually I realized that, unlikely as it may seem, she was right. As soon as she got an invoice from the mailman she wrote out a check, stamped it with Paul’s signature, put it in an envelope, and mailed it.
Paul, perhaps mindful of his terrible experience with debts to vendors when he took over the business, tolerated this approach. However, he understood, that it tied his hands with respect to cash flow. Furthermore, after Dorie paid the bills they still had to be entered into the general ledger system.
The problem was that Dorie was terrified of the computer. The night after I talked with her about accounts payable, she could not sleep at all. I wasn’t there, but the next day she came to Ledgecrest and was ready to quit her job. Paul assured her that she would not be required to use the computer.
Instead, Paul entered in records for all the vendors himself. Once he had done so, it was easy for him to keep up with them. He did not need to enter a stack of open invoices and reconcile balances. Paul found something else to keep Dorie busy.
I doubt that anyone with an MBA would have approved of this extreme “Theory Y” management style, but it seemed to work for Paul.
Ledgecrest and Priority Services upgraded to a System/36 in the late eighties.
I can’t prove it, but I strongly suspect that NSNE was in the west side of the indicated building.
In many ways National Safe Northeast was not an exceptional company. Most of their customers were banks. By the time that I started working with them their primary products were no longer safes, but Automated Teller Machines (ATMs). Their office was in an industrial park in West Hartford2. The most peculiar thing about it was that four family members were often present: Tony Bernatovich, who ran the company, his wife Lynn, who had a title but no evident responsibilities, his daughter, who was sort of the office manager when she was there, and a very large dog.
They wanted us to install a rather standard bookkeeping system. We made very few adjustments to the accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger systems. It made me wonder why the IBM rep did not just sell NSNE IBM’s packaged systems. They would have worked pretty well.
Tony’s real interest was in a customized payroll system. NSNE used a method called “half-time due”. You haven’t heard of it? Neither has anyone whom I have ever met. There is not the slightest passing reference to it on the Internet.
NSNE did not want its installers to work overtime. Since they were out on the road, it was difficult to control their hours. Employees who put more than forty hours on their timesheets were only paid half of their usual rate for the excess. Not double-time, not time-and-a-half, just half-time. If the total pay for the period was less than the minimum wage, they were paid the minimum wage.
Was this legal? I don’t know. There are several case files for lawsuits involving NSNE3, but I did not find any that involved complaints about illegal compensation schemes. Incidentally, although I was always on the lookout for an edge for our software, I never considered marketing this feature.
We primarily worked with three people at NSNE. Joan Kroh was the accounting manager. Her assistant’s name was Darlene. There was another employee named Jimmy. I do not recall either last name.
I am not sure what Jimmy did, but one morning no one else was there, and he was supposed to enter some accounts payable. The system was on, but he could not get it to work. I tried to talk him through it over the phone. I asked him to key in GO APMENU and then press Enter. As God is my witness, I talked on the phone with him for forty-five minutes, and he could not accomplish this. Finally, Darlene came in and keyed it in with no difficulty. It took her less than a minute.
I have two other fairly vivid memories. In one of them I was driving my car to NSNE. It overheated. I had to pull over to the side of the road. I loosened the cap on the radiator, and steam and hot water blasted me in the face. I was not hurt, but I was a mess. I went to NSNE anyway. I never have cared much about appearances.
This was not Joan’s team.
Darlene and Joan played in a woman’s football league. It was flag football, but these ladies were serious, and Joan was one of the best players. I was very impressed.
When the Lingerie Football League appeared on television I could not help thinking about the contrast between the ladies on TV playing “tackle” football in bikinis and shoulder pads and Joan’s teammates wearing sweatpants and tee shirts knocking one another on their asses.
This was not a pleasant drive. Route 44 can be very busy.
I never felt as ill-at-ease at a client’s offices as I did at John LaFalce, Inc., on Route 44 in Canton, CT. John4 was (and apparently still is) an interior designer. His retail office in Canton showcased a lot of eclectic furniture and doodads. I avoided the showroom lest one of my elbows occasion an unintended purchase. Rich people came there to hire him to redo the interiors of their Connecticut homes while they were living in one of their other houses. Or maybe vice-versa.
I think that TSI just implemented accounts payable and general ledger systems for them. We might have done some other programming that I don’t recall. There really was only one user, the bookkeeper, whose name was Jan Shustock.
I remember a meeting that involved one of the guys who ended up buying out John LaFalce, Inc. After the purchase they changed the name to LaFalce Campbell Robbins. The third person in our meeting was an IBM sales rep. The new owner mentioned something about red and blue not going together. As one, the rep and I held out our red and blue ties and looked down at them.
I also remember being stunned when TSI delivered the Datamaster that we had been working on to JLF. They asked me where, in my professional opinion, in their business office they should locate the computer system . They had sixteen employees, most of whom designed interiors for a living. They were asking a coffee-swilling code jockey how to arrange their furniture. I told them how long the cables were, but I refused to venture any further opinions.
SMI, in the south end of Hartford, has hardly changed in appearance at all in forty years.
Sue did most of the work for Standard Metals. The proprietor was Steve Buzash5. The person with whom we worked the most was named Carol. I recall very little about what we did for them, probably A/R, A/P, and G/L. I remember Steve talking with us about designing an inventory system. His inventory consisted of pieces of metal of various compositions, shapes and sizes. He often cut off pieces and sold them. It sounded like a nightmare to me.
Carol and Steve got married. They invited us to their unusual wedding, which took place on a large boat on the Connecticut River. After the ceremony there was a supper, which was followed by something that most of the people in attendance had never heard of, Karaoke.
Two people ran the show, a guy who served as MC and a woman in a sparkly dress who was obviously a professional singer. He told us tha we were going to be the entertainment, and we were going to have FUN!!!
To get things started, the lady sang a song. Needless to say, she hit every note perfectly and also inserted a few bel canto flourishes. Everyone was totally intimidated. I, for one, was wondering how far the shore was, and whether it would be worthwhile to try to swim for it in my suit and dress shoes.
When no one volunteered, the MC tried to coerce people into trying it. He promised “we will make you sound good.” A few people eventually ventured forth. I think that Sue sang a duet of something with Carol. The event lasted at least ten hours. No, I guess that would be impossible, but it sure seemed like it.
Dave Tine asked us to provide a computerized system for his sister’s company, Videoland, a company that sold home entertainment systems and rented VHS tapes. Its store and office were on Farmington Avenue in Hartford, but we never went there. I have a vague recollection that TSI did a simple inventory system for her. We probably also provided A/P and G/L systems. We billed Dave Tine for our work.
The company went out of business when Blockbuster Videos started appearing on every corner.
After we had a few installations, IBM accepted us into its fledgling Business Partner Program, which meant that we could make a little money selling hardware. One of our very first sales was to the Business Office of Avon Old Farms School. The Business Office Manager was Walter Ullram6. We sold them three diskette-based Datamasters. One was used for accounting functions by Mary Lee Pointe. One was used strictly for word processing by Walter’s secretary. The third was used by the bank. I don’t remember the names of either of these ladies.
The best thing about the AOF installation was that one-third of it required no support at all. The secretary loved IBM’s word processing system, and she learned how to use it from the manuals.
The first time that I visited AOF Walter showed me the system that he had developed for tracking on accountants’ sheets the school’s usage of oil in comparison with the heating-degree days. I was very impressed with how he had devised a scientific system to pinpoint inefficiencies and control the amount of money spent on heating all of the buildings. I was less impressed when I visited a few of the other buildings and saw that people there were coping with the cold weather by using incredibly inefficient electric space warmers.
I went to a very good prep school, but it was nothing like AOF. All Rockhurst students commuted. Most of the AOF students were boarders. They had uniforms, but they deliberately looked like slobs. We had no uniforms, but everyone dressed pretty nicely. The tuition at AOF was about thirty times what my parents paid. I soon learned that a lot of the AOF guys were “trust fund” students. Neither parent paid the tuition. It was paid by a trust set up when the parents divorced. Nearly all of the students were wealthy. Few were on scholarships.
I mostly worked with Mary Lee, whom I liked a lot. She had one very strange mannerism. A light on her telephone indicated whether calls originated inside the school or outside. When she answered outside calls, she began in a voice nearly as deep as Lauren Bacall’s, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Pointe speaking.” For inside calls, she sounded like Jerry Lewis’s falsetto, “Hello-oh?”
AOF reported a problem with connectivity. I cannot remember why they had to run long cables (maybe for Mary Lee’s printer), but they did. The cables did not run along the floorboards. They went through the walls and ceiling. We eventually discovered that the connections were OK, but some squirrels living above the ceiling had chewed through the cables.
Deposits at the AOF bank were not insured by the FDIC.
I was surprised to learn that AOF had a bank for its students. The parents did not send money for incidentals directly to the students. Instead the money went to the school, and the students were allowed to withdraw it. It was a simple system to write, and the lady who used it really liked it.
All in all this was a very satisfying installation. Walter and the users bragged about it to others in the faculty. I was considered a hero by all of the people that I worked with, and TSI made quite a bit of money on it.
I knew that there were quite a few prep schools in New York and New England. I was hopeful that there might be business office managers at some who were interested in automating. When I learned that Walter’s brother held that position at Westminster School in Simsbury, I was pretty optimistic. The story of our attempt to market Mary Lee’s system is told here.
Another favorite client was Viscom International in West Simsbury. Although their business was the importing and marketing of parts for boats, three of the four employees had formerly worked at advertising agencies. In fact, “Viscom” was short for “visual communication”. They were therefore very interested in the ad agency system that we had developed for Harland-Tine.
The principals were Curt Hussey and Frank Hohmeister7. The third advertising guy was an artist. I don’t remember ever even talking with him. Mostly I dealt with Curt and the administrative person, whose named was Mary. She also doubled as a model in ads that they produced to feature marine equipment that they imported from France. As Frank remarked once, “She could fill out a pair of jeans.”
The most enjoyable thing about this account were the lunches that Kurt, Mary, and I consumed in the small restaurant in the shopping center in which they were located. I recall good food and good conversation.
The account itself was a fairly difficult one. The primary system was inventory, and users are often unhappy with their inventory systems. Every transaction must be perfect, and designing a bullet-proof auditing system is difficult. Although their system was working fine at the time, they eventually decided to buy an IBM AT and ditch the Datamaster. The primary motivation was that Curt wanted to be able to do spreadsheets.
My recollection is that Curt had a heart attack while I was still visiting Viscom frequently. He came back to work not too long after that.
Mary left Viscom to work in a restaurant well south of Hartford that was managed by her husband. Sue and I went there for supper once, but I don’t remember any details about it.
Viscom went out of business in 1993.
We sold two Datamasters to the Feldman Glass Co. in North Haven. That was one less than the number of companies that they had. The parent company manufactured glass bottles that they sold and delivered to companies in the Northeast that distributed food or anything else in bottles. This company required only fairly standard accounting software.
The second company was named Anamed. It provided hospitals and the like with small plastic bags that contained tooth brushes, combs, and other hygienic items for patients. I think that we wrote a billing program for this service.
The bookkeeping for these two companies and the data entry for the computer was done by a mother-daughter team. The mother was named Isabel Blake. I don’t remember the daughter’s name.
I don’t remember the name of the third company. It specialized in “fulfillment”. Liquor companies ran contests in which they awarded fairly valuable prizes in exchange for some large number (fifty or more) of labels from their bottles. I don’t know how that Feldman Glass got involved in organizing and keeping track of all of this, but I guess that it was no more distant from its core business than Anamed was. At any rate they told me how they wanted it to work, and I did it.
One day I overheard one of the Feldman/Anamed ladies say that they had bought the wrong computer. I knew very well that it was unlikely that they would have found anyone who was willing to customize three different systems for them on any other computer. It was much easier to criticize the Datamaster’s specs than the quality of the installations. Someone had probably scoffed a the notion of using an underpowered system. I assume that they bought something else after using our systems for several years. It was just as well. Their businesses were so unique that we could not really even use them as a reference account.
I could find no evidence of the existence of any of these companies past the early nineties.
One of our strangest clients was Hartford Cutlery, a one-man operation owned by Bob Burke8. His parents owned East Granby Machine9, which had actually purchased the Datamaster. Bob’s business was sharpening knives and scissors for restaurants. I don’t think that he had any employees. His grinding equipment was kept in a little room at his parents’ company, but the Datamaster was actually in his house a few blocks away. That’s right. We sometimes made house calls.
Evidently all restaurants of any note had at least two entire sets of knives and scissors. Once a week Bob picked up a tray of cutlery from his clients, sharpened all of the pieces, and then returned them to the restaurant. Maybe he could pick up and deliver at the same time if he came very early or very late.
We wrote a billing program for him. It saved him a lot of time. It fed accounts receivable and general ledger systems.
Bob felt constrained by geography. There were not enough high-quality restaurants within an easy drive for him to make very much money. I could see what he meant; East Granby is not usually considered the center of the culinary universe.
Bob then told me his plan, or maybe it was his dream. He wanted to invade New York City. His scheme was to rent (or inherit or buy or steal) a helicopter and begin making daily flights to the city to collect knives to sharpen. He figured that he could undercut the prices of the local competition and still make a hefty profit. We didn’t talk about how he would get around in the city. I suppose that he could buy (or inherit or rent or steal) a truck of some sort to hold the trays of cutlery as he went from one posh dining establishment to another. There might be a place to park it near the helipad, although, now that I think of it, parking spaces there went for upwards of $50 per day even in those days.
Bob used our software for quite a while, but then we lost touch. I have seen no evidence that he ever implemented the plan or, for that matter, that he didn’t.
Putt Brown ran his family’s business, Mono Typesetting, in Bloomfield. I think that he may have gotten our name from a mutual friend and client, Ken Owen, whose story is here. We did a time and materials billing system for him that fed rather standard accounting systems.
These were great, but newer ones were better.
Putt and I often ate lunch together. He was a peculiar dining companion in that he saw a menu as not so much a list of food choices as an agglomeration of type fonts. He often lamented about the state of his industry. He said that he was forced to purchase new electronic typesetting equipment every year. As soon as he got a new system it was obsolete.
I don’t think that he realized it yet, but not very long after this conversation everyone would become a typesetter. Every font imaginable became usable by every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a personal computer that cost a tiny fraction of the systems that Putt was burning through. I am pretty sure that Mono was the last standing typesetting company in the Hartford area, but Moore’s Law killed it as well.
This looks like work to me.
At the time I was a fairly serious vegetable gardener in the small patch of courtyard behind our house in Rockville. Putt told me that he was going to try raised beds for his next planting. Raised beds are quite a bit of work, but they allow more heat to reach the roots, which, for some plants, stirs more growth. It seems like the technique would work best for root crops. The other advantage is that you can sit down rather than kneel down when weeding the crops.
I wonder if Putt actually tried it and whether it worked.
In 1988 I was very surprised to see Putt again in a very unusual setting. In fact, I was wearing a disguise. The incident is described here.
This Atari ST sort of looks like a computer
Suzanne Nettleton owned and operated a company in Middletown, CT, called Professional Relief Nursing. The company maintained two lists, nurses looking for work and institutions looking for nurses. PRN then matched them up.
Suzanne had already had two bad experiences with computing systems. Several years earlier she had tried to get someone to develop a system for her on an Atari computer. You could play Pong on it, sure, but I never heard of anyone trying to develop an administrative system on one.
On her second attempt she did a better job of selecting the computer (a Datamaster), but she chose the wrong people to develop the software. It worked OK at first, but at some point they refused to support it any longer. So, Suzanne asked us to take over the maintenance.
We printed out the listings of the programs. They did not meet our standards by a long shot, but they were fairly simple. We insisted on converting the programs to meet our standards. She agreed, and we signed a contract. Over the years we did a fair amount of additional programming to provide a more comprehensive system.
I have two vivid memories of this installation. The first was the drive to the PRN office. I was shocked that there were two stoplights10 in Middletown on Route 9, a six-lane high-speed highway.
The second memorable event occurred when I showed up early one afternoon for an appointment with the guy that Suzanne had hired to operate the Datamaster system. When he saw the McDonald’s bag that I brought with me, he exclaimed, “Oh, you eat styro-food!”
By far the most prestigious name on out A4$1 client list was only three letters long, IBM. A new department devoted to the IBM Business Partner Program resided in the company’s Armonk, NY, complex. We drove there and talked with Dick Patten, the IBMer in charge of the program, about installing a customized system for lead-tracking on a Datamaster. He liked our approach, and we were equally enthusiastic because we had already developed lead-tracking software for our own use. We also had installed it elsewhere a couple of times.
So, we signed a contract. Dick was then shocked to find out that he could not get IBM to deliver him a Datamaster for several months. He was astounded even more when we told him that if he ordered it through TSI, we could deliver a system in two weeks. Our orders went through “the channel”, which, sometimes but not always, had much better delivery times than were available elsewhere.
For a moment Dick actually considered our offer. Instead, he informed his hardware contact at IBM about our offer. He then demanded to know why the business partners had better access to systems than the man IBM had chosen to manage the business partners. Evidently they found one for him.
While we were in Armonk we chatted one day with a female college student who was employed by IBM for the summer. She told us that IBM had a policy of providing summer jobs to offspring of its employees who were at or above a certain level. She qualified because of her father’s rank.
She said that hers was the best job ever. She astounded us when she disclosed her hourly pay rate. $17 sticks in my mind, but that seems excessive. Also, on her first day her supervisor told her to go to the supply closet and take whatever she thought that she might need. No one kept track of anything like that.
When IBM found itself in financial difficulties in the nineties, this young lady’s tale popped into my head.
TSI had two clients in East Greenwich, RI. One of our most important was an advertising agency that is described here. The other was on the other end of the spectrum. Thorpe’s Wine and Spirits, which I think was just called Thorpe’s Liquor Store in those days, was a small adjunct to Thorpe’s Pharmacy. The pharmacy was sold to a major chain (weren’t they all?), but the liquor store still survives.
Not Gil Thorp, Gill Thorpe.
The proprietor, Gill Thorpe, told us that he had a Datamaster that he would like to used for an inventory system for his liquor store. We had quite a bit of experience doing retail inventory by this time, and the liquor operation was much simpler than a chain of jewelry stores. So, we took on the project in spite of the distance. I found the contract for this account in a box that Sue stored in my garage. We only charged them $500!
We evidently did a good job. The operator, Richard Thorpe11 (Gill’s son), called us for support a couple of times, but he never complained about the system, and they never asked for any enhancements.
One of the last Datamaster clients that we worked on, and certainly the site of the last such system that was still in use was the Regal Men’s Store of Manchester, CT. This store also had the distinction of being the only TSI client (other than IBM) that I personally patronized. I did not go there often, but when I needed something, I generally made the drive.
There was not much to the system. My recollection is that they did nothing but accounts payable on their Datamaster. I would have remembered if we had installed an inventory system.
IBM stopped marketing the Datamaster in 1985. We still supported our clients, and more than once we helped them find used parts—usually diskette drives. In the early nineties we were still supporting all the software that we had written for the Datamaster, but we sent a notice to all of these clients that we would NOT address the Y2K issue on these systems, and we would not support them after 1999. By this time IBM had reasonable hardware alternatives for most of them, but none of the A4$1 clients hired us to convert their code.
This tiny ad is the only reference I could find on the Internet.
In 1999, however, the computer operator at Regal’s, Ann Gareau, begged us to make her system work past New Year’s Eve. I told her that they really should get a new computer and that all of our other Datamaster customers had moved on. She told me that management would never approve the purchase of another computer. She was probably right. The company closed its doors in 2000.
I told Ann that the programs would probably still work in 2000, but the aging would look strange. They might occasionally need to fudge the system date to get the program to accept some dates. She seemed satisfied by that.
I have a strong feeling that I left out at least one other A4$1 client.
1. I think that Paul still lives in Berlin, CT, in 2021.
2. The address was 21-C Culbro Drive. The street no longer exists. I don’t know what happened to it.
