Monthly Archives: March 2021

1979-1981: Detroit: The Birth of TSI

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An unimpressive beginning. Continue reading →

In retrospect it seems that it should be rather easy to pin down the date—or at least the year—that our company, TSI Tailored Systems, was founded. The fact is that it was not that big a deal at the time. Sue was already helping to support the software that Gene Brown and Henry Roundfield had installed at their customer’s sites when they proposed that she take on support of the customers as an entity separate from them.

The transition was a simple one. Sue merely had to get a DBA (“doing business as”) from the state of Michigan, which anyone can do. There were no out-of-pocket expenses. Gene and Henry allowed her to use space in theor office in Highland Park. Of course, they were no longer paying her a salary. She needed to make arrangements to get paid by the users of the systems that Gene and Henry had sold. The customers were already paying hardware and software maintenance to IBM or, if the system was new, they soon would be.

One thing that I don’t recall is what was done about phone bills. In those days long-distance calls were expensive, and at least two of the 5110 clients were not local calls. Furthermore, Sue can be gabby on the telephone. I wonder what the arrangements were for those charges.

To tell the truth, I don’t even remember talking with Sue about whether TSI was a good idea. We certainly didn’t draw up a business plan or anything like that. I suspect that she just decided to do it.

The name was definitely Sue’s invention. “Tailored” was the key word. From the very beginning the company’s philosophy was to make the system do exactly what the customer wanted. At first the original code was written by another company (IBM or AIS). After the first few years we wrote and marketed only code that we had written—every single bite of it. The concept of “open source” was not prevalent and definitely not profitable. Even if other developers had offered their code for free, we would not have trusted it. There was a lot of garbage code out there. Some of ours probably was, too, but everyone is used to disposing of their own garbage.

Any resemblance was purely intentional.

And what did the I in TSI stand for? Fifteen years later it stood for incorporated. Now it stood for nothing, but It was blue with stripes just like IBM’s log.

When did the blessed event happen? Well, all of Gene and Henry’s clients had IBM 5110’s. The 5120, which totally replaced the 5110, was announced in February of 19801. So, TSI must have been started before that. I think that Sue probably made the decision in the last quarter of 1979.

Sue’s commute was not too bad. We lived near I-94 and Highland Park was near I-75. She drove through Hamtramck, the other town that is completely surrounded by Detroit.
Sue’s credenza has, like many other large objects in our house, been repurposed as a place to stack miscellaneous junk smaller items.

I definitely know what the company’s first asset was. Sue purchased a used steel credenza and somehow got it to the office in Highland Park and from there to our house on Chelsea.

While she was still working in Highland Park Sue communicated with most or all of Gene and Henry’s customers. She told those who were using the AIS software without a license that they needed to obtain a license. I don’t know if Gene and Henry charged them or not. If so, hey must have been furious. In any case, Sue offered them a way out of a potential mess, and most agreed to the offer.

The next major event for TSI was the sudden appearance in our house in Detroit of a 5120. Somehow Sue’s dad, Art Slanetz, arranged for this. Sue told me that some guy named Smith went in on the original purchase, but he later decided not to use it. I had no role in this deal.

Those guys without ties must be customers. In those days all male IBM employees wore white shirts, ties, and suits.

We must have received one of the very first 5120’s that were installed in Detroit. I remember that we had a very difficult time to get it to work. The customer engineer (IBM-speak for hardware repairman) had spread out computer parts all over the spare bedroom, which was now the TSI office. He was in there talking on the phone with someone from IBM for several hours. It was nearly 5:00 before he got the computer to work.

Sue used the 5120 to make some necessary changes to the customers’ software. She could then send or bring the updated diskettes to the customers. This was not a great system, but it was better than any feasible alternative. I was never involved with this end of the business. I think that I accompanied her once to Brown Insulation, but that was the extent of it. In fact, the only other reasonably local account was Cook Enterprises, which was based in Howell, MI.

At one point we flew to Kansas City so that Sue could meet with the people from AIS. They were very happy that the customers who had been using pirated versions of their software had actually purchased licenses. They provided her with file layouts and other documentation of their accounting software. Of course we also stopped in to see my parents. We only stayed a couple of days.

Computers were not used for word processing in 1980. My first project was to write and test Amanuensis, a program to store and produce my prospectus and the article that I wrote with proper spacing for footnotes. It did not have a spell-checker. In fact, it lacked a lot of things. Nevertheless, it saved me a lot of time. As far as I know it was the only word processing program ever written for the 5120.

As is described here, I also used Amanuensis to produce big documents for the Benoits. We actually sold a copy of this program to Brown Insulation. It was the first sale of a system that contained only code that we had written. I don’t remember what we charged. I don’t even know if they ever used it. They paid the bill and did not complain about it.

Over the summer of 1980 I wrote the software that is described here for our Dungeons and Dragons adventures. I also wrote a program to keep track of the status of warships in the Avalon Hill game called Wooden Ships and Iron Men. The latter program was never actually used. I could never find anyone to play with.

After we moved back to Connecticut we somehow got a chance to develop an inventory system for Diamond Showcase, a jewelry store with a handful of locations in the Hartford area. I think that the home office was in Farmington.

Diamond Showcase has almost been erased from history. I found only this matchbook cover on eBay.

The company already had a 5120. Perhaps they purchased it to use for an accounting application. The proprietor wanted to use the computer as a multi-location inventory and sales analysis system. He hired someone who ran a small software company (I don’t remember his name) to find people who could do the job. The software guy interviewed some workers at DS put together a half-assed set of specifications. Somehow he heard about us. Maybe it was from IBM, but we did not yet have a close relationship with the Hartford branch.

Sue and I met with the lady at DS who was in charge of the project once or twice. We proposed to do the project for $5,000. Evidently no one else was interested, and so we got it. At that point we might have had business cards and stationery. I wrote up a contract based on one that AIS used.

The more that I think about it the more amazing this seems to me. In the next thirty-five years TSI would be involved in many situations in which we tried to convince people that we possessed the skill and the knowledge to provide what they wanted. Sometimes we succeeded and sometimes we didn’t. I can think of no other occasion on which we succeeded with such sparse credentials. We had no references and no training. Sue’s experience was not close to applicable. I had written some cool programs, but I could hardly show them output from my D&D system. In early 1981 we barely even had a business.

Maybe nobody in 1981 had credentials. Software for small businesses barely existed; we were among the pioneers. Perhaps the software guy vouched for us or at least told them that we were the best people available. At any rate, they signed the contract and gave us a deposit. I went to work.

I wrote all the software for Diamond Showcase using principles that I had internalized reading through the listings for the IBM and AIS programs that Sue supported. The key was to use three diskettes (one for programs, one for detail of transactions, and one for all the other tables) and to process transactions in batches. Although I did not know that I was doing so, I normalized3 all the files.

If you had a box of these you could run a small business.

The system actually worked fairly well considering how little experience that I had. The difficult question in supporting any inventory system is “Why does they system say that I have x of them when there are only y in the store?” This was less of an issue with jewelry. Most of the items are unique, and so the quantity on hand is always 1 or 0. The biggest challenge for a retail jewelry system was to make sure that the user does not run out of room on the diskettes. They only held one megabyte of information, a small fraction of what is used to store a single photo on a cellphone. In 2021 storage on hard drives is given in terabytes. A terabyte is a million megabytes!

TSI’s first installation should have been a momentous event, but I have very few vivid memories of it. I remember that on one of my trips to the company’s headquarters the lady with whom I worked asked me a question that I could not readily answer. She said that she liked the computer and she liked the software. She wanted to know what other printers were available for the 5120. I told her that I was sure that IBM must have other printers. I was wrong. I had to call back to tell her that the one she had was the only one available. I was beginning to learn a little about how IBM did business.

As usual, the good guy with the gun was not able to stop the hormonally delusional young man with an inferior gun.

On Monday, March 30, 1981, Sue and I had just driven the Duster into the parking lot of the DS headquarters (not a store) when we heard on the radio that President Reagan had been shot.

Later, of course, John Hinckley Jr’s2 motive for the attempted assassination—to impress Jodie Foster—was disclosed to the public. For a short period it appeared that America might be upset enough about this outrage to try to prevent a similar incident, but we settled for the usual thoughts and prayers.

1. The strengths and limitations of these systems are described here. There was no way to communicate with them from a remote location.

2. Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. In 2016 he was released from a mental hospital to live with his mother. That stipulation was removed in October 2020.

3. A Wikipedia page explains normalizing of databases. You can read it here. The principles apply equally well to relational databases and those using the indexed-sequential access method (ISAM) championed in the eighties by IBM because of better performance.

1978-1980 Detroit: Dungeons and Dragons

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A new obsession. Continue reading →

Throughout my life I had enjoyed playing board games, especially war games made by Avalon Hill. However, it was always hard to find people to play with. I read an article about Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in a magazine in late 1977 or early 1978. The game sounded very intriguing, but the article did not make it very clear exactly what it entailed. There did not appear to be much to it, but apparently in some locations people became very involved in the game.

On August 17, 1948, my thirtieth birthday, a day on which I was already scheduled to have a big party in the evening, I drove to a toy store, located the basic set of Dungeons and Dragons, and bought it. It was not expensive, and the box was not very heavy. When I shook it, something rattled a little.

When I got home I opened it and was a little disappointed. There was no board and no game pieces. The box contained only five dice of different shapes and colors and a forty-eight-page book of instructions. Each die had a unique number of faces: 4, 6, 8, 12, and 20. These were to be used to determine random results for different types of events. Eventually it became pretty clear that the primary purpose of the dice was to provide some substance to the “set”. All that the game really required were the rules, a great deal of imagination, and some way of generating random numbers.

Ah, but the rules. The basic concept of the game was simple. One person served as the referee (called the Dungeon Master or DM). Before the players arrived, the DM needed to spend some time drawing a map on graph paper and creating an outline of the adventure. Many adventures were traditionally underground, but they could just as well be in a castle, a ship, or anywhere else.

I was hoping for weightless +10 mithral armor in XXL.

The various rooms (or caverns or holds or whatever) might be empty, might contain innocuous items, or might contain treasure. Some of the valuables might even be magical (or cursed, for that matter). However, danger lurked everywhere in the form of monsters, evil-doers, and traps. The DM would most likely need to make on-the-spot decisions about unexpected activities from the players, but the more details that were planned in advance the better. It was also a good idea for the DM to have some “random” events ready in case the adventurers dawdled.

To get the adventure going the players need some way of learning about the dungeon. Non-playing characters created by the DM could often fill this role, or it could be arranged that they could find an ancient scroll or something.

Not this kind of elf.

Players had to prepare, too. Each controlled one or two characters. The characters’ abilities (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity) could be generated using six-sided dice. Their endurance, measured in “hit points”, was also determined by rolls of the dice.

Dwarves were short, tough, and cheap. Negotiating a price was called “dwarfing him down”.

Players were allowed to choose the class (fighter, magic-user, cleric, or thief—more came later) and race (human, elf, dwarf, half-elf, half-orc, or halfling) and alignment (lawful or chaotic, good or evil) of their characters. Magic users and clerics could memorize a spell or two. Some races had special abilities or limitations. Every character was born with a little money with which to buy some weapons, armor, and supplies.

Nobody won an adventure, but it was possible to achieve a goal that made some or all of the characters stronger. It was also possible for characters to die.

Spells were definitely useful, but the magic-users’ aversion to armor led to a high mortality rate.

Players were not required to disclose any of their characteristics to the others, but every character had to persuade the others that he/she would be a valuable addition to the party. Recalcitrant characters could and sometimes did say no.

So far, so good. I constructed a little dungeon, and I invited Sue, Vince Follert, and the Benoits to play it. I tried my best to decipher the rules on movement and battles, but it just seemed like the monsters—even the ones that were just powerful humans—moved in slow motion while the party members dashed around and slaughtered them. After a few adventures the players were so powerful and rich that they could take on almost anything,

After the first few games, I knew that something was wrong. The players enjoyed the games, but the battles were not close to realistic. Outcomes were never in much doubt. I read and reread the rules. You can read them yourself here. Take a look. The rules for time and movement are on p. 9. Can you figure them out?

These were helpful.

I started to frequent a hobby store on Gratiot Avenue. It sold inch-high lead figurines as well as issues of Dragon magazine and some pamphlets containing details of dungeons or whole campaigns that experienced players had designed. I invested in all of these. The purchases of the magazines and pamphlets were a good idea, but the figurines were a mistake. Anyone who spent a lot of time painting figurines wass going to be very upset if the character died, and a crucial element of the game is the belief of the players in the mortality of the characters. It is what gives the edge to the game.

The first edition of the Player’s Handbook was published in June of 1978. I was not able to lay my hands on one until several months after that. The confusion about movement and how battles (called “melee” in D&D) should be refereed was cleared up by this work. I read it from cover to cover many times, and I had at least a dozen pages tabbed for quick reference.

The quality of the writing in this book was much better than the rules for the basic set. The illustrations were also marvelous.

The Dungeon Master’s Guide was published in 1979. I preordered a copy and picked it up the day that it arrived at Comic Kingdom. The clerk told me that all of their copies were sold the first day. I don’t remember what the book cost, but it was definitely worth it. Everything about the game now made sense. The quality of the adventures that I designed improved enormously.

The Dungeon Masters Guide was also great fun to read. At least twenty pages of mine were tabbed for easy reference.

There was still one problem. The original characters that played in our early adventures were were much too powerful. Their participation in those “Monte Haul” games had left them so rich and powerful that they could no longer sensibly play with inexperienced characters. Superman never took Jimmy Olsen on adventures.

The Monster Manual was useful mostly for generating ideas. A DM who used one could show the illustration instead of trying to describe it.

I did not set out to solve this problem, but … In one of the games in late 1978 or 1979 I designed a White Dragon named Frix. For some time I spread fables and stories about his enviable treasures and his awesome super-cold breath. One day a group of the rich and powerful characters assembled a small party and decided to go after Frix.

The adventure started in the usual way. Once in the cave complex, the party ran into a few squads of orcs and the like. They quickly disposed of them and made their way down to the fourth level, which their informant had told them was the abode of the great white dragon. The party found the lair and then burst in without taking any precautions.

I rolled a die to see whether they had surprised Frix. It wasn’t likely. At least one of them was clanging around in plate mail a hundred feet beneath the ground and they talked to one another constantly. So, Frix struck first with his frigid breath. They rolled saving throws, but, alas, they all were frozen to death.

The maps of the city and its environs were about thirty inches on a side.

None of them took this well, but a couple of weeks later Vince, one of the participants, asked me if they could have avoided the peril if they just had asked their cleric to memorize the Resist Cold spell instead of the Cure Light Wounds spell that clerics always used. When I admitted as much, he conceded that they were all idiots and deserved to die.

In a way they became legendary, not for their accomplishments in previous dungeons but for their arrogance and lackadaisical preparation in the last one.

Every building was numbered on the detailed map of the city

I came across The City State of the Invincible Overlord, a publication of the Judges Guild, at Comic Kingdom, and I bought it. It had detailed maps and descriptions of the contents of nearly every business in the city. I bought a lot of 5″x8″ index cards and a box to hold them. I made one card for each business so that I could rapidly find them. From that point on, I started every adventure that I created with the characters at an inn in the city. After the original encounter with the proprietor, another customer, or an employee they could walk to other buildings to purchase gear or ask for information. Setting all this up took a lot of time, but it worked well.

My file had a card for every building in the city.

The next major step was a gigantic one. At some point in late early 1979 Sue obtained an IBM 5120 computer for her business, TSI Tailored Systems. How she managed this is explained here. I took advantage of this to write a few BASIC programs that really enhanced the experience of D&D get-togethers both for the players and for the DM.

The fist program automated the process of generating a new character. The player entered a number. The program used the number as the seed for the built-in random number generator and produced a list of the character’s ability scores. The player could save or reject them. If the scores were accepted, a permanent record was made. This program greatly accelerated the process of getting a new player ready for the first adventure.

The next step was to allow the editing of the player record to reflect advancement to higher levels and other important changes. A sheet of green-bar paper that contained almost all of the personal information needed for an adventure could then be printed out for each player.

The final step was the program to assemble a party. When all of the characters had been entered, a printout was created that had information that the DM needed for each player in an easy-to-read format. This dramatically reduced the time spent paging through the handbooks looking for tables.

The last program was the simplest. It just provided a way of printing up a set of rumors to distribute randomly to the characters.

D&D was a lot more fun with these programs. They cut down on the drudgery and left more time for the adventures. No one ever complained about them.

Our basement was an ideal location for an adventure. The DM sat on a stool behind the bar. Their were couches (well, actually one was the back seat of an old Mercedes) and chairs aplenty for the players. People brought their own drinks and snacks.

Sue sometimes played. Her principal character was a cleric named Sr. Mary Chicos, named after a former nun who worked at Brothers Specifications. She also did some work on an adventure featuring Massai warriors, but I don’t think that we ever played it.

A lot of students from Wayne State’s Forensics Union played. In addition to the people mentioned above, the group included Mike Craig and a friend of his who ate an enormous amount of snacks. In other circles the players “crawled” dungeons, but Mike introduced the phrase, “Let’s dunge” to our group. Jo Anne might have come once or twice. Nancy Legge, Gerry Cox, and Mark Buczko were definitely regulars. Kim Garvin came once. I think that Scott Harris also played at least once.

I am sure that there were other participants. A professor in the speech department attended one adventure, and he brought his son. They chose not to play, but they observed for hours.

I don’t remember too many details of the dungeons that I created. I remember one in which the players discovered a space ship. It was not much fun.

I spent a lot of time on the one that the speech prof attended. The characters needed to arrange passage on a ship to get to an island owned by a witch. Fortunately they did not select the boat with the lowest charge. They might have spent the rest of the time looking for Davey Jones’ locker.

When the party arrived at the island, the witch gave them a quest and promised to reward them handsomely if they succeeded in killing her rival, a frost giant. There were two possible approaches to the cave in which her enemy lived; The Path of the Forlorn was full of traps, and the Path of the Misbegotten was subject to attacks from monstrous creatures. The party chose the monster route. The witch, however, insisted that the group’s most fit participant (as measured in hit points) stay behind with her to keep her company. She was SO lonely. So, the party’s best fighter missed the most importantUr part of the adventure.

My favorite part of the dungeon was the entrance to the giant’s lair. It was a sheet of ice thirty feet long at a forty-five degree angle. It was not easy to escape from this place in a hurry. The group did a good job of dealing with the obstacles, and they won the prize. The poor guy who was left with the witch had to be carried to the awaiting ship by the exhausted adventurers.

I liked to play in the adventurer’s groups occasionally. I had six characters that I remember. My original character was Prufrock the cleric. I think that he had a magic hammer. I had two female characters. Kithra was obviously based on Wonder Woman. Her first purchase was high hard boots. Tontonia was a half-elf with a much less dynamic personality. Urgma was very stupid but a strong fighter who was comfortable taking orders. Pslick was a magic user who also had some “psionic” powers. He was also a wise guy. Gubendorf was a thief. He was so obnoxious that he was killed by his own party at the end of his first adventure.

A teenager named James Dallas Egbert III was in the news in 1979-80. He was described as a “genius” or “child prodigy” who was majoring in Computer Science. For some reason he was living in his dorm room at Michigan State in the middle of August in 1979. Then he “disappeared”.

His parents back in Dayton, OH, somehow heard about D&D and the steam tunnels. They thought that he might have been killed by a D&D cult acting out fantasies in the tunnels. They told their theory to the newspapers and hired a private detective.The news reports emphasized two things. 1) JDE3 played D&D; 2) He and some friends explored the steam tunnels in East Lansing. They speculated that he and his friends were acting out an adventure, and he was killed either accidentally or as a sacrifice to Asmodeus (do NOT say the name out loud or you will immediately summon him, and he is NEVER in a good mood).

Suedomsa backwards.

The detective never found him (but he did find a book deal). JDE3 eventually called the detective and told him that he had taken a bus to New Orleans, where he was NOT developing a D&D campaign based on voodoo or Mardi Gras. The detective tried to talk JDE3 into returning home to Dayton, but that was never going to happen. Instead JDE3 tried unsuccessfully to kill himself twice. He succeeded the third time when he used a gun.

I smelled a rat in this story from day 1. First of all, if he was a computer genius, why was he going to a state-run ag school? What was wrong with MIT or Cal Tech?

Second, why did he not go home for the summer after his freshman year? Most students are eager to compare experiences with their old high school buddies.

A great place to stage an adventure.

Third, I knew a group of guys who messed around in the steam tunnels in Ann Arbor. If I had been running a D&D campaign in those years, a few might have played in it. However, we would never have played in the tunnels. The reason is simple. There is no light. D&D requires lots of reading and mapping. The two activities are totally incompatible. I have never been in the steam tunnels of East Lansing, but I doubt that they are large enough for bugbears, much less giants, djinn, or dragons. Students might have discussed what an adventure in a tunnel would be like, but they would never act it out in such an unwieldy environment. A hero needs room to swing that two-handed sword and enough light to identify his foe.

Finally, it just seemed obvious to me that he had run away. Something must have been going on at home. It turns out that he was gay. When I was a freshman at U-M, my parents suspected me of being gay or on drugs or something because of the way that a friend (without my permission) answered my phone in the dorm. My mom and dad flew up to Ann Arbor to check out the situation. I would bet anything that JDE2 made some kind of threat that caused JDE3 to think that East Lansing would no longer be far enough away from his parents.

A similar take on this sordid tale can be read here.

After we left Detroit I played D&D a few times. When it appeared unlikely that I would have any further use of my materials, I gave them to Sue’s nephew, Travis LaPlante.

1979-1981 IBM 5110-5120

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TSI’s first computer. Continue reading →

IBM 5110.

The 5110 and 5120 were essentially the same computer. The 5120, which was introduced in 1980, provided a larger display area. It also eliminated the quarter-inch tape device and added a second 8″ diskette drive. Both of these changes were important. The 5110’s display was so small that some people could not use it. Designing a system that could work with only one diskette drive was extremely difficult. If the software required more than one drive, the 5110 customer needed to purchase a stand-alone unit that could house two diskette drives. It was the size of a two-drawer file cabinet.

The 5120 and the printer that both systems used.

Both systems came with random-access memory (RAM) ranging from 16K to 48K. It had two different operating systems. One used APL and one used BASIC. A switch on the front of the console controlled which one was active. Practically all of the customers used BASIC.

IBM marketed at least one application for the system, a construction payroll system. Most of TSI’s customers had licensed that system.

Strengths: The hardware was reliable and durable. IBM supported the hardware with a maintenance agreement. If the software was licensed from IBM, telephone support was also available. In that era this was an enormous advantage. IBM’s systems engineer (hardware support guy) once spent an entire day working on TSI’s 5120 He finally got it to function correctly. If he had not been able to get it to work right, we would have expected a new unit the next day. Systems from other vendors did not offer anything comparable. 5110/5120 customers expected the system to work every day.

Data files were stored in EBCDIC format and were read by programs using IBM’s Indexed Sequential Access Method (ISAM). If the keys to the files were sorted, access to the individual records was relatively fast. Of course, it was important to keep the keys sorted. The standard practice was to sort the keys at the end of any program that added new records. The operators knew to do something else during this process until the beep sounded that meant if was finished (or something had gone wrong).

BASIC was easy to learn, and everything was well documented.

Limitations: Although the system had a fairly fast 16-bit PALM processor, the paucity of the memory made the applications excruciatingly slow.

Only one model of dot matrix printer was available. Its interface was, like all IBM interfaces of this period, not standard. So, it was difficult and expensive for third-party manufacturers to provide an alternative.

There was no hard drive available except the one offered by a third-party vendor named CORE. By the time that this product was released, the 5110/5120 was nearing obsolescence.

It was possible to connect two computers to the external floppy disk unit, but it was difficult to write software that would overcome the inherent disadvantages of two users fighting for the same diskette drives.

The 5120 console weighed ninety-nine pounds!

Yes, we had push-button phones. We were not savages.

The only interfaces were for the printer and the external diskette unit. It was not possible to connect it to phone lines or anything else to the system. If a bug was found in a program at a remote location, the developers had to talk the users through the process of changing the code. This was, of course, both dangerous and frustrating.

If more than a few lines of code was added or changed, someone often needed to visit the customer to install the changes. The alternative was to use an overnight delivery service to send a new diskette.

The BASIC interpreter used line numbers, not statement labels. The highest line number available was 9999. TSI circumvented the lack of statement labels by always using the same sets of line numbers for standard routines. The end of program routine always started at line 6000. The page heading subroutine always started at 9000. Individual lines on reports always started at at 9200. Date functions always used the same numbers.

Born free; everywhere in chains.

BASIC had some limitations. One program could “chain” another, but it was not possible to have two programs in the RAM at the same time.

It was easy to write a BASIC program with an infinite loop. Here is one:
10 GOTO 20
20 GOTO 10

Discipline was therefore required. Some programmers avoided the GOTO statement altogether, but we found it useful in specific instances.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but an R4 could be a rose variety or a rhododendron or a row number or …

The most annoying problem with BASIC was that the variable names were restricted to one letter followed by nothing or a single digit. Thus, the employee number field could be called E in a program or E4, but it could not be called EENUM. This restriction made it absolutely necessary to maintain a list—either in comments in the program or on a separate sheet of paper—as to what every variable stood for in every program. It was also difficult, if not impossible, to keep the variable names consistent among all programs.

I just assumed that the absurdly short variable names were an inherent limitation of the BASIC language, and so I learned to live with it. Fortunately, I only developed one fairly elaborate system on the 5120, and so this did not cause any great problems for me. Sue maintained the systems that were written by IBM or AIS. I don’t know how much it bothered her.

This problem was corrected in subsequent hardware systems, and I had almost forgotten about it when I wrote this.

The 5110/5120 was designed for accounting and other administrative applications. It had absolutely no capacity for graphics. Furthermore, spreadsheets had not yet been invented. What do you want for $18,000?

I seem to recall that a utilities diskette included a game that involved shooting down enemy spacecraft. There definitely was a pseudo-random number generator. There was also a program for printing biorhythm charts.

Unique feature: When a BASIC program was running, the line number that was being executed was displayed in the lower right corner of the display. This provided a little entertainment for the operator when a lengthy process (such as updating a large batch of transactions) was being performed.

1979-1980: Wayne State Debate Tournaments, etc.

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Debate at Wayne. Continue reading →

The resolution for 1979-1980 was: “Resolved: That the federal government should significantly strengthen the regulation of mass media communication in the United States.” Once again the resolution was much more limiting than the ones of the middle 1970’s. In the fifteen elimination rounds at the NDT the affirmative teams won eight debates, and the negatives won seven.

The coaching staff was quite different. Vince Follert left for Western Illinois. The Benoits also moved on. Jack Kay earned his PhD and accepted a job at the University of Nebraska. I don’t remember if Sheri Brimm was still around. Tuna Snider, Ron Lee, and Gerry Cox joined the staff.

As in the other years, it was all hands on deck for the first couple of months. We spent a great deal of time working with the inexperienced novices in order to find compatible partners and to get them reasonably well prepared for the novice tournament sponsored by the Michigan Intercollegiate Speech League.

I think that Gerry Cox mostly worked with the novices. The only one with significant high school experience was Dennis Corder.

We also reprised the trip to Ann Arbor to research in U-M’s libraries. I don’t remember who came, but the productivity matched the standard set in the previous year.

Varsity: Kent Martini and Chris Varjabedian graduated. Kevin Buchanan returned to the team, and George paired him with Scott Harris. I don’t know why George skipped over Mike Craig, who had had an excellent year in 1978-79 and had also displayed a great attitude. Maybe it was because neither he nor Scott had been a second negative at Wayne State. At any rate, Mike debated with Dave Debold all year.

Someone entered the ZSR library to study and left with a new (to him) cowboy hat.

I do not remember many specifics from this year. I remember only one tournament that I definitely attended, Wake Forest. I do not remember how we did. What I do remember is that I left my cowboy hat in the Z. Smith Reynolds library there.

I don’t remember what specific cases the Wayne State debaters defended during the year. I do, however, remember the one run by the Sutherland twins who debated for Louisville. Their case was about free speech and the cable television industry that was still in its infancy. I judged them on their affirmative several times. and I always voted for them. So did a lot of other judges; no one was surprised that they received a first round bid to the NDT.

I noticed that the second affirmative for Louisville always gave heavy emphasis in the 2AC to a piece of evidence that had seemed innocuous when it was read in the opening speech. Someone on the Wayne State team found the original source for this quote, and I worked with them to develop a sophisticated block of arguments about it. This foiled their strategy. We never lost to Louisville again.

The other popular case that I remember was one that banned billboards. They supposedly caused “blight” and traffic accidents. I thought back on how much I loved Burma Shave billboards and the countless roadside signs for Wall Drug. Also, we would never have made that pleasurable stop at Reptile Land in the previous year if those ads were banned.

These advantages certainly seemed as real to me as the alleged problems, but I could think of no persuasive way to turn them into debate arguments.

Scott and Kevin had a great year, from start to finish. They earned the distinction of being the first Wayne State team to receive a first round bid1 to the National Debate Tournament, which was held at the University of Arizona. Going into the tournament they were the ninth-ranked team in the country.

Mike and Dave also had a good year. They became the fourth consecutive team from Wayne State to qualify for the NDT at the District 5 tournament. So, in my six years of coaching at U-M and Wayne State, seven of my teams qualified for the NDT, and five teams made it through districts. The one team that did not qualify barely missed after going 0-8 the year before. I was definitely a better coach than I was a debater.

I got to attend the tournament, too. I had seniority, but I had been in the doghouse academically for several months. I knew that George would go, but if he brought anyone else, I thought that it would be Tuna or Ron. At this nationals I spent a lot of time judging.

The adventure of flying to Tucson is described here.

This photo is from 1970 at UA.

We had a great time in Tucson. The weather was fantastic, and the atmosphere at the university was invigorating after nine months in the cold in Detroit. Young men and women were playing Frisbee in shorts and tee shirts on the lawn of one of the buildings. One morning I went on a jog with Scott and Dave. We even persuaded George to take us to an authentic Mexican restaurant for supper one evening.

Scott and Kevin qualified for the elimination rounds with a 6-2 record. Scott was the #8 speaker in the tournament. Unfortunately, the guys were upset in a 3-2 decision by two ladies from Southern Cal even though Wayne State was on the affirmative. I don’t remember Mike and Dave’s record, but I think that they finished near the middle of the field.

I don’t know how George finagled it, but Scott (partnering with Dave Debold) also won a first-round bid to the 1981 tournament. He and Dave were again 6-2, and Scott was the #2 speaker. Wayne State won its octafinal round, but fell to Pittsburgh, the eventual champions, in the quarterfinals.

I was very happy to read in the NDT book for 1981 that Kim Garvin and Nancy Legge also debated at the NDT that year. I wonder what happened to Mike and Kevin. Kim and Nancy also attended the 1982 edition of the tournament.

1. In two consecutive years, 1967 and 1968, Wayne State was exempted from qualifying for the NDT because its team had debated in the final round of the previous year’s tournament. First round bids were first implemented in 1973.

1978-1979: Wayne State Debate Tournaments, etc.

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The debate topic for 1978-1979 was: “Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program which guarantees employment opportunities for all United States citizens in the labor force.”

My recollection of this entire year is spotty. I don’t even remember any specific cases that debaters were running. That word “guarantee” was pretty constraining. Anyone who did not like economics was in for a long year. The national unemployment rate at the time was about 6 percent, but it was slowly decreasing.

As in the previous year all of the coaching staff (except George) spent the first few months working with the novices. I don’t remember any details at all.

The varsity team largely remained the same. Debbie McCully did not exactly graduate (as explained here), but she was no longer associated with the team. Kevin Buchanan was still in school, but he decided not to participate in debate. Chris Varjabedian rejoined the team. George paired him with Scott Harris, and they were clearly the top team all year long. However, Mike Craig and Kent Martini also had a very good year.

All of the debate coaches returned from 1977-1978. Sheri Brimm was added.

The top novice team was Dave Debold and Kim Garvin. They were also quite an “item” for most of the year.

The team did not go to Camp Tamarack in 1978. I am not sure why not. I don’t remember anyone discussing it. I offered to organize a research trip to U-M for the varsity debaters. George deemed it a great idea. I drove a group of the debaters to Ann Arbor. It was probably on a Sunday; Saturday in the fall is devoted to football at U-M. I showed everyone where the libraries were. We then split up, researched for a few hours, and then gathered for lunch. Afterwards, people changed locations and continued researching. Everyone had a pretty good time, and a lot was accomplished. The debaters were a little overwhelmed by the amount and quality of materials available at U-M. I knew very well that there was a lot more within a mile or two, but I did not rub it in.

The social side of Tamarack was replaced by a Halloween party. It is described here.

Varsity: I must have gone to other tournaments during the course of the year, but the only one that I specifically remember is when I accompanied the two top teams on the “Florida Swing”. Scott, Chris, Mike, Kent, and I piled in a van supplied by the university’s motor pool and set off on I-75 for Tallahassee, the home of Florida State University. My recollection is that George made arrangements for us to stay overnight in his favorite “ma and pa” motel in Tennessee.

Everybody on the trip was quite serious about the upcoming debates. Quite a bit of productive work got done. Even so, it was an awfully long time to sit in the car.

Despite the backbreaking drive the debaters did well at FSU. I think that Scott and Chris made it to the final round. Mike and Kent also qualified for the elimination rounds. I have a vague recollection that they may have even been scheduled to face each other in an elimination round, and I had to decide who should advance.

The second tournament was at Central Florida University in Orlando. We had a free day in between tournaments. Unfortunately, there was not nearly enough time available to stand in line at Disney World or any of the other major tourist attractions in the Orlando area.

Fortune shone on us when we were just about halfway to our destination. I spotted a billboard for an interesting place called Reptile Land on state highway 301 near the town of Lawtey, FL, southeast of Jacksonville. We decided to give it a try.

By the time of our visit it was a little bigger than it appears in the photo. It also actually had more than just snakes and alligators. As I recall, their was at least one chimpanzee and diverse other birds and mammals. And there were no lines!

Reptile Land was obviously a tourist trap, but we all had a good time thee. I regret to tell readers that readers that Reptile Land closed forever not long after our visit.

UCF was not yet known for football, but it had a very good debate team in 1978-1979.

After that nice little break we were all business for the rest of our time in the Sunshine State. In the Central Florida tournament both teams again qualified for the elimination rounds. This time they landed on different sides of the bracket. Both teams won their octafinal rounds. Both teams won their quarterfinal rounds. Both teams also won in the semis.

So, for the first time in the long history of the Wayne State program, two of its teams closed out the finals of a varsity tournament. We brought home both the first and second place trophies. It was quite an accomplishment, and we were all super-pumped. We could not wait to call George and tell him the news. The trip back to Detroit was much longer than the drive down to Florida in terms of miles, but the time flew by.

It seems strange to report that that jubilant return trip is my last clear memory of the 1978-1979 debate season. I remember that Scott and Chris cruised through districts, but I don’t even recall whether I attended with them. Kent and Mike were awarded a second-round bid. So, for the first time ever Wayne State had two teams at the 1979 NDT at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. George did not bring a second coach, even though the team drove. I don’t remember why not.

At the NDT Scott and Chris qualified with a 6-2 record. This was the first time that Wayne State had qualified for the elimination rounds at NDT since 1967. Kent and Mike won five and lost three. They were the only 5-3 team that missed the elimination rounds. They persevered through a very tough schedule; and when their fate was announced, the crowd applauded their performance. I am sure, however, that it was a tough moment, especially for Kent, who was a senior.

Scott and Chris lost in the octafinals to Harvard on a 3-2 decision. Thus ended one of the greatest varsity debate seasons in Wayne State’s history. Wayne’s teams reached the quarterfinals of various tournaments twenty-seven times, the same number as in the previous year, but the close-out and the NDT performance made this year even better.

Televised Debates. For a few months Wayne State participated in a weekly television program on Channel 20 called City Update. It might have been the lowest-rated program on Detroit’s lowest-rated station. I was already quite familiar with the program because the main presenter was a very good-looking young lady whose name I don’t remember. They gave the team a fifteen-minute segment to present a one-on-one debate on a topic of our choosing. Many debaters and some of the IE performers got to appear before the camera.

Fire did not kill Garth Gimble. He was impaled on a Christmas tree.

The best debate was the one in December in which the topic was something like “Is there a Santa Claus?” Mike Craig stole the show as the negative. One of his arguments was entitled “Christmas tree deaths”. He based it on a segment of the Fernwood 2Night show. However, Mike lost; Jack Kay showed up in a Santa suit to deliver the verdict.

I moderated several of these debates. All that I did was to introduce the debaters and the topic. I was surprised that the whole operation was not more professional. The set consisted of a rostrum in an empty room. Only four of us were present—the two debaters, the moderator, and the camera person. On most occasions the camera person was the attractive lady who also hosted the show. Our segment of the show was taped, but we only got one attempt. If someone flubbed something, it was aired anyway.

On one occasion, however, the rules were slightly changed. Three of us that day taped a promo for City Update—the lovely hostess, a debater (I don’t remember which one; it might have been Ruth Kay), and me standing beside one another behind the rostrum. Someone else might have operated the camera, but I think that the presenter set the focus and then just let it run.

We did six takes. I said my lines correctly the first five times, but either the hostess or the debater was not happy with it. On the sixth attempt they both were fine, but I hesitated a little at one point That was the one we used because I said that I didn’t care.

High School Tournament: Every year that I coached at Wayne State the FU hosted a tournament for high school debaters. We all pitched in. In 1979 I was in charge of the tabulation room. Kent Martini and one or two other people helped out. Kent was done with his portion of the final results before the others had finished theirs. When he announced this fact, I told him to check everything again.

Well, he didn’t do it, and George ended up announcing incorrect results. When the mistake was realized, Kent went to George and apologized. He even told George that I had told him to check everything again.

Kent felt terrible, and, as I described here, I knew exactly how he felt. At least he admitted his mistake.

High School Institute. In each summer Wayne State hosted a week-long institute for high school debaters. U-M also hosted an institute, but theirs was more of a camp. Students stayed in the dorms, and it was famous throughout the state. The U-M institute was run by a Wayne State alumna, Jayne Greco1, who was also the debate coach at Kimball High School in Royal Oak, the institution that Kent Martini, Mike Craig, and Dave Debold attended.

In the 1979 edition of Wayne State’s institute I gave a lecture on topicality arguments. I insisted that they were an important part of argumentation in competitive debates. At some point I inserted the phrase “despite what Mrs. Greco might say at the U. of M. Institute”. This got back to her, and she complained to George.

George told me that I should call her and apologize to her. My sweaty hands nearly dialed her number several times, but I never did. I did not know what to say to her. I wasn’t sorry. I chose my words carefully, and I did not say anything untrue or insulting. She was notorious for thinking that only a few cases should be allowed so that no negative team would need to argue about topicality. I strongly disagreed.

Besides, I really did not care what she thought of me.

1. Jayne Greco died in 2000. Her rather sparse obituary can be found here.