Tag Archives: AdWeek

1985-1988 TSI: Adventures in Marketing

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Building a better mousetrap was not enough. Continue reading →

When we moved from Michigan to Rockville, Sue and I knew almost nothing about marketing. When the business was closed over three decades later, we knew a lot more. Unfortunately, at least half of what we had learned was probably wrong.

In Detroit Sue had depended on IBM for referrals. When we moved we learned that the branch offices had no specific policy on this. Each salesperson knew a few of the independent software companies. Since no one in the Hartford office knew us, it was folly to depend on IBM in Connecticut.

The first year or so was the only time in the first three decades of the company’s existence that I had time on my hands. I wrote a little system on the 5120 to keep track of leads. I got most of my information from the Yellow Pages in the reference room of the Hartford Public Library.

I definitely remember sending a letter to the area’s jewelry stores. I think that we also sent one to construction companies. I do not remember how we did these exactly. Perhaps I just wrote a program on the 5120 to print letters with data from the lead tracking system. It seems unlikely that we had letterhead and company envelopes with our Rockville address yet.

I think that we got the lead for the Harstans account from the jewelry store mailing. I don’t remember any responses from anything in the construction industry. If we received any inquiries, Sue would have dealt with them.

I found a business card from the Detroit days in our basement.

After we had purchased a Datamaster with a letter-quality printer, we converted the lead tracking system to run on the new machine. We also invested in company letterhead and web-mounted company invoices. Both were Nantucket grey with light blue lettering. The TSI was striped in imitation of IBM’s logo, but we used a sans serif font.

We definitely did several mailings to ad agencies. Potter Hazlehurst responded to the first mailing. Other mailings may have at least produced a few lukewarm leads.

We received two free pieces of publicity. The GrandAd installation at Harland-Tine was featured in Basic Society News. This was described here. The other article, an interview with Dick Keiler, was published a few years later in AdWeek New England. It is described here.

We also bought our only ad ever in the same issue of that magazine. It was a waste of money.

By 1983 we began to get quite a few leads from IBM. We closed many of these deals, but most required significant custom programming and offered virtually no opportunity for additional business. What we wanted to sell were ad agency systems that took advantage of work that we had already done.

We participated in a campaign organized by a marketing manager at IBM to allow its salesmen to promote “IBM Advertising Agency Solutions.” He asked the third-party developers of ad agency software to provide a list of how their software could benefit ad agencies. Someone then took all of these items, assembled and sorted them all into one huge list, and put them into an attractive fold-out piece in which each of these advantages was claimed for “IBM solutions.”

Of course, no system marketed by anyone actually did all of those things, and some of the advantages were incompatible with others. Furthermore, none of the names of the companies that marketed and supported the software were included. The pamphlet only mentioned “IBM solutions” until the very last paragraph, which stated, “When you combine the specialized capabilities of IBM Business Partner applications for advertising with the quality control, product support and service that accompanies IBM systems, you have a comprehensive and powerful solution. One that can meet the needs of your agency today—and continue to serve you and your clients tomorrow.”

I was very upset when they sent the finished product. Set aside the atrocious grammar of the last sentence fragment. Who will possibly use this piece? IBM reps could not (or at least should not) use it because it doesn’t indicate which business partner could address which problem. No ethical business partner could hand it out because the prospect might think that the software company was claiming all of these advantages for its own product. I suppose that if we were allowed to white-out the parts that did not apply to our systems, we might be able to use it, but it would not look too professional.

When I explained that this was false advertising because the “IBM solution” described within did not exist, he was taken aback. He honestly thought that we would all be happy just to be associated with IBM. I admitted that we were. However we were ALWAYS in competitive situations. We could not afford to be associated with erroneous claims like “IBM creative applications help your writers and artists work more efficiently.” Our software did not improve the efficiency of the creative staff one iota, and if we tried to get the writers and artists to trade in their Macs for IBM iron, we would be run out of the office on a rail.

In addition, there were a couple of advantages that were unique to our approach. Of course, I had listed them, and they appeared in the pamphlet. I resented that every other Business Partner was authorized to claim these advantages, if only implicitly, for its own software.

With the help of Ken Owen of the Edward Owen Company we developed some leave-behinds that were at least a little professional looking and much less likely to get us sued. We put the write-ups of various aspects of the system in notebooks that had the company’s name and logo on it. The first batch were blue with white lettering. Subsequently we reversed the color scheme.

When we gave presentations. we put all of the handouts in folder like the one shown at left. The cover was generic enough that we could use it for any of our software products.

Our mailings for the ad agency system included self-addressed prepaid bounce-back cards on which the recipient could indicate the agency’s interest in our product. This certainly increased the quantity of positive responses that we got, but it also meant that we needed to spend more time qualifying the leads.

By 1986 Sue and I were frustrated with our sales efforts. We had been in business for more than five years. We had amassed a reliable set of reference accounts, but we were still struggling just to meet our payroll.

Sue set up some kind of business relationship with a guy named Joe Danko. I think that he was a consultant who had somehow come across our GrandAd product. He wanted to be our representative in southeast New England. Since the proposed arrangement involved no investment on our part, we agreed to it.

Sue corresponded with a former IBM VAR (as we were) named Jim Holland, who had started a business in Colorado helping others selling “turnkey systems”. Sue liked his approach, but he sold his business to a company in Paramus, NJ, called Motivational Marketing1. He convinced us to drive there for a “Motivational Marketing Working Session” in January of 1987.

We drove to the company’s offices and met with, I think, one of the founders of the company, Gary Farber2. We told him that we were having trouble closing deals for our software system for advertising agencies. We thought that we needed to hire a salesman, but we were not sure how to do it. He outlined a plan for us. It seemed pretty costly and did not directly address the need for a salesman, but if we scored even one or two deals, it would be worth it.

Two guys from the marketing company came to our office in Rockville. The older guy was named Irving; the younger one was Nick Pitasi. They told us that the first step in their plan was to contact our clients to get a more objective view of TSI’s strengths and weaknesses. Nick called everyone on our list of clients. He reported back to us that our clients loved us, and they particularly liked the fact that we educated them. This was rather nice to hear, but we already knew that we had very good reference accounts. We had thought that we were not doing a good job of using this information to our advantage.

Since we had said that we needed a “closer”, and since we already had a relationship with Joe Danko, Irving invited him to our office to interview for the job of salesman. Irving conducted the interview in Sue’s office upstairs in Rockville. I sat in. Sue might have attended as well, but she doesn’t remember it.

I was astounded at how awful Joe’s performance was. Without being asked about it, he went on and on about his involvement in lawsuits over his divorce. I would never have considered hiring him to take out the trash.

After the interview Irving told us that he thought that Joe would be OK as our salesman. Perhaps we should have cut our losses at this point. Irving and Nick might be able to help us in some way, but they certainly seemed unwilling or unable to address what we considered our most critical problem.

Their next step was to hire someone to call the presidents of ad agencies. We had a pretty good list in our lead tracking system. By this time Nick was handling our account by himself. He engaged a guy named Paul Schrenker for this purpose. Nick wrote a script for him. I could not believe how many presidents talked with him when he asked for them by name. I would have bet that he would not reach any of them.

The only person who accepted Paul’s call and expressed any interest was Bill Ervin at O’Neal and Prelle in Hartford. I visited them a couple of times, and they eventually agreed to a contract. The story of that installation is here.

One day I observed Nick while he was calling one of the presidents. It was impressive. A secretary answered the phone. Nick said, “Put Bill on, please.” When the secretary asked who was calling, he just said with supreme confidence, “It’s Nick from TSI.” The president picked up the phone, and Nick talked with him. I certainly couldn’t have done this.

Nick dropped by the office a couple of times after that. He had been in the office enough to see how things were run. By then he was familiar with how Sue would miss appointments and how disorganized she was. On one occasion I asked him whether he thought that we could make a go of it. He said that he did not see how. What a depressing moment that was.

Maybe I should have given up at that point, but I had no plan B. I was almost forty years old. I had burned through several occupations already. I did not want to start over.

When I first started to work with Sue I figured that I would do most of the programming, and she would do the rest of the work. After all, she had much more experience in business than I did, and she loved to talk on the telephone. She was certainly much more of a “people person” and less of a tireless coder She could figure out how programs worked and fix them, but I had never seen her write so much as a single program.

That was not the way that things worked out. As the years went by I took on more and more of the responsibilities. By the late eighties she was doing the accounting and the payroll, and that was about all. Even so, she could not keep up with it. The answer was not increased staff. We went through as many administrative employees as Murphy Brown.

We needed help with sales. The marketing consultants were nearly as worthless as all the other consultants that we had dealt with. We needed to hire a salesman. We terminated our agreement with Motivational Marketing in February 1988.

On March 2, 1987 (Sue’s thirty-sixth birthday), we sent out out a newsletter to all of our clients. It was three pages of 10-pitch single-spaced type on 8½x11″ paper. Mostly it dealt with hardware, but there was also half a page of information about changes that we were making to the S/36 version of the GrandAd system.

I located copies of issues numbered 1 through 6. The fifth issue, dated March 29, 1988, reflects the influence of Michael Symolon, our first marketing director. The first page of this issue announces three new ad agency clients. In addition, the first page is printed on GrandAd stationery that Michael ordered rather than on TSI letterhead. A post-it note attached to the copy that I found indicated that I was slightly annoyed that the subsequent pages did not match the cover page in either color or weight.

This issue is really meaty. I think that Michael or Kate Behart must have done most of the work on this issue and the others in this format. Issue #5 contained six pages of text and a copy of an article from the November 30, 1987, issue of ADWEEK about the installation of the GrandAd system at Rossin, Greenberg, Seronick, and Hill.3

I do not remember how many issues of those newsletters we produced. After I purchased and taught myself how to use PageMaker, the name of the newsletter was changed to Sound Bytes from TSI. At first it was 8½x11″, but the later versions were printed on both sides of 8½x14″ paper and folded to be 8½x7″. They also contained two columns per page, different fonts, and graphics. I located only one copy of each of these formats.

The main purpose of most of the subsequent newsletters was to announce new AdDept clients or new modules developed for existing AdDept clients. There may have also been one focused on TSI’s Internet insertion order system, AxN.

1. I think that Motivational Marketing still exists, but it has now evolved into a call center located in Rochelle Park, NJ. Its website is here.

2. Gary Farber’s LinkedIn page is here.

3. Much more about Michael Symolon’s career at TSI can be read here. More about Kate Behart has been posted here. The description of the installation at RGS&G is here.

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

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TSI’s first big conversion. Continue reading →

A fairly detailed description of the design of the GrandAd System can be found here. More information about IBM’s System/36 (S/36) is posted here.

The purchase of the GrandAd software system in early 1985 by Keiler Advertising (KA) was definitely a milestone for TSI. The agency was one of the two largest in the Hartford area, and its founder and president, Dick Keiler1, was highly respected in the local advertising community.

Although I had recommended to Sandy Procko3, KA’s finance manager and our liaison on the installation, that they buy two Datamasters and a hard drive, IBM had talked her into ordering the recently announced S/36 model 5362. They made the right decision.2 The Datamaster was on its way out, and the S/36 gave them better peripherals and room for growth. It also had many more subtle advantages.

Her decision was a great break for us. We would have needed to convert the system anyway. The sooner that we got started on it the better.

The only problem was that no one at TSI had ever worked on a System/36. We knew that the system had a BASIC interpreter, but we were uncertain about the compatibility of the two versions. IBM provided KA with a huge stack of documentation. I read the BASIC manual thoroughly and was relieved to find that it was very similar to what we were accustomed to. I read enough of the other manuals to get an idea about how to set up their system.

I also had to write the file definitions for each file. We had versions of these created in the Datamaster’s word processing program, but on the S/36 it was important that they be stored as Data Definition Specifications (DDS). The final preliminary step was to write a procedure for creating all of the empty data files from the DDS.

IBM’s office had a 5360, the “washer-dryer” model.

IBM allowed us to work on the S/36 in its downtown Hartford office before KA’s system was delivered. I saved our programs onto 8″ disks. I created a library for them on IBM’s 5360. Then I restored them as text files. I edited them to conform with the S/36 syntax and changed the names of all of the files to use the dot format that SSP required. I then tried to load them in the interpreter. If any lines were rejected, I fixed them and kept trying until the program loaded. Then I went on to the next program, of which there were several hundred.

When I was done with the programs and procedures, I saved the library onto diskettes, brought the diskettes to KA, and restored them. Then I executed the procedures to create all of the files. It never occurred to us that there might some day be a way of populating the data files from files that they had stored on their PC’s. I think that it was possible to save the specs table, which was a fixed-record-length file.

For nearly all of its forty-two years of its existence KA was located in a large house in Farmington, CT. It is portrayed in the photo at the right. During the period in which I was regularly vising the agency, the trees and the bushes were much smaller, and they were surrounded by wood chips. Sandy called Dick “the mulch king” of Farmington.

From the beginning, or shortly thereafter, Sandy was assisted by a younger woman named Shelly. I don’t remember her last name

Getting the code to work on the S/36 caused us fewer problems than one might imagine. By this time we understood how IBM thought about things. The fact that all of our programs followed strict procedures also made it easier to adjust to the differences. I don’t remember encountering any problems that necessitated consulting IBM or anyone else.

Here are my most vivid recollections of the installation.

KA’s 5224 printer was much faster than anything available on a Datamaster.
  • KA not only had a kitchen. It had a chef who prepared meals for clients and prospects and a dining room as well. I was never invited to one of these occasions.
  • The parking lot at KA, which was in the back of the house, had a few narrow grass covered areas with skinny trees in them. I parked my Celica to the left of one of them once. When I exited I turned the wheel too soon. The mirror on the right side of the car got caught on the tree and broke off. Thenceforward there was no mirror on the Celica’s right side. Changing lanes to the right required extreme caution.
  • The first few monthly closings at KA were, as always, difficult. Query/36 sometimes helped the reconciliation process. Nevertheless, on one occasion we had a discrepancy of ten cents in the accounts payable account. Sandy told me not to worry about it, but we had the tools to find it, and so I persisted. I eventually discovered that no vendor was off by a dime. Instead, three invoices were off; all three had discrepancies of more than $100, but they almost perfectly balanced one another.
  • Sandy taught me that if a discrepancy was divisible by nine, it was probably a transposition error.
  • On one occasion guys from the Australian national swimming team were in the office for some reason. Sandy and most of the other female staff members thought that they were very hot.
  • Sandy liked the system’s reports a lot. I am pretty sure that she asked for a couple of revisions, but I do not remember the details. I do remember that, despite the fact that we spent a lot of time making sure that the results of the cost accounting system agreed with the cost accounting system, she never showed any client profitability reports to Dick. She said that that would open a can of worms.
  • I went to KA once during the period in which I was weak from cat scratch fever (as described here). It happened to be on the day that KA was moving its accounting department from the ground floor to the second floor. I carried a printer or something, but the effort totally exhausted me.
  • At some point in 1988, I think, Sandy fell out of Dick’s favor. She was reassigned to take charge of the scheduling of production jobs, a clear demotion. I never learned why all of this happened.
  • Dick hired a woman with experience from a New York agency to replace Sandy. I tried to explain to her why the system’s method of calculating work in process (WIP) was superior to the method advocated by the AAAA, but I don’t think that she bought it.
  • The last time that I went to KA Shelly was in charge of the finance department, and the New Yorker was gone. On that occasion Michael Symolon, our salesman at the time, accompanied me. Evidently he had gone on a date with Shelly once and was embarrassed about it. He stayed in the background. That was the only time that I ever remember him being shy.

When the system had been working successfully for a few months, Dick Keiler arranged to be interviewed by AdWeek New England about our system. It was a very nice article that heaped praise upon our system. It started on the front page, and it continued for several paragraphs in the middle. I had only one minor quibble: THEY NEVER MENTIONED THE NAME OF THE SOFTWARE OR THE COMPANY THAT DEVELOPED IT!!!

TSI had, for the first and only time in its existence purchased an ad. It appeared somewhat close to the article’s continuation page. However the ad was not precisely the same size as the hole that the magazine needed to fill. The way that they floated it in made it look really unprofessional.

I was quite upset about this. I wrote a letter to the editor complaining about both of these things. He called me. He did not apologize. He said that he did not think that it would have been proper to identify TSI. I reminded him that the article clearly identified the hardware vendor as IBM. What was the difference? He repeated that it just did not seem proper. He also thought that our ad looked fine. I hung up on him.

I made lemonade out of this by writing to all the prospects in the northeast about the article, providing “what AdWeek neglected to mention.” It generated a few inquiries.

1. Dick Keiler founded the agency in 1972. He started his retirement process in 1999 and left the company five years later. In 2021 he lives in Tucson Arizona. The agency went out of business in 2015. The last few years are described here.

2. I am pretty sure that in 2021 Sandy Procko resides in Westbrook, CT.

3. I was slow to come to the realization that when trying to sell systems that generated no revenue for the purchaser, it was best to strike when the iron was hot. One of our clients later told me “Christmas only comes once.” The person recommending the purchase always dreaded making a mistake. He/she most feared the prospect of telling the boss a little later that the company needed to purchase more hardware. I always thought that IBM proposed systems that were bigger and more experience than necessary, but they were more experienced at this process than I was.

4. The S/36 operating system, called SSP, used the term “procedure” for a list of commands that were to be executed sequentially. In addition, BASIC used the same term for a sequential list of BASIC commands that could be executed inside the interpreter. On the Datamaster the user was always in the interpreter, and so there was no confusion.

1983-1985 TSI: GrandAd: The Datamaster Clients

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A good fit for several agencies. Continue reading →

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This requirement alone would leave me out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My fingertips were on the keyboard, not each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darby O’Brien.

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

A Wang PC.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. Workstation Basic is described in some detail here.

12. Wang filed for bankruptcy protection in 1996.