Tag Archives: AT&T

2001-2006 TSI: Weekly Partners’ Meetings

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Agendas for meetings. Continue reading →

Between January of 2001 and November of 2006 I met pretty often with Denise Bessette (introduced here), who was by then my partner and VP of Application Development. I found a folder of Microsoft Word files for the agendas that I wrote up for these strategy meetings. Starting in 2003 the meetings became more regular. They occurred on many if not most Wednesdays, the day that I was most likely not to be at a client’s.

We generally ate lunch together at an order-at-the-bar restaurant on the west side of the river. It had picnic tables near a small stream. I can’t remember the name of the place. I took a drive in the area that my memory associated with its location, but I could find no trace of it. I suspect that it closed, and the land was bought by a developer who put it to another use, perhaps condominiums.

The following summaries are mostly in chronological order. Almost every AdDept client is mentioned at some point. Separate blog entries with much more details have been posted for each of them. They can easily be found using the 1948 Project’s master index program, which is available here.

Many items on the agendas are repeated on subsequent agendas. A few of them persist over years. These were issues for which we never found solutions. The most obvious examples were the efforts to find additional uses for AxN that would benefit newspapers and/or advertisers.

By 2001 the nature of and name for AxN1 had been decided. Our focus was on how to roll it out to the AdDept clients and what we could do to make it more attractive both to the advertisers and the newspapers. We also discussed potential support issues and how the new model 170 that TSI had recently purchased could handle the load of handling the traffic from AdDept clients and newspapers. Occasionally we talked about personnel and other business-related matters.

By 2002 the business environment for large department stores had changed dramatically. Before listing the agenda for one of the meetings I wrote, “We need to change our attitude 180 degrees. Previously we had excess demand and were struggling to increase our capacity to meet it. Now we have excess capacity, and our customers are frugal.”

I had used Net.Data2 extensively for AxN. At the time it was the only thing available on the AS/400 that could interact with the database. By 2002, however, IBM was telling people not to use it. However, it was several years before IBM provided an equivalent tool. Java3, which I had studied extensively and had concluded was not suitable for what we wanted to do, was IBM’s solution to everything.

I was surprised to read how uncertain we were about the willingness o AdDept clients to use AxN. The meeting in March mentioned the need for a second installation. Before reading this I was pretty sure that Belk4 was the first, but maybe someone else had used it on a limited basis.

In 2003 Denise and talked a lot about what kind of programming was marketable to our clients. We investigated quite a few products that claimed to make it easier to make native AS/400 programs web-based . We also talked about what features could be added to AxN so that it would be more valuable to advertisers or newspapers. Usually one of the last items on the list was whether we should spend time converting our code from BASIC to RPG or something else.

In May Sue and I took our first vacation in Italy. I wrote a journal about that adventure and posted it here.

The meeting of November 5 was the first mention of Bob Wroblewski, who has been introduced here. The next few agendas mostly consisted of the same items.

In January of 2004 Bob and I flew to California to visit Robinsons-May and Gottschalks. Bob then started enrolling Rob-May’s papers. After that the process of getting newspapers to subscribe to AxN snowballed for several years. At about the same time our long courtship of Dick’s Sporting Goods finally paid off with a contract for AdDept. So, in only two years the outlook for TSI had improved greatly.

In February it occurred to me that there might be one dominant software company for the newspaper business. If we could create an interface with their system, it could advance the AxN project tremendously. However, I later discovered that each paper, if it had anything at all, had developed its own software or paid someone to do it. There was no uniformity. Fortunately I discovered that this was a blind alley before I wasted a lot of time, money, and energy on it.

The agenda for the February 18 meeting made it clear that the AxN project was about to take off. Most of the long-time AdDept users had at least been contacted. Stage Stores was enthusiastic, and they had just acquired another chain named Peebles. Finally, Dick’s Sporting Goods had finally signed the contract to purchase AdDept. To deal with the expected increase in use of the Internet by the newly subscribing newspapers Denise was arranging for installation of a T-1 line from AT&T with the Cox Cable connection as backup.

The March 3 agenda closed with a mention of the NAA, which was the abbreviation for the Newspaper Association of America (changed to News/Media Alliance in 2016). I eventually talked with someone at its headquarters, but I foresaw that it would take a lot of time and effort to build a productive relationship with the organization. It might have been a good project for Doug Pease (introduced here) or Jim Lowe (introduced here), but at that point they were in the rear-view mirror. I never thought that this would have been a good fit for Bob. Besides, he was busy talking to newspapers, or at least soon would be.

It took me a few minutes to decode this entry on the entry for March 24: “Robinsons: Lower price for LANG?” LANG was the Los Angeles Newspaper Group,.5 a company that printed and distributed tabloids in Los Angeles and its suburbs. Advertising for all those papers was managed from one central location. TSI agreed to send them one bill. We treated them like one large paper with several editions.

In April we were waiting for Dick’s to begin the solicitation for AxN before we approached Macy’s West and RadioShack. The April 21 entry contained positive news about Filene’s use of AdDept for accounting, including the monthly closing process. The next week Denise and I discussed the proposed trip to talk with Hecht’s main paper, the Washington Post. I ended up visiting them on May 14. It gave me quite a thrill, but I don’t think that they ever agreed to use AxN. Apparently we also considered a press release about being in business for twenty-five years, but I am pretty sure that we never did it.

The agenda for May 26 poses this question about Filene’s: “Have they made a big mess?” Bon Ton agreed to send letters to its newspapers about AxN.

In June we discussed various methods of emailing claims. I don’t recall that we ever took any action on this. There was ominous news from Federated that they put all quotes on hold. The total number of orders in AxN exceeded 100,000. The June 30 agenda announced that Dick’s was moving into its new building over the subsequent weekend.

The first item on the July 21 agenda was “Denise’s three issues”. I wonder what they were. Item #10C talks about a follow-up meeting with the Washington Post that never happened. The next week’s agenda explained that they did not respond to my email. A second e-mail was sent on August 4. On August 25 (my dad’s eightieth birthday) I called the Director of Advertising Services.

Something distressing was evidently going on at Parisian, but I don’t remember what it was. That disclosure was somewhat offset by the following good news: “RadioShack: 34 active; 39 testing; 22 Macy’s West; 15 L&T; 4 Parisian; 56 other.” RadioShack did one of its four geographic divisions at a time. The last two entries brought up new subjects: “How can we make better use of my time and Lucia’s6?” and “5-year plan”.

The August 4 agenda was the first to mention SQL7. I used SQL for all of the AxN programs, but the AdDept programs mostly created temporary indexed output files that were populated by one program and read by another using IBM’s recommended approach, ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method).

Marshall Field’s (introduced here), the last big installation of the May Co. version of the AdDept system, was first mentioned in the agenda for September 8. We were very excited about the meeting scheduled for September 16 at Hecht’s advertising department in Arlington VA. By this time the work for the Peebles installation at Stage Stores was operational enough that we were ready to solicit their newspapers for AxN.

I was serious enough about contacting companies that sold software for ad agencies that I spent $35 to buy the booklet from the AAAA. I questioned whether we should write to each of them to propose an interface with their system and AxN. I don’t remember ever doing so.

The agenda for November 1 mentioned that Field’s used an ad agency for both broadcast and newspaper. My recollection was that they started using AxN almost immediately and dropped Haworth, the agency that bought newspaper space. However, later entries seem to contradict this. The same agenda mentions that TSI was carrying $55,000 in questionable receivables in the last month of its fiscal year.

I never had to make an onsite visit to our AxN client in Guam.

The November 10 agenda mentioned that—after months of foot-dragging—Federated Systems Group was finally going to “cut over” to their new AS/400 system. During this period we were worried about providing support for AxN for Macy’s West’s newspapers in Hawaii and Guam. This was needless. The papers subscribed for years without any problems. This was also the last agenda that included a mention of a press release about TSI’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

A major issue early in the year was how to handle the process for installing changes that Dick’s had forced upon us. There were other issues, too. The first agenda of the year ends with the question: “How can we get this installation on the right track?”

Two minor enhancements to AxN for the advertisers had been completed: custom emails and downloading of email addresses. However, I had apparently given up on the possibility of interfacing with computer systems used by the newspapers. There was also a process for reconciling the orders on AxN with the schedule on AdDept.

By March 10 we had a big programming backlog because of the large number of difficult jobs for Marshall Field’s. Denise controlled this process. I simply asked, “How can I help?” In the same meeting we discussed for the first time what, if any thing, we should do to forestall Macy’s from replacing AdDept with the system known then known as FedAd that had been developed by Burdines. Our contact at Macy’s West stated that “it did not exist”.

At the March 25 meeting we talked about Macy’s East for the first time in many months. For the April 28 and May 4 meetings there is separate agenda for AxN. For some reason I seemed worried about using it at Foley’s and Stage Stores.

The first item on the regular May 4 agenda was one word: “Lucia”. Lucia was able to handle much more challenging projects than our other administrative employees. The problem was trying to come up with things for her to do. Another issue on the same agenda posed some interesting questions:

We never mastered the trick of Cloud Computing.
  1. How could we set ourselves up to manage systems for our small clients? Bon Ton, Gottschalks, Neiman Marcus
    1. IBM (like Federated)?
    2. TSI
      1. Dedicated high-speed line for each user?
      2. On the net?
        1. Telnet? How would they print? Pdf?
        2. VPN: AS/400 to AS/400?
        3. VPN: PC to AS/400?
      3. High availability?
      4. Disaster recovery?
    3. A third party?

We did not spend a great deal of effort on trying to provide “cloud” computing for our customers. It would have involved a great deal of expense and risk. Just seeing that term “disaster recovery?” item gives me the chills.

Later in May Sue and I took our second Italian vacation with our friends Tom and Patti Corcoran. I wrote a journal again, but this time I had a camera. The results are posted here.

The agenda for June 2 began with the surprising news that Chuck Hansen at Marshall Field’s had asked me to back off on AxN. It also mentioned the agenda for a meeting with Macy’s Marketing on 5/17. It probably intended to say “6/17”. The next agenda, dated July 8, only stated, “Follow up with …” I must have forgotten the name (Robin Creen) of the lady with whom I met at Macy’s Corporate Marketing. There is also a reference to Bloomingdale’s. I suspect that this was in response to information from Tom Caputo, who worked with AdDept at both Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue, that Bloomies had never taken the FedAd software out of the box.

The July 11 agenda has some detailed information about a proposed newsletter publicizing how AdDept handled inserts. Some of these enhancements were done for Dick’s.

The August 26 agenda has a new and somewhat mysterious major topic called “AdDept ideas”. The two subtopics are “SpooliT8 ($9K) or other Excel” and “Service Bureau”. I think that SpooliT made .csv files out of spooled output files. It may have had a few other features.

Throughout this period there were references to The Oregonian, the major paper in the Portland area that stopped paying invoices for AxN without canceling and never responded to attempts to find out why.

The agenda for September 14 mentions the long letter that I sent to Robin Creen. Its contents are posted here.

The agenda for October 12 had several tantalizing references. It began by stating that IBM’s VPN9 product, which TSI used for communicating through the Internet, with clients’ AS/400s would be activated on the following Saturday. It also reported that a newsletter had been sent out.

Robin Creen topped the October 24 agenda, but there were no details. The second item referred to renewal of iSeries News, a magazine.that catered to the AS/400 community. It had undergone many name changes, and the content had also evolved. We kept all of the back copies in the shelves that in 2023 are in my office. When we closed down the company (details here), I threw all of them away.

The third item was “SBC Contract”. I don’t remember SBC, but I suspect that it was an IBM Business Partner that had sold more systems than we had or had somehow managed to deal directly with IBM. During this period TSI was not allowed to quote or sell any IBM products. We had to go through a Super-VAR.

The fourth item was “Lucia” with no details. The fifth was “AT&T Global: do we need it?”. I am pretty sure that this product allowed me to get my email when I was on the road. In the days before Wi-Fi I had an AT&T product installed on my laptop that allowed me to use a phone line in my hotel room to sign on to AT&T and look at my email.

We must have received an inquiry from Sport Chalet10 a chain of stores in California that was similar to Dick’s. Until I saw this entry again I had completely forgotten about them. Evidently I wrote them a letter and sent them a newsletter, but nothing came of it.

The last agenda for 2005 was dated December 6. The #1 item was the blitz to get an AdDept system for Macy’s South up and running in time for the season that started at the beginning of February. The second item was an inquiry from Circuit City11. This was another dead end.

The “My disk recovery” entry brought back some really bad memories. I think that I recovered everything on my computer’s hard drive, but it was costly and painful. The best part was that I got an external hard drive12 that made it very easy to back everything up.

There are no entries for 2006 until June. I remember being under extreme pressure to bring the two huge AdDept installations at Macy’s South and Marshal Field’s up to speed. Meanwhile we received the crushing news that Macy’s and the May Co. had merged, and Macy’s would be the dominant player.

The agenda for June 13 began with the word Corum. I am pretty sure that it referred to broadcast buying software. Based on the date it was probably associated with Macy’s South.

That agenda also contained a major item that simply stated “Modernizing and marketing AdDept”. We never did find a feasible way to transform the AdDept screens into something that looked modern. We made more marketing attempts after this, but they did not amount to much. This was the peak period for AxN. More than four hundred papers had subscribed. TSI’s administrative person spent a good deal of time printing and mailing invoices and depositing checks from newspapers.

The agenda for October 11 was startlingly different. It mentioned two AS/400 models, a 170 and a 270. My recollection is that we did development and ran the business on the 170, and the 270 was devoted to AxN. It also mentions recruitment. I am not sure whether that referred to the administrative position or programming. The agendas have gotten shorter and shorter.

This agenda also mentioned the C compiler for the 270. Denise was upset at me for even investigating the possibility of converting TSI’s code to C, which was widely used in the Unix world.

In the agenda for October 18 the scary term “Macy’s North” appeared several times. It referred to the company that was formerly called Marshall Field’s. Evidently the marketing (never called “advertising”) department there had never bought into using AxN for insertion orders. They may have still been using Haworth.

“Maintenance” was often mentioned in the agenda for November 1. We probably never charged as much as we could have for the kind of service that we provided our clients. I was evidently still spending quite a bit of time at Belk.

I was surprised to see Circuit City mentioned again on the agenda for November 8. We must have received another phone call. The term “Foley’s project” also appeared. I am pretty sure that that was the code name for the long and frustrating effort that Denise and I undertook to sell the company.

The last agenda that I have was dated July 10, 2007. It contained only four items:

  1. Trip to Macy’s West
  2. 515
  3. Dick’s quotes
  4. Foley’s
Never even a nibble.

Denise and I continued to meet, but not on a formal basis. By then I had almost given up on selling more AdDept systems. There had been so much consolidation in retail that the number of good prospects for the system had shrunk to almost nothing. Nordstrom and Dillard’s would have looked nice on our client list, but it was hard to think of anyone else that was worth pursuing.

We still did quite a bit of custom programming during the next five or six years, but managing the list of open jobs did not require the juggling act that had characterized the previous decade.

The AxN business decreased for a few reasons. The big stores no longer trusted newspaper ads to bring in customers as they once did. Newspaper readership was way down. Some of the AdDept clients outsourced their buying to agencies or media services. That always meant a drop in the number of papers.

I enjoyed those meetings immensely, and I miss them.

1. The history of the development of AxN is posted here. The system design is outlined here. The description of the process by which it was brought to market begins here.

2. Net.Data was a scripting language written by IBM for the AS/400. It was quite popular, but IBM for some reason decided to drop it in favor of the open source scripting language php, which required implementation of the Zend php engine.

3. Java is an object-oriented language that was developed by people at Sun Microsystems. The company released an open-source version. Java was almost the only thing that IBM talked about at the PartnerWorld convention that Denise and I attended in 2000. It is described here. On the AS/400 applications written in Java required a lot more resources than programs written in the native languages. If run on the same box the Java programs were slower, a lot slower.

4. The history of the AdDept installation at Belk is posted here.

5. In 2016 LANG merged with the Orange County Register and a few other papers. The new organization was called the Southern California Newspaper Group. The third item under the Federated topic was “AxN letter to four divisions”. Since “Bloomingdale’s” was the second item it mus refer to Macy’s East, West, South, and Florida (Burdines).

6. Lucia Hagan was TSI’s administrative person during this period. She was introduced here.

7. SQL stands for Structured Query Language. It was invented by IBM, but the company did not endorse its use on the AS/400 until 2004.

8. SpooliT is still on the market in 2023! Its website is here.

9. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. The Wikipedia entry is here.

10. Sport Chalet was sold to Vestis Retail Group in 2014 and was liquidated in 2016.

11. The sad story of Circuit City ended with its liquidation in 2009.

12. I still have that hard drive in 2023. However, I recently discovered that I no longer can find the cable that was used to attach it to a computer, and the company that made it was no longer in business.

1999-2002 TSI: The Million Dollar Idea

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The genesis of AxN. Continue reading →

In large measure this entry is based on and inspired by a set of recently discovered messages that I sent to my partner, Denise Bessette, about new projects that we were researching or working on. The first email was dated in late 1999. The last was in early 2001. The messages portrayed an exciting but scary time for both of us.

By the middle of the nineties it was evident to us that the way that TSI had been programming in the past fifteen years was becoming obsolete or was at least losing popularity. In 1992 Microsoft left IBM at the starting gate when it released Windows 3.1, the first version of its operating system that featured a graphical user interface (GUI) and was also stable enough that large corporations took it seriously. One could still make the argument that text-based software systems like the ones that we had developed were appropriate for many business tasks—in fact, most of the most important ones. However, if you did, you were probably dooming yourself to the fate of typewriter salesmen.

Great if you have just 2 fingers.

In fact, systems like AdDept and TSI’s other systems were branded by many of the magazines of the day as “legacy systems”. The emphasis of the new approach centered around the appearance of the screens, which now featured colors, images, text boxes, radio buttons, and varied fonts. They were certainly more interesting to look at than anything that we had produced. The mouse was the thing! The keyboard was only used when absolutely necessary. Whether they were as efficient or as easy to use was debatable, but, as I already noted, we were well aware of what had happened to the typewriter salesmen.

Another thing that happened during the middle of the nineties was the explosive growth of the Internet. All software developers wanted to be a part of it, but few were exactly sure how to approach it. I knew that we needed to figure out what aspect we should concentrate on, but it was not an easy decision to make. A few early participants made a lot of money, but an awful lot of ideas were catastrophic failures.

The Search for a GUI: I spent countless hours researching ways that we could provide a GUI for the AdDept system that did not involve a complete rewriting of the hundreds (and growing daily) of screens that we had already implemented. Every developer who worked on IBM midrange or mainframe systems must have been faced with the same problem. We all wanted a way to provide a system that looked modern but also took advantage of the thousands of lines of functioning code that had already been written.

I don’t know why, but IBM was not much help in this endeavor. Instead, in the late nineties IBM became a strong proponent of an object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems called Java. This was a startlingly new language. The first version was released in 1996.

I bought and read ten separate books that purported to teach Java programming. The structure of the language was consistent with the first principle of its design: “It must be simple, object-oriented, and familiar.” Well at least it was simple and object-oriented. The structure of the code was nothing like what I was accustomed to. Its main orientation was to a computer display, which it considered a set of objects, each with a set of properties and methods. That approached worked well enough for a screen, but how would it work for other things? After downloading the software development kit to my laptop and spending hundreds of hours mulling the contents of those books, I could do all of the exercises in every book, but I had not the slightest clue how to begin to code a system to manage any aspect of retail advertising. In fact I could not replicate even one screen of the AdDept system.

I did not completely discard the notion of using Java somehow, but if we did, we would definitely need some help. As I look back on this, maybe this is the reason why IBM was so crazy for Java.

The Spreadout Project: Users of TSI’s systems seldom complained about the look or feel of our data entry screens. Those screens would never have won any design awards, but the formats were completely consistent throughout the application, and everyone knew that they got the job done efficiently. Furthermore, they knew that TSI could implement requested changes rapidly and at moderate costs.

What they did not like much was the look of the reports, which was limited to one non-proportional font—Courier—with no images or even styles like italics or bolding. Many, if not most, of the people who used AdDept were quite good at making and manipulating spreadsheets. They were used to controlling the format of the output, and they liked the flexibility. For example, if they wanted someone to concentrate on one column or row, they could easily change the font, color, or style for just those cells.

Several clients asked us if it would be possible for us to produce an Excel spreadsheet as the output from designated programs in AdDept instead of or in addition to printed reports. I did not know if it would be possible, but I said that I would look into it. I dubbed this project “Spreadout”.

It was rather easy to produce an output file that contained the same rows and columns as the report, and we implemented that option in a large number of AdDept reports. The user could then download that file to their PC. That file could then be loaded into Excel with the rows and columns intact. However, the fields (or cells) in the file contained only text or numbers. It was not possible to download formulas for totaling or designate any kind of formatting. Furthermore, the process of downloading the file was not exactly speedy.

I tried to figure out what it would take to produce code that could provide files that could be opened in Excel with predetermined formulas and formatting. I found some documentation from Microsoft of the Excel files, but I never could concoct a way to provide what our customers asked for. Furthermore I never heard of anyone else who had accomplished this, and —believe me—I searched..

I did, however, managed to provide an alternative that proved popular to some clients. Almost all the AdDept customers used Hewlett-Packard printers that were accessible by the AS/400. HP sold books that documented the format for files in HP’s printer command languages, PCL 4, PCL 5, and PCL 6. I could then write code to produce spooled files that contained the output in exactly the format that the client specified. The downside was the considerable amount of coding required for each report, many times as much as it took to produce it in the Courier-only. It also required an extra step to send the output directly to the printer without being reformatted.

However, a few clients were so insistent about the need for a precise format that they were willing to pay the price. These reports were almost always the ones that they distributed to other departments or to higher-ups.

If anyone else ever did a project like this for the AS/400, I never heard of it. Unfortunately, I never figured out how it could be marketed as a stand-alone product usable with other AS/400 software.

As the new millennium approached, we—that is, Denise Bessette and I—felt that we needed to expand TSI’s horizons. In January of 2000 we flew to San Diego for IBM’s PartnerWorld conference in the hope of making contact with people who could advise us how to adapt to the need for modernization and the Internet. That enjoyable but frustrating experience has been described here.

On February 25, 2000, I took the time to write up in a fairly detailed manner how, given the inherent limitations of a small business like ours, TSI should to proceed in trying to develop a second line of business. Here is a portion of that memo:

General principles:

1. We should get the best people available to help us.

2. We should maintain AdDept as a dependable source of income. Whether we should invest a lot of time and/or money in enhancing and marketing AdDept is still to be determined.

3. We should try to leverage our assets better. Our income is too heavily dependent upon the number of hours put in by Mike and Denise.

4. We should assume that the economy will remain strong for another two years. On the other hand, we should avoid debt or at least large amounts of debt in case this assumption turns out to be false.

5. We should add new skills that are more marketable. That means learning some subset of Windows, object-oriented programming, and the internet. We should be thinking past the next project to the one after that if we can.

6. We should look for partners with skills and assets that complement ours.

7. We should not be deterred by the fact that some of these principles seem incompatible.

8. We need to act fast. Pursuing René2 cost us seven months. On the other hand we might have gone down some less profitable paths if she had been on board.

I think we should take the following steps as soon as possible.

1. Find out what it takes to get our existing clients to use AdDept for insertion orders. The following clients are not using AdDept for IO’s: Macy’s East, Neiman Marcus, Filene’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Hecht’s. I checked Herberger’s. They have ads through March 29, 2000, at least. Macy’s West is apparently starting. Gottschalks ran insertion orders yesterday. I don’t know about Meier & Frank, but I can take care of that on my trip.

2. Find out which advertising departments have access to the internet and would be willing to use it to check on insertion orders. I don’t think that this would be a problem with most of them. Unfortunately, we don’t really have anyone in the office who can do this for us.

3. Make an appointment with Ken Owen3 to run the idea of a clearinghouse for insertion orders by him. He may be very interested in working with us on it. I have quite a bit of respect for him. At the very least, he is smart and completely honest.

4. Run the clearinghouse idea by at least one of our clients. Why not schedule our trip to New York and run it by Tom, Chris, and whoever their ROP person is?4

5. Run the clearinghouse idea by at least one newspaper or someone who knows how newspapers think about these things today.

6. Start trying to package and market AdDept and/or AS/400 products and services. We need to maintain or enhance our cash position over the next six months.

7. We should find out what, if anything, the National Newspaper Association (NNA)5, the AAAA6, and AP AdSEND have done in this regard. The AP is a potential partner in this venture. I once had a copy of the NNA’s EDI spec7, but I seem to have thrown it out when we moved. I will see what I can find on the Internet.

Requirements for hiring a marketing/client services person:

1. He/she must be able to get along with Mike and Denise. This includes having a good work ethic. I think Doug barely met these qualifications.

2. Must be able to get along with the clients.

3. Must be willing to spend a lot of time on the phone.

4. Must be able to talk to decision-makers and occasionally presidents of corporations without looking foolish. Doug could do this, but his ability to identify the real decision-maker was just so-so. He was also almost always overly optimistic, but this might be necessary to offset my tendency to see the negative side of everything.

5. Must be able to refrain from overselling.

Pluses:

1. Intelligence. Determination can go a long way to overcome deficiencies in this categories, but I don’t think I want to try to explain things to someone any duller than Doug.

2. Retail experience.

3. Newspaper experience.

4. Other advertising experience.

5. Good business sense.

6. Sales experience.

7. Computer experience.

How to proceed.

1. We can run an ad in the Courant. There are almost as many classified ads for sales and marketing people there as for programmers. The only major retailer in the immediate area now is Ames, and they run no ROP. Therefore the chances of finding someone in Hartford who understands retail advertising are slim.

2. We can contact a headhunter. We don’t have to pay unless we find someone, but we will have to pay plenty if we do. It might be worth it if it speeds up the process.

3. We can advertise on the Internet. Does that cost money? If so, how much?

4. In interviews I think that we should consider dangling a carrot of a spinoff of a .com company for the insertion order clearinghouse. I am not exactly sure how to present this idea to someone. Maybe we could offer them a percentage of the new company with the understanding that we would try to sell it once it has become established.

In retrospective I find it impressive that I was able to earmark in advance so many important issues that TSI would face over the next few years. We made some mistakes, but we made a lot of good decisions.

A month later, on March 25, 2000, I mailed a letter to our contacts at all of the companies that used AdDept. I solicited their opinions on what TSI’s priorities should be in the new millennium. Here is a copy:

TSI is in the process of evaluating how best to allocate its resources over the course of the next year or so. Our highest priorities will remain providing excellent support for existing installations and responding to requests for custom programming from existing clients. However, there are a few additional projects that we are considering. We are very interested in learning what our existing clients think about them.

1. Menu maker: This is a fairly simple idea both in concept and in implementation. You would be provided with either a PC/Mac program or an AS/400 program that would allow you to create your own menus. The menus would reside in a separate library so that they would never get mixed up with the standard AdDept menus. You would provide the name for the menu and the heading text. For each option you that want to add, you would be allowed to select from a list of AdDept programs and menus. You could also enter your own command or an IBM command (e.g., WRKQRY). If you selected an AdDept menu or program, the description and the online help would be filled in for you, but you could override the text to make it say what you wanted.

2. GUI front end: Most software companies that market systems of a size comparable to AdDept have budgeted more than $1 million to “modernizing” their data entry screens to use a “graphical user interface” that is consistent with the methods used by Windows and Mac programs. It is now technically feasible to create a fairly nice GUI front end for AdDept for much less than that using products available from third party vendors. However, there is still a considerable capital outlay involved. We also estimate that it would take at least half of a man-year of labor. Furthermore, the PC or Mac would have to meet certain minimum requirements. Terminals would still use the green screens. TSI’s support regimen would be more difficult. The interactive programs would probably run slower on older AS/400’s. They may actually run faster on newer boxes.

3. Output to Excel: We believe that it is technically feasible (albeit difficult) to create a file from the AS/400 that is usable by Microsoft Excel with no intervening steps. It is a relatively straightforward task to download data files (or even spooled files) to spreadsheets today, but many intervening steps are required to get something presentable. TSI’s proposed method would allow you for each report that is eligible for this kind of treatment to designate (and permanently store) the formatting of the worksheet—report titles, column headings, “fit to page”, and most of the other values in “File, Page Setup.” You would also be allowed to designate fonts and sizes for the report title, the column headings, the body text, and each level of subtotals. The subtotal values would be formulas, not simple values. The same program could be used for data files that are produced by queries. The resulting worksheet could then be edited as needed. You can even edit, add, or delete lines in the worksheet. The subtotals will automatically be updated. Most simple reports could be reformatted to use the proposed program. It might be difficult or even impossible to generate some complex AdDept output using this approach.

4. Insertion order clearinghouse: We have long thought that the methods used for reserving newspaper space leave too much room for error and are overly labor-intensive, both for the advertiser and for the newspaper. The purpose of this project is to make the ordering process easier and to minimize the potential for miscommunication.

Instead of faxing the orders, the AS/400 would send them electronically to TSI. We would post them on a website. When the newspaper reps sign on, they would see all orders for them from all advertisers who are using this service. They would be able to add comments or questions and confirm them electronically with or without reservation numbers. They could also print the orders and, eventually, download them directly into their reservation systems. When you sign on, you would see all of your orders. It will be immediately obvious which ones have been confirmed, which have been read but not confirmed, and which have not been read yet.

What do you think of these ideas? Do you have any ideas of your own? We would greatly appreciate it if you would communicate your feedback to us at your earliest convenience. The last thing that we want to do is invest a lot of time and money in something that is of little or no perceived value to our clients.

I don’t recall receiving any substantive responses to this, but around this time Steve VeZain sent me a rather lengthy email that explained some of the priorities for Saks Inc. Our dealings with him and his company are detailed here.

Net.Data: At some point I became acquainted with an online forum called IGNITe/4007. This was a website where AS/400 developers could pose questions about using the AS/400 for applications for the web. Although some IBM experts participated, the forum was not run by IBM, but by a former IBMer named Bob Cancilla8, who worked for a company in Rochester, MN, the home of the AS/400.

Bob also wrote the book shown at left that explained how to use the AS/400 as an Internet server. IBM disdained the approach of its customers using a book written by someone who had actually gotten the AS/400 to function as an Internet server. Big Blue preferred that its customers spend hundreds of dollars on classes or thousands of dollars on consultants rather than $15 or $20 for a book. They also championed something called WebSphere to manage applications written in Java. During February and March of 2000 I had puzzled over the Redbook that documented this product. I was nearly ready to give up on the idea of using the AS/400 for anything related to the Internet until I found Bob’s book and website in April of 2000.

I purchased this excellent tome and followed most of Bob’s advice. I successfully configured TSI’s model 150 as an HTTP server to serve web pages to browsers and as an FTP server for exchanging data files. It was possible to use the AS/400 as an email server, but Bob advised against it. We elected to use AT&T for sending and receiving emails for our employees. We later configured our AS/400 to send outgoing emails through the SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) server. Eventually IBM decided that it was a bad idea to have its own proprietary HTTP server and supported a version of the Apache server used by almost everyone else.

At that time the most popular scripting language for web-based applications was PERL. IBM never supported it on the AS/4009. Instead it provided its own language, which was called Net.Data (pronounced “Net Dot Data”). This was the only web language that could be used on the AS/400, and no other system in the history of the world ever used it. We obtained a copy of IBM’s handbook on Net.Data (posted online here), and I determined that we could probably use the language for what we wanted to do. Here is what I wrote about it at the time.

I signed on to the IGNITe400 website and registered as a member. It’s free. You can ask questions there. I looked at a few of them. Bob Cancilla himself answered some of the questions! I also looked at IBM’s Net.Data website. It is full of information.

I printed out a lot of documentation. I am now convinced that we can do what we want to do with HTTP server and Net.Data. This is exciting. Buying that book was a great idea. The links alone are worth the price. The biggest difficulty that I see will be working out the process of getting the orders from our customers and then from others.

… I have more than doubled my knowledge about the AS/400 and the internet in the last two days. Moreover, I think I could do it! I think that we should try it some time this coming week.

Net.Data was an interpreted language, just as BASIC was on the Datamaster and the System/36. The programs (which in web parlance were called scripts or macros) were not compiled into executable machine code. Changes to the scrips took effect as soon as the programmer made them. So, a developmental environment was a necessity. The time it took the processor to interpret the code and generate the HTML code that the browser could understand made all of the programs considerably slower than the compiled BASIC programs on the same machine. However, they were lightning fast compared to Java, the approach blessed by IBM.

So, I taught myself how to use Net.Data to deliver interactive scripts for a browser (at the time the main choices were Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, and whatever Apple called its browser before Safari). The language itself was relatively easy to understand, but programming for numerous constantly changing browsers was much different from programming for a very stable AS/400 and its 5250 user interface.

I also had to learn the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), which was the method of reading from and writing to files on the AS/400. This was totally different from what we were accustomed to. Our programs had always read the files a record at a time even after we switched to the AS/400’s relational database. With Net.Data it was necessary to execute an SQL statement that returned a set of data—rows (records) and columns (fields)—that was stored in an array (called a table in Net.Data). It was then necessary to loop through the rows of the array. I was already somewhat familiar with SQL, but I needed to learn how to use “joins” to do complicated selections.

These two volumes got a workout. The binding on the HTML book split in two years ago.

I also needed to buy books on HTML and JavaScript. If I had realized before I started that I needed to learn all of this, I might have deemed that the project would require more time and effort than I could afford. However, by the time that I realized what I was up against, I had invested so much time that I was not about to abandon the project.

There was no syntax-checking of Net.Data macros, and, at first, there was no editor to help by color-coding the statements. So, when I ran into a problem, which happened quite frequently, I had to search elsewhere for help.

Life got a lot easier when IBM put its Redbooks on CDs.

In researching for this blog, I found a pdf online for a Redbook (technical manual) that IBM published for people like me in 1997. It is posted here. Even a quick glance will make it clear that writing applications for the AS/400’s HTTP server would be a daunting task. For example, it contained this statement: “Net.Data Web macros combine things you already know such as HTML, SQL, and REXX with a simple macro language.” I did not know HTML at all, I knew only a little SQL, and to this day I have no idea what REXX was. Also, the Redbook neglected to mention that it was not really possible to write interactive programs without JavaScript.

I hung in there. Here is one of my last messages: “I feel a lot of pressure to work harder. I want this new project operational yesterday. It is going to be difficult at first. I want to get over the hump.”

I spent a lot of time in the IGNITe/400 forum. My best source of information was a guy from (I think) New Zealand, of all places. I never met him in person or even spoke with him on the phone. His name was Peter Connell, and he helped me through every difficult coding problem that I encountered. Not once was he stumped. By the time that I was well into the project, I was able to provide solutions to coding problems that others described.

TSI’s Internet Project: Even before Denise and I attended PartnerWorld, we had pretty much decided that our best shot at developing a successful Internet product would involve insertion orders, which is what newspapers and magazine call reservations that they receive from advertisers for ROP (display ads), inserts, polybags, or any other kind of advertising. TSI’s AdDept customers sent their reps at newspapers a schedule that listed all of the ads that they wanted to place for a specified period—usually a week. Most of them faxed this information to the papers. The rep at the paper examined the schedule. Sometimes questions required phone calls. Sometimes requests (such as designated positioning in the paper) could not be accommodated. Even after final approval the schedule was often changed by the advertiser before the ads ran, sometimes with very little advance notification.

Newspaper ads were expensive … and valuable.

Errors on both sides were not rare, and they could be quite costly. The newspaper often gave the retailer free ads to make up for the mistake. The advertiser’s loss might be much greater. In the nineties and early twenty-first century ads in newspapers were the primary vehicle for communicating with customers. Mistakes in the ads could cost the retailer thousands in sales, and they were embarrassing to the advertising department. Occasionally heads rolled.

In 2000 most retail advertisers faxed their schedules to the newspapers. If the line was not busy, the phones were rather reliable. However, what happened to the schedule after the fax machine received it? Was the printout legible? Did the rep ever get it, and, if so, what did he/she do with it. What assurance was there that the fax that the newspaper used to compose the paper was the final version?

We thought that the Internet might provide an opportunity to speed up this process and to improve its reliability. My first idea was to replace faxing with email. If the AS/400’s (free) SMTP server were installed, AdDept could compose and send to the newspaper an email that contained the schedule. Wouldn’t the newspaper rep immediately print the schedule? If so, how was this better than faxing? Doesn’t it just add another step? Besides, email is demonstrably less reliable than faxing. The worst that usually happens with faxing is that the output is blurry or even unreadable. Emails, in contrast, can be held up by any Internet Service Provider (ISP) that handles the message, and there could be dozens. So, the schedule might never make it to the rep’s inbox.

Eventually Denise and I settled on using FTP to send the schedule from the client’s AdDept system to TSI. Thereafter TSI’s AS/400 managed the whole process using a combination of BASIC programs and Net.Data macros. Details of the actual design are posted here.

After Denise and I agreed on the design, several details still needed to be settled:

  1. Who will do the coding at TSI?
  2. Who will pay for the service, the advertiser or the newspaper?
  3. How much will we charge?
  4. How will we market the product to our clients and their newspapers?
  5. How can we entice advertisers that did not use AdDept to use this method for insertion orders?
  6. Can we take advantage of the link established between TSI, the papers, and AdDept for other modules?
  7. What will the product be named?
  8. Will the project be part of TSI or a new financial entity?

The answer to #1 turned out to be Mike Wavada. I expected that I would eventually train Denise or one of the programmers so that they could at least support the existing code, but it never happened. It astounds me to report that this was a one-man coding job from day one, and no one else at TSI ever learned Net.Data. Hundreds of papers and most of the AdDept clients relied on it starting in 2002 and continuing through early 2014. Think about this: Between 2003 and 2012 I took six vacations in Europe and one cruise in the Caribbean. There were no serious incidents!

Questions 2-5 are addressed in the entry about marketing of AxN, which is posted here.

From the outset I was hoping that the nexus connecting newspapers and the retailers through TSI’s website could be used for other communications as well. The most obvious one was for the delivery of the files that contained the layouts of the ads. Nevertheless, I was reluctant to pursue this for several very good reasons. The first was that the Associated Press already had a huge head start with its very popular product called AdSEND10. There were also several other companies that offered similar services.

The other thing that gave me pause was the potential legal liability. It seemed to me that if we failed to deliver an ad correctly and/or promptly, we could easily be sued. A fundamental tenet of TSI’s operation had been to avoid any activity that might occasion a lawsuit. Throughout the first two decades of its operation, TSI had successfully avoided litigation. Also, we knew nothing about the process of sending ads electronically, and the AP already owned satellites that it used for this purpose. I also learned later that AdSEND had twelve dedicated T-1 lines, and one of TSI’s clients told me that that was not nearly enough. TSI eventually installed one T-1 line that easily handled the insertion order traffic generated by AxN.

An idea that I liked better was for the newspapers to transmit their invoices electronically through TSI’s servers to AdDept users. I even came up with a cool name for this: e-I-e-IO, which stood for electronic invoices and electronic insertion orders. My idea was to provide a program to feed the newspaper’s billing system with the information from the insertion order, and to feed the retailer’s AdDept system with the same information. I did a little research to see if one software system for billing or accounting was dominant in the newspaper industry and discovered that this was decidedly not the case. So, we would face the prospect of persuading one paper at a time, or, at best, one chain of papers at a time. Furthermore, someone else had already claimed the URL that I really wanted: eieio.com.

The name that I picked for the new product would still work if we came up with other ways for TSI to serve as a nexus between advertisers (A) and newspapers (N). It was AxN, which was pronounced “A cross N”. The A and the N were always portrayed in dark blue Times New Roman. The x was always in red Arial.

That leaves question #8. Denise was always in favor of making AxN a separate financial entity. However, we never found a way to extricate it from the rest of the business. We looked at the revenues separately, but we never even did a separate P&L for it.

1. René Conrad was TSI’s liaison with Kaufmann’s, the May Company’s division based in Pittsburgh. Both Denise and I had a very high opinion of her. When Doug Pease left TSI in 1999, we tried to hire René. Details of the AdDept installation at Kaufman’s are posted here. The unsuccessful pursuit of René is documented here.

2. Ken Owen is a friend and was a client. The latter role is explained here. By 1999 Ken’s business had drifted away from creating and placing ads for clients to software for the Internet. He gave us a little free advice, but the role for him that I envisioned did not materialize. I communicate via email with Ken every year on March 4, the holiday that we celebrate together—Exelauno Day.

3. Tom Caputo and Chris Pease were our key contacts at Lord & Taylor in Manhattan in those days. The history of the installation at L&T is recorded here.

4. I did contact the NNA, but nothing came of it. The person with whom I spoke was nice enough, but it became evident that trying to work with this organization would be extremely time-consuming and not the kind of thing that I was good at or enjoyed. Eventually I discovered that there were almost as many administrative systems for newspapers as there were newspapers. It appeared that there were no accepted standards.

5. The American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA—universally pronounced “four A’s”) published an annual list of software for ad agencies. For years TSI’s GrandAd system was on the list. I am not sure what I had in mind as an additional relationship. Perhaps I envisioned ad agencies that specialized in retailers might want to use AxN for insertion orders and would work with us to create an interface. Perhaps I thought that other software companies might add the interface to their products for ad agencies. Nothing like any of these things ever happened.

6. EDI is short for Electronic Data Interchange. It refers to an orderly setup that enables participant to exchange information electronically. When there are only two participants, it is usually just called an interface. “Specs”, which is short for specifications, refers to the documentation published and delivered to the participants and prospective participants.

7. I have no idea what the name of this group meant. At the time IBM was busy promoting the idea of e-business. IBM’s marketing director proclaimed at PartnerWorld that IBM “owned” the concept. So, that may explain why the e is not capitalized. I was surprised to find an article in Enterprise Systems Journal about IGNITe/400. It is posted here.

8. Bob Cancilla went back to IBM for a while and then became a consultant. His LinkedIn page is here. In 2018 he wrote about the thirtieth anniversary of the AS/400. It is posted here. The article explains some of the reasons why IBM treated the AS/400 division and its customers so shabbily almost from day one.

9. For some reason IBM repeatedly changed the name of the AS/400 to a bunch of things with the letter i appended. The operating system remained the same. Everyone at TSI, like most users, still called it the AS/400 even after the name changes.

10. In 2007 Vio Worldwide acquired “the assets” of AdSEND. The deal is described here. In 2010 Dubsat acquired Vio Worldwide. This transaction was reported here.