Tag Archives: Celica

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

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We installed at least part of the GrandAd system at all of the companies listed below. A few may have actually been Datamaster clients. My recollections of some installations are very dim. In a few I had little or no involvement

Visitors to O&P went through this red door on Elm St.

Although Keiler Advertising evidently had a famous red door in the twenty-first century, in the eighties the most famous red door in Hartford’s advertising community belonged to O’Neal & Prelle1 (O&P), the agency that was housed across the street from Bushnell Park in Hartford. Our negotiation was with Bill Ervin2, who was, I think, already the president of the agency.

We got this account because of a phone call from Paul Schrenker, the graduate student hired by our marketing company (described here). Paul called dozens of presidents of ad agencies. Bill responded that he was interested in our system. This was probably the only positive outcome from that endeavor.

I seem to remember that O&P bought a model 5364 from TSI. I do not remember doing any custom programming, but we almost always at least customized the invoices that they sent to clients.

I worked mostly with Liz Dickman, who was the bookkeeper. Of all of our agency liaisons, she was among the best to work with. She was able to do the reconciliations by herself more quickly than anyone else. I am not sure who drew the following beautiful schematic of the installation. It certainly is not my handiwork.

Evidently we installed a 5363. A 5364 would not have supported so many devices.

Here are my most vivid memories:

  • On one visit I had to carry something down to the basement. Halfway down the staircase I felt a stabbing pain in my right knee. It did not last, but it was the first time that I had felt pain there since I recovered from the operation in 1974, as described here.
  • If I was at O&P at lunch time, I generally bought a couple of tacos from one of the food trucks. I then sat alone on a bench in Bushnell Park and chowed down. One day while I sat with my legs crossed a starling popped up on my right shoe, which was about six inches off the ground. He perched there for at least a minute or two to see if I would reward him for his clever trick. When I failed to do so, he flew away.
  • I recall Liz informing me that she planned to take the CPA exam as a flyer. She said that she did not study for it, or at least not much. She was legitimately shocked when she later learned that she had passed. Perhaps it dawned on her that she was suddenly overqualified for her job. They made her a vice-president.
  • The installation really went downhill after Liz departed. The guy who operated the computer called TSI and asked for some training. We scheduled a day for him at our office in East Windsor. He was shocked when we billed O&P for it. Evidently either no one told him that TSI had a contract with O&P that clearly designated how much free training (plenty) they received, or someone gave him some bad advice. O&P didn’t pay the bill, and shortly thereafter the agency announced its liquidation.

I am pretty sure that we sold a model 5364 to Eric Tulin Inc.4 of Hartford, CT. It might have been TSI’s developmental system. I can remember spending a few days at the office on Hamilton St. The primary operator was a guy, but I don’t remember too much about him. I must have met with Eric as well, but I don’t remember the occasion.

The agency was not very large at the time. I don’t think that they had more than five or six employees.

I recall even less about Knorr Marketing5, which was (and still is) located in Traverse City, MI, which is in the northwest part of Michigan’s lower peninsula. The agency, which must have already purchased a S/36, called TSI one day out of the blue.

We sent them some materials, and even though they had never sen a demo, they purchased some portion of the GrandAd system. We sent Kate Behart to do the installation and training. Because we used almost exactly the same system for our record-keeping, Kate knew the accounting and job costing portions of the system. So, I assume that we did not install the media portion.

Kate must have done a good job. We hardly ever heard from them, but Knorr Marketing sent us a Christmas card for many years.

Another mystery GrandAd client for me was Brannigan-DeMarco of New York. They purchased their hardware from IBM. Sue took care of this account. I am not sure how much of the GrandAd system they used.

Sue worked closely with Angela Vaccaro, who was the primary operator of the system. She called for support every few months. Sue always took care of her problems.

Similarly, I know very little about Sullivan & Brownell6 of Randolph,VT. Sue handled everything about this account, too. She visited them occasionally. Sue did not need much of an excuse to schedule a trip to Vermont. She has always loved the whole state.

The only thing that I recall about the account was the fact that the media director was a Black woman. That would not ordinarily be even a little surprising, but this was, after all Vermont. In 1990 there were a grand total of 1,951 Black people in the state, including exactly zero lawyers and judges. In fact, only eleven Black people in total lived in Randolph.

Sue told me that the media director and her husband had a farm in the vicinity. Sue told me that she might have stayed overnight there once or twice.

Using a chain saw the husband carved a fox out of a tree trunk and gave it to Sue. It sat placidly on guard out in the grass just beyond the parking spaces of our office in Enfield for many years. In 2021 it wards off coyotes in our back yard. I took a photo of it. It has seen better days.

I handled most of TSI’s interactions with Knudsen-Moore (K-M), an advertising agency located in Stamford, CT. I thought of this as an important account because it finally gave us a toehold in the southeastern (wealthy) part of the state. I also thought that it was cool that one of our clients did business with both King Oscar and the WWE (then known as the WWF).

The audience for my demo was the seventy-two year-old7 bookkeeper whose name was Irene. I must have brought a PC, our 5364, and a terminal that we were evaluating for another client. Its screen was very large for the time. This became important because the bookkeeper had very bad vision. In fact, she later confided to me that the reason that she insisted that they choose TSI’s system was because of that terminal. Ordinarily my strikingly good looks are the deciding factor, but as I mentioned, her vision was poor.

The McMahons never showed up at their ad agency when I was there.

It took us several months, for reasons that will soon be apparent, to get them up and running. During this period the agency changed hands not once, but twice. Its final name, which persists to May of 2021 was CDHM8.

The holdups for going live with the system were the balances in accounts payable and accounts receivable. The values in these accounts are generally positive for A/R and negative for A/P. If a vendor bills you $100, and you immediately bill the client with a 10 percent markup, A/P will have a transaction with a value of -100, and the entry in A/R will be +110. There will also be offsetting entries, of course. The point is that every company should be able to justify its A/P with a stack of unpaid bills from vendors and its A/R with a stack of open invoices sent to clients.

I entered in all of the open A/P and A/R into GrandAd. I printed a list of each with totals. The system’s totals did not agree with what Irene’s hand-written worksheets said were the current balances. Not only that; her balances, which were reflected in the company’s official general ledger, had the wrong sign! The A/P showed a positive balance, and the A/R showed a negative balance. According to these figures the agency’s vendors owed them money, and they were in debt to their clients!

Irene still insisted that her figures were right. I asked for a meeting with the president, Bill Hoag. The bookkeeper attended, as did a couple of other people. Their accountant was not present. I explained the situation with words similar to those of the previous paragraph. She insisted that her numbers were correct because she had checked every entry. She knew this because there was a little dot next to each figure. Much screaming ensued.

The lady had been using the “balance forward” method. After each transaction a new balance is calculated. This is OK, but at least monthly this balance must be checked against the list of invoices. She had NEVER done this. I later looked over her sheets. They were replete with errors. She simply could not read her own handwriting.

The irony of the situation did not strike me until much later. If someone had caught this egregious error earlier, we would not have won the contract. She recommended us solely because of the big screen on the terminal, remember?

How in the world could an agency with books in this deplorable condition be sold twice? I don’t know.

They asked the bookkeeper to retire. The guy that replaced her was, in some ways, worse.

I am pretty sure that his first name was George. I don’t remember his last name, but I do remember that he insisted that any communication to him include the title “Esq.” Now, I don’t pretend to know who gets to use that title, but I would be willing to bet that not many of them lived at the YMCA, which is where this character lived. George got into arguments with us all the time, and he was abusive to TSI’s employees.

For the first and only time, I finally called the agency’s president about George’s behavior. He said that he would look into it. He called me back less than hour later. He said that the guy had not been in all week, and he was now officially terminated.

The next week the president told me that they had hired a new person. I think that his name was Roger. He was very easy to work with, and he had the record-keeping straightened out in short order.

I drove to CHM an least half a dozen times. I never saw Vince or any other McMahon. It was a big disappointment.

Sue handled the account of Charmer Industries of the Astoria section of Queens. The company distributed wine and liquor products. This was probably a referral from Quique Rodriguez, an IBM rep with whom we had a good relationship.

Sue and I drove there on, as I remember it, a Sunday, carried their computer and printer into the building, and made sure that they were working. Then we drove back to Rockville. I found the whole drive within the city terrifying. I wanted to stop, get out of the car, and kiss the earth when we were back in Connecticut. I have been to NYC many times, but I have never driven inside the city limits.

Ed Wolfe.

Charmer had a lot of companies. One specialized in the design of point-of-sale products in bars and liquor stores. Over the years it went by a number of names, including ACC Marketing and the Sukon Group. These were the people who used our system.

Our final liaison in the nineties was Ed Wolfe. As I recall, the company later decided to purchase a small AS/400, the system that replaced the S/36. The AS/400 is described in some detail here. I took the train to New York a couple of times to help with the setup of the new system. Ed was a nice guy and a good client.

Doherty-Tzoumas occupied this building on Dwight Street in Springfield.

I have always thought of Doherty-Tzoumas of Springfield, MA, as a bizarre advertising agency. Dianne Doherty9 was the president. She was totally unsuited to running this agency or any other business. Her husband was a very prominent lawyer. I think that he must have set her up in this business, perhaps for tax reasons. I can only speculate.

Her partner, Marsha Tzoumas10, knew her way around advertising and the business world at least a little, and she was very nice. I felt a little sorry for her.

The agency certainly tried hard to succeed. It always seemed to be a beehive of activity. Quite a few employees had been hired. They liked to hold “focus groups”11 for their clients’ products or services, an idea that I had never previously encountered.

I worked with Marsha and the agency’s bookkeeper to set up the system, and for the most part it seemed to go rather smoothly. However, when we showed the reports for the first monthly closing to Dianne she was overwhelmed.

Dianne hired a financial consultant to help her run the business. He might have been the company’s accountant, but that is not my recollection. I was in a few meetings with him. Most of them were fine, but in one meeting we were discussing the general ledger. Dianne made a very peculiar request. She asked if there were just two or three accounts that she should concentrate on. The request was, in my opinion, absurd. There might be a few that she could pretty much ignore, but to try to focus on any small subset of a company’s books was unthinkable. Most small businesses fail, and there are many paths to failure.

Nevertheless, the consultant took the bait and named a few accounts. I can’t even remember which ones he chose. I assume that cash was one. It is generally a good idea to know how much cash you have. He probably also picked A/P and A/R.

At any rate I knew in that instant that this business was doomed. I was right. In 1991 we received a letter from Dianne’s husband Paul proclaiming that the business was being liquidated. It was the only such letter that we ever received from an ad agency. They owed us less than $100, and so we did not consider suing for it.

I remember that on one occasion Marsha mentioned that she was looking for a good book to read. I recommended Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. I wonder if she took my advice.

In 1987 Rossin Greenberg Seronick and Hill (RGS&H)12 was the hottest agency in Boston, MA. The president, Neal Hill13, was not an advertising guy. Although I never met any of the other three partners, I am sure that they all had a good deal of advertising experience.

The agency had enjoyed two years of explosive growth. It wanted a computerized system for word and data processing. Neal and Ernie Capobianco14, the director of finance, interviewed us and all of our principal competitors. Their choice of the GrandAd system was a real feather in our cap. We were confident that we could do a great job for them, and we hoped that it would open the Boston market, which we had previously never been able to crack, for us.

A Wang word processing terminal.

The holdup was the word processing element. Neal loved Wang’s approach to word processing, and he thought that DisplayWrite/36 (DW/36) was inferior. However, no ad agency software had ever been written for Wang’s operating system. In fact, I had never encountered anyone who used it for anything other WP.

When Neal told us that they had decided to use our system, he asked what we would recommend for word processing. I said that I was not an expert, but the future was in PC’s. Furthermore, if they planned to use the S/36 only for GrandAd, a 5362, which could support up to twenty-eight locally attached devices, would be more than sufficient.

WordPerfect running in DOS did not look like the answer.

My assessment turned out to be correct, but in 1987 buying PC’s with good word processing software (the most popular at the time was WordPerfect) and connecting them would have been a formidable task. Personal computers in those days were still really personal.

Neal insisted that one system should address all the needs. IBM persuaded Neal that a model 5360 with DW/36 would serve their needs.

Neal approved the purchase of a 5360 (the washer-drier model) directly from IBM.

In the meantime I received a phone call from a salesman at Wang. He wanted us to convert our software to run on Wang’s equipment. I informed him that this would be a monumental task, and, although we had dozens of successful installations on IBM hardware, we had absolutely no experience with Wang’s approach. He told me that if we agreed to convert, he had an agency lined up that would use our system. I asked him if he was referring to RGS&H. When he confirmed it, I told him that they had already signed a contract with us. This was news to him.

The system that IBM proposed included terminals for almost all of the employees. The ones with PC’s got 5250 emulation adapters. Our end of the installation went fine. We did a great deal of custom coding for them. They had spent a lot of money on the system, and they reasonably insisted that it do exactly what they wanted.

Then the bombshell exploded. Microsoft let the world know that Neal Hill had written a letter to them. In it he bragged that RGS&H had poached the copywriter and artist from the agency that had handled advertising for Lotus Development, which at that time was considered Microsoft’s biggest competitor. Microsoft had not yet assembled its Office package, and Lotus 123 and Approach were very popular applications. Neal said that RGS&H knew what Lotus was up to, or words to that effect. He also sent them two plane tickets from Seattle to Boston.

I could sympathize. Evidently no one checked Neal Hill’s work either.

This episode caused a major scandal that has been widely written about in legal, advertising, and business circles as well as in the local press. In fact, if you google the agency’s name you will get several pages of articles about it. There are so many that is very difficult to find any other information about the agency.

Neal resigned in December of 1987. Ernie was named as the interim president. Our system was fully functional by this time. Ivan Dunmire served as our liaison. He did an excellent job.

TSI indirectly got swept up in this brouhaha. The articles in the local press mentioned that RGS&H had recently purchased a computer system that was characterized either as a mainframe or as a system that was much too large for the company. So, despite the fact that the people who actually used our software appreciated greatly what we had done, we never had the good reference account in Boston that we had hoped for.

Here are some of my recollections of my experiences with RGS&H:

You can’t make it in thirty minutes if you are afraid to exceed 10 miles per hour.
  • When I was driving Ernie to lunch one day he complained that my car smelled like tobacco smoke. It must have been Sue’s. Nobody previously had mentioned it. Evidently I was “nose blind” to it.
  • One of the two contenders for the most harrowing experience of my life (the other, getting caught in the Blizzard of ’77, is described here) occurred when driving back to Rockville. It was snowing lightly, and the traffic was moving at a fairly steady pace on the Mass Pike when I reached Exit #9 for I-84 near Sturbridge. To my surprise I-84 was nearly empty. There were no tracks in the road at all. I could clearly see the reflective markers on both sides of the road, and I used them for navigation. There really was no place to stop between Sturbridge and Rockville. The Celica and I passed no one, and we were only passed by one car traveling at perhaps 30 mph. A mile or so later I saw a car that had slid into the median; I assume that it was the one that had passed me. I did not consider stopping. When I finally reached the exit for Rockville, I had to guess where it was; the asphalt was covered with several inches of snow and there were no tire tracks. I did not think that my car would make it up the steep hills in Rockville, but it did. Sue was very worried; there were no cellphones in those days.
  • After we moved the office to Enfield in 1988, I usually drove to Springfield, took a Peter Pan bus to Boston, and walked a few blocks to the RGS’s offices. By that time “&H” had been dropped from the agency’s name.
  • I loved working with Ernie, Ivan, and the other people at the agency. There were no quarrels or misunderstandings.
  • I remember that I usually walked to McDonald’s for lunch and ate a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese and a Big Mac.
  • In the nineties Ivan called us a few times for support. By that time PC networks were becoming widespread, and people were touting the idea of “client-server” systems, a term that simply meant that the data was on one system used by everyone, but each person’s computer had its own set of programs. However, Ivan said that many of the people at the agency did not understand this. They thought that the term designated a system constructed to provide better service to the agency’s clients, and they wanted to know why RGS did not have one.

I tried to recruit Ivan to work for TSI, but he turned us down. I am not exactly sure what role he would have played at TSI, but I am pretty sure that he would have done a good job.

Our other installation in Boston, Rizzo Simons Cohn (RSC), was an even bigger fiasco. I was surprised to discover that Sue has almost completely repressed the memory of The Sign of the Three.

We had been contacted by a firm called Computer Detectives (CD). The guy on the phone told us that his company had been hired by the agency to find a computer system for them. It turned out that CD was a two-person company, the guy with whom we talked and his wife. His name was Larry Ponemon16. I don’t recall hers. We dealt almost exclusively with Larry.

Sue and I went to supper at a Chinese restaurant with them. The both ordered moo shu pork; this is the only thing that Sue remembered about them. They were very surprised when we told them that we had never really had a vacation.

We showed them the system, and they liked what they saw. We gave them a proposal for the GrandAd system running on a S/36 model 5363.

AT&T 3B2 model 400.

Larry called us to tell us that they had recommended our system to RSC, but the agency preferred to run its system on 3B2, a UNIX computer manufactured by AT&T. They asked us if we could convert our system to run on it.

We researched whether the S/36 version of Workstation Basic17 would work on a 3B2, and we were assured by the company that wrote and marketed it that it would. We told CD that we were pretty sure that it would, but we would need to adjust our quote to cover the conversion costs. We did so.

We then got to meet another consultant, who, among other things, sold and marketed AT&T computers. We told him that we were accustomed to working with IBM, and we trusted its commitment to support. If he sold the system to RSC, we wanted to know whom we would contact when we had problems or questions. He said that he was our contact. Remember that there were no cellphones, and this guy practically lived in his car. We would need to leave messages. The best that we could hope for was a beeper. Then we would need to depend on him to find someone who was willing and able help us. We were used to dialing 1-800-IBMSERV from anywhere. Someone ALWAYS answered.

The CD people were there at the meeting. They and the AT&T guy assured us that we and the agency’s users would get all the support that we needed.

We converted the software to work on Unix without an inordinate amount of difficulty. That, however, did not mean that it would efficiently do everything that RSC wanted in their environment. We knew nothing about how the operating system would perform when numerous users were working on the same files at the same time. Sue spent several days at RSC trying to get the system to work, but she ran into one roadblock after another, and no one was available to help her.

After a few weeks of this foolishness, the agency got fed up. CD had not disclosed to RSC, who had paid them handsomely to conduct the search, that they were being paid a “finder’s fee” both by us and by the AT&T guy. RSC had never voiced any preference for hardware; that was just a lie. Evidently they had told RSC quite a few whoppers, too. RSC sued CD, and Sue testified for the agency. AT&T took the hardware back and refunded at least part of the cost.

RSC reopened the software search. We submitted the same proposal that we had previously given to CD. Since we had already been paid for the UNIX version, we charged nothing for the GrandAd software or for the customizations. The other contender was a New York company (I can’t remember the name) against whom we often competed. Its software ran on UNIX.

I called the finance guy at RSC, Jonathan Ezrin18, and asked about their decision. He informed me that they had chosen the other vendor. I asked him what the basis for the decision was. He responded that mostly it was the cost. The answer astounded me. I asked him what the other software company had bid. It was about $10,000 higher than ours. I asked him how they could have considered this less than our bid. He said that to be fair they had included the cost of the software in our original proposal when making the comparison.

I assured him that we were not going to give that money back. I then told him frankly that theirs was the stupidest line of reasoning that I had ever heard, and I slammed down the phone.

RSC dissolved in 1990, less than a year after that phone call. I don’t know what happened to CD. I found no trace of them on the Internet, although Lavinia Harris has published a series of novels about a young couple who call themselves “computer detectives”.

I remember visiting Fern/Hanaway19 of Providence, RI, a few times. The agency had a System/36 that they had bought from IBM. I think that we installed one or two modules there, but I don’t remember which ones.

IBM must have told Arian & Lowe (A&L)20, an advertising agency of sorts in Chicago, IL, about TSI. Sue said that she went there once. She remembers that the floor of their office would have been good for dancing, but the only thing that she remembered about the company was that their main client was the Beef Board. They mostly produced point-of-sale posters and signage.

I installed some modules of the GrandAd system there and flew out for a couple of month ends. I remember several very strange occurrences.

  • The Director of Financial Operations for the agency was Neta Magnusson21. We generally had lunch together. She always had more than one martini. I could never have concentrated in the afternoon if I had imbibed a small fraction of what she downed. I stuck with Diet Coke or iced tea.
  • A&L used its S/36 model 5360 for word processing. One time when I was there working on the GrandAd system, they somehow lost some WP documents. A few people blamed me for this. I protested that I had not done anything to any documents. Fortunately I knew enough about how DW/36 worked that I could also demonstrate that I could not possibly have done anything.
  • I ordinarily stayed at a Holiday Inn that was a short distance from A&L. On one trip I had to stay an extra day. The Holiday Inn had no availability for that extra night, but they found me a place to stay and called a cab to take me there. The cab driver said that I definitely would not want to stay there. Instead, he took me to another place that was in a rather rough part of town. However, the room was OK, and it was only one night. I was, however, happy to be out of there the next morning.
  • The agency’s was in downtown Chicago. I had to take cabs back and forth to O’Hare. One time I somehow left my glasses in the cab. Believe it or not, the next time that I went to A&L I stopped at the taxi dispatcher. My glasses were in the Lost and Found box safe and sound.
  • One of the cab drivers spoke no English at all. His girlfriend sat in the front seat and translated for him.
  • Another cab driver picked me up at A&L. I wanted to go to O’Hare. He asked me for directions. I actually rode with a cab driver in Chicago who did not know how to get to the airport! Fortunately, this was one of my last trips to A&L; I could have given him instructions blindfolded.
  • The favorite expression of the system operator at A&L was “Have a good one!” I realized that this was cheerful and completely innocuous, but for some reason it really irritated me.
  • My favorite part of the trips to Chicago was the prospect of having an Italian beef sandwich, either at the airport or bought from a street vendor.

It seems appropriate to end with the bittersweet tale of Charnas Associates of Manchester, CT. TSI and IBM scheduled a presentation to the agency at the IBM office in Hartford. The presentation was scheduled to take two hours. I went to the office early and loaded our GrandAd demo system onto the 5360 at IBM. I also went over my notes for the presentation.

The turnout was unbelievable. Around twenty people showed up from the agency. I was always happy if we got one; I had done worse than that.

I had a lot of experience at this. The format varied by only a little. Someone from IBM acted as the host. He or she was always dressed impeccably and spoke glowingly about how wonderful IBM’s systems and support were and what a close working relationship IBM had with independent software developers like TSI. Then they turned it over to me.

I hated whiteboards after this.

Not this time. The IBMer went around to each and every person in the room and asked them what they would like the computer to do to help with their jobs. After each answer he would rush back to a whiteboard and add it to the list of items that were already on the board. The he would ask them to evaluate how important this was to them. He was hoping that they would attach a monetary value to it, but he was willing to settle for peace of mind or saving time. He dutifully recorded the values as well.

This went on for at least an hour and forty-five minutes. Then he spent a few minutes praising the System/36 before he let me talk for a couple of minutes. I could not possibly do my presentation in less than a half hour. So, I had to forget about my slides and my demo and try to talk about the big picture. The worst part was that damnable list on the whiteboard behind me. Needless to say, our software addressed less than half of the wish list. Of course no one suggested “Help us find which clients are unprofitable and why” or “Help us improve cash flow”.

I was so angry at the IBMer that I could have punched him. If I had not sworn after that fight in the fifth grade with Tom Guilfoyle that I would not engage in fisticuffs, I might have.

We followed up on this, but we never heard from Charnas.

A few years later in 1989 I was scheduled to give my first AS/400 demonstration of the AdDept system that I was still in the process of installing at Macy’s in New York. TSI did not own an AS/400 yet, and so I had made a backup tape at Macy’s. I planned to install Macy’s programs and data, dummy up the data so it was not recognizable, give the demo, and then erase the programs from the disk.

I never finished the first step. Something about the tape made the AS/400 system at IBM hang up. Commands could not even be entered at the system console. I worked with these incredibly reliable machines for twenty-six years. This was the only time that I saw something like this happen.

The IBM people were furious at me. They were certain that the problem occurred because our programs were written in BASIC. I calmly explained that the programs never got restored. Something happened during the restoring process.

Nobody from IBM attended my demo. I went to the demo room to do a song and dance with no accompaniment. Only one person was there, and she was not even one of our invitees. She identified herself as a media buyer at Charnas who had heard about the event from one of her clients. I explained how the GrandAd system worked and which agencies were using it.

She told me that Charnas had a S/36. She did not know the model. I asked her how big it was. “Oh, it’s big!”

She said that they used it only for word processing, and everyone hated it. That guy from the first demo had sold them a 5360 with no software except DisplayWrite36!

I don’t remember what happened after that too clearly. I am sure that I went to Charnas’s office in Manchester at least a few times in the early nineties. I think that I installed an abbreviated media system for them. Then I got heavily involved in the AdDept system.

Charnas apparently went out of business in July of 1992.

While I was looking for information about the agency I came across the book shown at the right. It was commissioned by Robert Bletchman, an attorney from Avon who died in 2008. His obituary is here.

There is only one copy of the book on this website. The title is How to Achieve the Release of Unidentified Flying Object Information from the United States Government.The first reader with $50 can claim it. Shipping is free!

The publication date for this book is in 1985. I am pretty sure that this effort antedated Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM show on WTIC radio by approximately ten years.

1. O’Neal & Prelle went out of business in 2000.

2. Bill Ervin died suddenly in 2003. His obituary is here.

3. Liz Dickman is now the CEO of Integrated Physicians Management Services in East Hartford. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. Eric Tulin Inc. changed names and ownership a few times before giving up the ghost in 1991.

5. Knorr Marketing’s website is here.

6. In 2007, as reported here, Tom Brownell apparently transferred his client list to a group of his employees. They changed the name of the agency to 802 Creative Partners and moved the headquarters to Bethel, VT.

7. By coincidence 72 is my own age as I write this in May 2021. To be honest, if I tried to keep a manual ledger, I probably would not be able to read my handwriting either.

8, The agency’s website is cdhm.com.

Marsha.
Dianne.

9. Dianne Doherty now goes by Dianne Fuller Doherty. She resides in Longmeadow, MA, in 2021. After the agency’s failure she devoted her life to helping other small businesses, especially those run by women, get started. Her story is described here.

10. Marsha Tzoumas is now known as Marsha Montori. In 2021 she is the Chief Marketing Officer at Six-Point Creative Works, an ad agency in Springfield. Her LinkedIn page is here.

11. I used focus groups in my short story (described here).

12. RGS&H went through five name change. Its final incarnation, GSOD, Inc. dissolved in 2007.

13. Neal Hill landed in Canada. His LinkedIn page is here.

Ernie Capobianco.

14. Ernie Capobianco telephoned me in the early 1990’s. At the time he had just started working at Valentine-Radford, a big ad agency in Kansas City. He arranged for me to meet with some principals and the IT guy. I also visited Ernie’s apartment in Johnson County. I think that I caught him at a bad time. His LinkedIn page, which skips over his time at RGS&H, is here.

15. Ivan Dunmire lives in New York City. His LinkedIn page is here.

Larry Ponemon.

16. I think that Larry Ponemon now runs the Ponemon Institute, which has something to do with privacy, security, and computers. His page on the organization’s website is here.

17. Workstation Basic was designed to emulate the Datamaster version of BASIC running under DOS and later UNIX. More information is here.

18. Jonathan Ezrin apparently now lives in Plymouth, MA. He does not have a LinkedIn page.

19. Fern/Hanaway was dissolved in 1998.

20. It appears that in 1991 A&L was taken over by Daryl Travis. Various versions of Arian, Lowe and Travis (no Oxford comma) existed after that, but I think that the operation in Chicago did not survive for long. The Beef Board account represented a high percentage of its billings.

21. I think that in 2021 Neta Magnusson lives in Geneva, IL, a suburb on the west side of Chicago.

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.

1981-1985 TSI: The Office and Employees

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

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

Downtown Rockville: Crystal Blueprint is on the right.

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

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

Our first EVP.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I found it in the basement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At one time Royal was a major employer in Hartford.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Denise wanted to be a Smithie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess that this is a thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Michaud in action!

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

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

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

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

1981-1983 TSI: GrandAd: The First Two Clients

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1 + 1 = a marketable system? Continue reading →

We were very fortunate that IBM announced the Datamaster in 1981, the same year that Harland-Tine (H-T), an advertising agency in downtown Hartford, began its search for a computerized administrative system. Most advertising agencies both produce and place ads. At almost any ad agency that was large enough to consider automating, those two functions were assigned to separate groups of people. All previous low-end (under $20,000) IBM computers had no way for two users to share data. More details about the Datamaster can be read here.

Harland-Tine’s offices were in this building at 15 Lewis St., near Bushnell Park.

1981 was also the year that Sue and I moved back to Connecticut. We were also fortunate that Harland-Tine happened to have the same accountant, Dan Marra from Massa and Hensley, that TSI used. Dan told Dave Tine, the president of Harland-Tine about the time and materials billing system that we had written for his firm. As Bob Dylan sang in “Idiot Wind”, “I can’t help it if I’m lucky.”

The unique nature of advertising agencies is described here. The system that we designed for Harland-Tine is described in considerable detail here.

The installation, which began in December of 1981, went pretty well. Westy Jones1, the office manager, oversaw the installation. In phase 1, which lasted about six months, the system consisted of a job costing module, production and fee billing, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger.

Near the end of the first phase Sue worked with the people at H-T to generate some publicity for both companies. The Basic Society News, a tabloid-sized monthly newspaper dedicated to the Datamaster community, published on the front page of its August 1982 edition a rather detailed account of the installation. It was a really nice write-up with well-chosen photos. We showed it to whomever we encountered.

Until I reread the article for this blog entry, I had forgotten that H-T had also purchased a second Datamaster to use for word processing. The Datamaster had outstanding WP software, but I don’t remember ever having seen a daisy-wheel printer in H-T’s office. The Datamaster’s dot-matrix printer did have a “letter-quality” mode that sort of filled in the dots, but I would not expect any advertising agency to settle for that. Agencies are all about presentation, and dot-matrix output has never really been considered appropriate for important communications.

I have no memory of anyone named Janna Sherman. Maybe she used the Datamaster for word processing.

The second phase of the installation involved the module for media scheduling—including insertion orders, media billing, and media payables—and cost accounting (client profitability). My recollection is that H-T was able to use most of what we had developed for Potter Hazlehurst without significant changes.

I am pretty sure that H-T purchased the 30MB hard drive when they for the second phase. I don’t remember whether they purchased a third Datamaster for the media department. They might have used the one that had originally been intended for word processing.

Westy is standing. The guy is an artist who had little or no involvement in the installation. This photo was probably staged.

Considering how much time that I spent on this project, I have surprisingly few vivid memories. Westy hired Diane Ciarcia2 as a bookkeeper and primary operator of our system. She was, thank goodness, easy to work with. She was good at explaining why she didn’t like something that the software did. So, we were able to make the system rather easy to use without too many missteps.

At about the same time that Diane was hired, Sandy Bailey, a wise-cracking New Yorker, was hired as Director of Finance. She and I got along very well. She must have still been there in 1988. I remember remarking that we were furiously pitching the advertising department at Macy’s in New York. She said “If you get Macy’s, you’re all set.”

In 1984, I think, Harland-Tine merged with another Hartford agency the name of which escapes me. The other agency had been one of the very first agencies in the country to automate. Fortunately for us, their system ran on an outdated IBM 5120. So, the new agency, which set up shop in H-T’s office space, continued to use our software.

This, I take it, is a Sunfish.

The new agency was named Harland, O’Conner, Tine, and White3. I never met O’Conner; I don’t even know the right pronoun to use. I occasionally saw Will White4 in his office, which contained several copies of The Sunfish Book that he wrote. I guess that it contained all that you ever need to know about a type of sailboat that I, a native of Kansas, had never heard of. You can still get a copy on Amazon.

Diane Ciarcia left the agency during this period. A young lady from Jamaica was hired to replace her. Because the system was rather stable by this time, we did not need to work closely with her. Eventually someone discovered that she had been issuing checks to accounts that she had opened under various reasonable-sounding names and booked them as production expenses for the agency’s largest account, Hitchcock Chair.

She was not able to run this scam for very long. Dan Marra discovered discrepancies using the month-end reports that our system produced. He credited the audit trails that the system provided with unearthing the scheme. H-T definitely fired her. I don’t know if she was ever prosecuted.

Everyone should agree that flavored coffees have no place in an office. If employees what to put stuff in their cups, fine. MAKE MINE BLACK!

I have one other strong memory of TSI’s first agency installation. This was the beginning of the period, which lasted for more than two decades, during which I consistently worked long hours often seven days per week. I also needed to be very alert whenever I was working. It was very easy to make catastrophic mistakes, and, as always, nobody checked my work. I had become dependent on help from coffee, especially when I was on the road.

I remember wandering into Harland-Tine’s kitchen5 one morning. I poured myself a cup of bitter black caffeine and ported it back to the accounting area. When the first few drops hit my tongue I almost spit them back into the cup. Evidently someone thought that it would be “a nice change” to add a little flavor.

The second ad agency that we landed was Potter Hazlehurst Incorporated (PHI) of East Greenwich, RI. As I recall, they responded to a mailing that we did in 1982. Sue and I drove to their office on Route 2, where we met with Russ Hahn, the office manager, and Bruce Brewster, the accounting manager. Russ said that he liked what we had done, but they also needed a system for media. He also said that they needed to be able to see a summary of the profitability of each client on one report. He showed me what he did by hand for Herb Sawyer, the agency’s president.

We drove back to Rockville and drew up a proposal. IBM proposed two Datamasters and the hard drive that acted as a server for both data and programs. One computer was designated for accounting and one for media.

Potter Hazlehurts’s offices were in this building. The parking lot was bigger in the eighties. They had about forty employees. Herb had a reserved spot for his black Celica.

On the second trip we met with Herb for lunch, which was served all’aperto. He had not been available to meet with us on the first visit. I was almost as nervous as I had been back in 1962 in my first debate in high school, which is described here. Herb was friendly but serious. I could see that he had some doubts about our ability to pull this off. In the end he signed the contract, and we went to work.

A very fortunate thing for us was that PHI billed all of its media in advance. For example, they billed in the month of November the ads scheduled to run in December,. We designed the system so that prebilling the media was the norm. This helped us in the future in two distinct ways.

  1. It was much easier to accommodate billing in the same month or a later month than it would have been if we had started with the assumption that the ads had already run and tried to come up with a way of handling prebilled placements.
  2. It gave us a valuable selling feature. If the agency already prebilled their media, the system could handle it. On the other hand, if it did not, using our system gave the agency the opportunity to try to convince their clients that they should get the invoices in the preceding month so that they paid in the month that the ads ran. In those inflationary times, receiving the money a month or two earlier could be a big factor.
In the eighties “Online” and “Mobile” were science fiction, but “Print” included newspapers, magazines, direct mail, polybags, yellow pages, and others.

A difficult decision had to be made about the design of the media scheduling system. The different types of media differed greatly. For example ads in print media generally ran only once in an issue of a publication. Broadcast ads almost always ran repeatedly, and most of the time the date and even the program might not be specified. The size of a print ad was measured in column inches. The size of a broadcast ad was measured in seconds. The most surprising thing to me was the “broadcast calendar” that began every month on a Monday.

Furthermore, some types of ads, like billboards or yellow page advertising were sui generis.

On the other hand, it would be easier for the accounting people if the important financial information was in one place. Data entry for billing and payment would be easier, and the programs would run faster.

I decided to designate one file in which all ads were defined. It contained all the financial information and all of the other information for print ads. The fields that were peculiar to broadcast were kept in a separate file. Eventually we created a file for yellow pages, too.

The key to the ads file was the client number, the ad number (usually, but not always the production job number), and a one-character version code to distinguish different sizes of the same basic ad. I never regretted handling media this way.

I spent many days at PHI. I remember every inch of the drive. Most of the morning drives were toward the east. The sun was directly in my eyes. The return trips were mostly due west, and the sun was again in my eyes. I did not own prescription sunglasses. If there were clip-ons available, I did not know about them. It was brutal.

The Burger King in Killingly is still there, but now it has a lot of competition.

There was not much in the way of retail between Rhode Island and Rockville. On return trips I would almost always stop at the drive-through window of the Burger King on Route 101 in Killingly, CT. The consistent part of my order was a large Diet Coke to keep me alert for the rest of the journey.

If, as often happened, it was late, I would also order a whopper. One time they had a special on “Bullseye burgers”, which were two regular BK hamburgers that were a little thicker than usual and cooked with Bullseye barbecue sauce. The burgers were placed on a long roll and topped with bacon. I ordered one, and I really liked it. Ever since, whenever I cook burgers for myself on the grill, I mix Bullseye barbecue sauce in with the ground beef before cooking.

Hold the cheese.

Incidentally, I have very long fingers. At the time BK advertised that “It takes two hands to handle a Whopper.” I can assure you that I was easily able to drive while holding any BK sandwich in one hand. It did get a little clumsy if I had to change gears on my Celica.

I remember that one time I worked so late that I had to stay overnight. PHI arranged a room for me at a motel in North Kingstown, the next town to the south. It was run by an Indian couple (a rarity in New England in the eighties) with forty or fifty children who had the run of the place. It was an unusual experience for a Kansan, but I did not encounter any difficulties.

I cannot remember much about any of PHI’s employees other than Russ and Bruce. I remember noticing that over half of them had Italian names.

Bruce was a little younger than I was. He was a big guy. He was really into sailing. He had a boat of his own, and he devoted most of his spare time to it. He also disclosed to me that he would really like to be a crewman on a yacht that competed for the America’s Cup.

Russ was a few years older than I was. He was a bit of a fuddy-duddy, but he always took me to lunch. I really appreciated that. When the agency’s fortunes began to slide in the nineties, he was one of the first employees to be laid off.

I am not sure of the year in which PHI closed its doors for good. At the very end Herb Sawyer was operating the Datamaster by himself and calling us for help in closing the books. I found this rather sad.

When the PHI installation stabilized, we no longer had two customers with separate systems. We had two diverse advertising agencies using customized versions of the GrandAd system. I was fairly confident that we could market it successfully.

1. I think that Westy’s last name is now King, and in 2021 she resides in Enfield.

2.Diane’s married name is Carrabba. In 2021 she apparently lives in Bloomfield.

3. The accepted abbreviation was “Hot W”. If I had been asked my opinion, I would have suggested putting Mister White first and using “White hot” for short. It is probably a good thing that they didn’t. Shortly after incorporating, they changed the name to Harland & Tine & White.

4. I think that Will White is living in Arcadia, FL, in 2021.

5. It was a real kitchen, not just a place to make coffee and keep lunches. Susan Harland often prepared gourmet meals for clients and prospects.

1988-2004 TSI: AdDept: The Macy’s Installation

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The first AdDept client. Continue reading →

Quique Rodriguez.

In early 1988 Sue Comparetto, who had handled the GrandAd accounts in New York City, received a call at TSI from IBM’s Manhattan office. One of our contacts, Quique (KEY kay) Rodriguez1 wanted to talk with us about Macy’s New York. Its advertising department had been using software programs on an obsolete System/34 to keep track of its advertising expenses and income. The system had been developed internally by people who no longer worked for Macy’s. Documentation was minimal.

Macy’s New York had recently merged with Macy’s New Jersey. The new entity was called Macy’s Northeast, and its offices were on an upper floor of the “world’s largest store” on 34th St. in Manhattan. The advertising department’s existing system had already been stretched to the limits and would never be able to handle the increased load. Moreover, the users were not happy with some aspects of the code. Alan Spett2, one of a very large number of vice-presidents at Macy’s, had been provided by corporate with a budget for replacing or updating the existing system.

This may have been the last time that I actually jumped.

I jumped for joy and clicked my heels when I heard about this opportunity. For some time I thought that companies that produced and/or scheduled their own advertising represented a attractive untapped market for the skills and knowledge that we had acquired from our seven years works with advertising agencies. Evidently I was right. We had never approached any of these departments because I had absolutely no idea how we could even identify which companies created and placed their own ads.

Coincidentally, IBM had just announced a new mini-computer, the AS/400, to replace the System/36 (which had replaced the System/34 in 1983). This announcement and its implications for TSI are described in considerable detail here.

The train brought us to Penn Station, only a block or so from Macy’s.

I made several trips by Amtrak train to the city to document the requirements for the new system. Sometimes I was accompanied by Michael Symolon, TSI’s marketing director at the time, and sometimes by Sue. We soon learned that Macy’s advertising department did everything that an ad agency did except keep track of the amount of time spent on individual production jobs. In fact, they had an advertising agency name that they used when ordering media. In addition, the department had many other needs that regular ad agencies lacked. Specifically, they were required to allocate both production and media expenses to the selling departments. These departments were identified by three-digit numbers. Each was assigned to an administrative group that also had a number. In turn there were three levels of vice-presidents who “owned” administrative groups3.

Macy’s also billed the merchandise vendors (Clinique, Ralph Lauren, Levi’s, etc.) a portion of the expense for ads that featured their products. The cost to the merchandise department was net of these “co-op” billings. The contract could be for a percentage of the media cost or it could be a fixed amount.

The first phase of this job entailed providing Macy’s with everything that they needed to get the ads in all media scheduled—printed schedules in the format that they liked, “insertion orders” (called “delivery tickets” by other retailers) to accompany the materials sent to the media vendors, and so on—in every media. It also included keeping track of expenses and co-op for each level of the merchant hierarchy. There were several different formats that they used for reporting these breakdowns.

I envisioned that the creation of any ad would consist of five steps:

  1. An ad number within the season and a version code that was usually blank would be entered, or ad numbers could be assigned by the system by pressing a function key.
  2. A new ads screen allowed selection of the ad type (e.g., black-and-white ROP) and entry of the primary run date, which must fall with the season.
  3. The other information that applied to all of the media for the ad would be entered on a header screen. This varied by type of ad, but each screen included selection of a pub group—a list of newspapers, markets, or stations.
  4. A media selection screen showed one line for each pub in the pub group with dates, quantities, rates, and other costs or discounts. Any line could be edited or deleted. Additional pubs could be specified.
  5. A participants screen to provide the list of departments or groups for the ad with the expected cost percentages and co-op amounts for each.

Storewide ads could be entered rather quickly. Ads with many departments or groups might take a few minutes. This approach was warmly received. The employees were accustomed to specifying the participants for each pub in the ad.

After the schedule was created, any aspect of an ad could be changed, or the ad could be killed, (in exceptional cases), deleted, or moved to a different date. New ads could be defined. Once the ad was run, the actual participants and the actual co-op could be provided. History records with dates, times, and user ID’s were kept for all changes.

How did Macy’s determine the percentage of the actual cost of each ad that was to be allocated to each department or administrative group? The process astounded me. In one room4 were seated from three to five clerks. Each was provided with a stack of newspapers and a list of ads that were scheduled to be run as well as lists of department numbers and the numbers of administrative groups. They looked through the newspapers to find the ads that Macy’s had run. They then measured—with a ruler!—each of the “blocks” in the ad to see how many columns wide (six columns to a page) and how many inches deep (i.e., vertically) the block was. They then entered the column inches for each block. For blocks that were not specific to a department or group, a special “storewide” department #999 was created. The total of the measurements must exactly equal the total size of the ad.

My approach changed this process so that the clerks measured ads, not insertions (the ad in a specific paper). If the ad was already measured, the clerk could see what had been entered, who did it, and when.

A similar process was also required for each page of each direct mail piece and newspaper insert. The ads for other media were not measured, but actual percentage breakdowns were recorded.

Similarly, the actual co-op dollars received from the selling departments (a process called “turning in”) could be recorded. Lists of missing co-op could be printed.

The most important financial reports for Macy’s compared the committed co-op and costs with the actual measured costs and actual co-op. They could be run for any or all merchants (the vice presidents who owned the departments) and any or all media.

Camex was located at 75 Kneeland St. in Boston.

In addition to all of this, Alan had ideas for other modules such as an inventory system for the merchandise used for photo shoots in the studio in Newark and a system to manage the shoots themselves. He also wanted us eventually to work on an interface with the Camex system that Macy’s used to create the images for the ROP6 ads and books. Thank goodness these ideas were not included in the original contract.

TSI’s GrandAd system for ad agencies had been built around a file for ads, the key to which was a three-digit client number and a five-digit job number. So, each client could have up to 99,999 jobs. For the departmental system, which I decided to call AdDept, I designed a similar structure, but, since Macy’s itself was the only client, I made the three-digit code stand for the season. 891 meant spring of 1989. 892 was fall of 1989. Eventually, a one-digit code for the century was added as well, but otherwise this proved to be a very feasible approach.

Many other structural changes were necessary. The most significant one was the designation of a one-character version code as part of the unique identifier (key) to the main media file. This could be used to make distinctions that varied by pub (media vehicle). For example, one item in an ad might be “swapped out” for a different item in another ad. The catalogs sent to some markets might not include some pages.

The new table for the pub groups mentioned above allowed Macy’s to identifying papers in which they often ran the same ad, e.g., the tabloids. There was no limit on the number of pub groups, and pubs could be in any number of pub groups.

I did not mention this to anyone at the time, but while I was gathering requirements, I noticed a very serious flaw in the design of Macy’s existing software for the S/34. The same ad was run in a few papers, but each insertion in each paper was given a separate ad number. The clerks doing the measuring were each assigned one or more newspapers. They measured and then entered into the computer the amount of space for each department in each ad. The person next to them might have already measured the same ad in a different paper, but there was no way for them to use that information; they had to key it all in again. So, with the S/34 design the increase in the number of papers added by the merger would more than double the work in allocating costs. My approach would decrease the work even with more papers. They would only measure the ad in one paper.

How great was this? The ROI for this feature alone would easily surpass the cost of the entire system in the first year!

How was such a colossal blunder possible? Well, the S/34 programs were designed for Macy’s New York, which advertised almost exclusively in only three papers: The New York Times (a broadsheet), the Daily News (a tabloid), and Newsday, a Long Island newspaper with a unique shape. Each of these would require separate versions and therefore separate measurements. However, all of the new papers were either tabloids or broadsheets. There was no need for separate measurements.

At some point in mid-summer TSI needed to do a presentation for Macy’s at IBM’s office on Madison Avenue in New York. There was no competition; no other software developer wanted anything to do with this project. The alternative for Macy’s was to enlist their IT department to do something. No one mentioned this, but I was quite certain that the IT department would not be able to deliver a functioning system that met all the requirements within the required time frame. Of course, I was not certain that we could do it either. However, we had delivered several large projects on schedule, and I was willing to put in the hours5 to make this one a success.

590 Madison Ave., then known as the IBM Building.

I wanted to demo the GrandAd system and explain how we would adjust the database to fit Macy’s. I made arrangements to use a S/36 in IBM’s office at 590 Madison Avenue to show how our advertising agency system currently worked and how it could be adapted. I considered–and still do–this to be the most important presentation that I ever gave. It was my only chance to persuade Macy’s Advertising Director, Howard Adler, that TSI should be contracted to do the project. I figured that if we got Macy’s, and we did a good job, a whole new market would be opened to us. At that point I was still naive enough to assume that other retailers would surely be much less difficult because we had already done the programming for the largest retail advertiser in the country.

I needed to transport our GrandAd programs and our demo data to New York. Not only was it not possible in 1988 to send them there electronically using something like FTP. We did not even have access to a compatible medium. The I/O device on IBM’s S/36 in NYC read 8” diskettes. Our system in CT used 5¼” diskettes. So, I saved our programs and our data onto nine 5¼” diskettes. Then I used a machine that I had purchased for just this purpose to copy the 5¼” diskettes onto previously blank 8” diskettes. I then loaded the 8″ diskettes into a “magazine” that I had obtained somewhere. The S/36 in New York included a device for reading diskettes from such a magazine.

This is the only photo that I could find of a magazine. The diskettes are inserted in and removed from the opposite side.

You say that you are not familiar with the concept of diskette magazines? For over a decade IBM used them on the S/34 and the S/36. As far as I know, no other system from any manufacturer followed suit.

They were almost completely plastic. Their width was about an inch and a half. The other dimensions were just large enough for 8” diskettes. One side was open to allow insertion and removal of diskettes. Small plastic rails on the top and bottom of the open side kept the diskettes separate from one another. The only thing on the magazine that was not plastic was a small metallic bar near the top of the open space that held the diskettes in. The bar could be lifted up on a hinge to allow access to diskettes. The machine that read the diskettes could also do this (like a juke box), and it was smart enough to read them sequentially.

The process of saving and converting the programs and data, which I probably did over a weekend, took several hours. I then inserted the 8” diskettes into the magazine, put it in my sample case with my other materials, and then stowed the sample case in the trunk of my Celica. I do not remember why, but I must have left the car in the sun for several hours. When Michael and I reached New York and took out the magazine, we could see that the little iron bar that restrained the diskettes had apparently become hot enough to melt little notches into all the diskettes. The magazine drive on IBM’s system refused to read them. O tempora, o mores!

Michael had a brilliant idea. He used a sharp knife to slit the edge of each damaged diskette and nine new diskettes that we borrowed from IBM. The actual data was not, of course on the plasticized paper that one could handle (and therefore slit). It was on a very thin circle of magnetized film inside. For each new diskette Michael replaced the blank film disk inside with the one that he had retrieved from a diskette that I had made. Then he carefully inserted the nine new diskettes that hopefully contained our programs and data into the magazine. I then loaded the magazine into the S/36’s magazine drive again and entered the command to restore the files. The machine successfully read six diskettes. However, at that point it made an awful noise and totally mangled the seventh diskette including, because we had no way to reseal the side that Michael had slit, the precious film inside.

My dog could not juggle six balls.

So, I was faced with the prospect of making the most important presentation of my life with absolutely no software to demonstrate. The pony in my “dog and pony show” was a stick-figure drawing. Would anyone notice?

Fortunately, my many years of experience in debate at adjusting a presentation at the last minute kept me from panicking. I began the presentation by apologizing for the technical problem. I then illustrated the approach that we proposed to take using the whiteboard that IBM provided, and I answered questions as well as I could.

It was enough. Macy’s agreed to put in motion the process of contracting with TSI. As Alan later said, “You were definitely the only game in town.”

The plan was to install the system in the “System/36 environment” of a B30 model of an AS/400. The I/O devices were a single 8” diskette drive and a ½” tape drive. TSI had no system that had either of these drives, and so our only choice was to execute the cumbersome conversion process every time that we needed to make changes.

TSI could not even afford J. Cheever Loophole.

I sent Alan our usual two-page contract. He sent it to their legal department and returned one with about twenty-five pages. I should mention that the TSI was dirt poor at this time. Sue and I had been low on funds before, but this was the first situation that rose to a crisis level. Details are posted here. We certainly could not afford a lawyer. I had to read the contract very carefully and assume the worst. After a few changes, we agreed, signed it, and started work. I did almost 100 percent of the coding. The other programmers were busy with work for our other clients, and I did not trust Sue to do the work.

I was not able to use a single program from the GrandAd system. I thought that at least one of the many insertion order programs that we had written for ad agencies would be usable without much modification, but I was wrong. The people in retail advertising just do not think like the people in advertising agencies. Every single program was written from scratch.

We had no time to produce a detailed design document describing the project. Our drop-dead deadline was the end of the season in late January. All programs must be totally functional. The process was:

  1. Write the code.
  2. Get it to the point where there was something to show to Macy’s.
  3. Save the changes to 5¼” diskettes.
  4. Copy the 5¼” diskettes to 8” diskettes.
  5. Take the train to New York.
  6. Install the new software from the 8″ diskettes. This could take up to an hour.
  7. If changes had been made to the database definitions, make them on Macy’s system.
  8. Make changes on the fly as necessary.
  9. Show Macy’s how the new code works.
  10. Save the changes to 8” diskettes.
  11. Bring the 8″ diskettes on the train ride to TSI.
  12. Copy the 8” diskettes to 5¼” diskettes.
  13. Install the changes on TSI’s system.
The luxurious Windsor Locks Amtrak stop. This is the view looking north. From the parking lot the engine’s light could be seen under the bridge.

This was, to be sure, a terrible way to do things. It required me to make at least one trip to New York every week for several months. Usually it was up and back on the same day. I stayed overnight at a hotel a couple of times. Often I made two up-and-back trips in a week. Each trip required a twenty-five minute drive to the train platform. I boarded the train at 6:00 AM in Windsor Locks. There is only a platform there. I therefore sat in my car with the heat on until I saw the light of the train approaching.

The word you did not want to see was “DELAYED”.

If everything went well, I arrived back at the train platform at 9:30PM. The trains in the evening, however, were almost never on time. Those trains originated in Miami, FL. There were plenty of opportunities for delay as each one crawled its way north. A report on my most memorable Amtrak experiences is posted here.

During this process Alan would quite often come up with new thoughts as to what should be in the “base system” covered by the contract. I grumbled, but I almost always did what he asked. One morning I saw a Daily News in Penn Station with the headline “Macy’s Computer System is Driving Me Crazy!” I bought a paper, cut out the headline, and taped it to the inside of my sample case.

Meanwhile, TSI had received only a deposit from Macy’s. However, we were desperate to receive that final check. I saw no alternative to this nightmarish schedule.

The scope of the project was enormous, and almost nothing from the GrandAd code was usable for this project. In addition to everything else, the emphasis at Macy’s was on newspaper ads. In my experience ad agencies used the term “print”, which for them referred to direct mail and magazines. Most agencies treated newspapers as magazines that published more often on cheaper paper to a geographically limited audience. The ingrates who ran the papers did not even offer discounts to ad agencies. Macy’s, on the other hand, could run a dozen or more ads in one issue of a newspaper.

Time to go home.

Mirabile dictu! By February, 1989, the system was stable enough that Macy’s paid us most of the balance. This did not end the crisis at TSI, but it allow us to meet the payroll for a few months. In retrospect, I cannot imagine how we pulled it off. I remember working seven days a week. I was always at work by 6AM, and I seldom left before 7PM7. I admit that I always went home for lunch, and I usually took a short nap.

Gary Beberman.

What enabled the completion of this seemingly impossible task in that amount of time was the fact that Alan somehow got Gary Beberman8 to serve as the project manager. He could speak advertising to the workers at Macy’s and geek to us. I only trained one person; Gary trained the others. I am not sure where Alan found Gary or how he got assigned to the project, but he was a godsend. He saved us a huge amount of time and frustration, and he was also quite adept on pouring oil on troubled waters during the frustrating periods in which I was working feverishly on the code.

The next two projects for Macy’s were an inventory system for the “loan room” (usually called “merch room” at other retailers) and a more sophisticated system of entering and reporting actual costs, what Macy’s called “financials”. I gathered the specs for these projects on trips to Macy’s and produced detailed design documents, which Alan quickly approved.

Denise Bessette did almost all of the programming on these two large requests, and she did an outstanding job. I installed the code and showed the people at Macy’s how to use the programs.

Merchandise that was afraid of the traffic could have just as easily taken the train.

The loan room gathered merchandise needed for photo shoots and sent it to the photo studio in Newark or to some other location. Part of the automation of this process was the printing of tags for each item. Almost as soon as this was implemented, the amount of pilferage reportedly decreased dramatically. The merch room manager told me that previously a lot of merchandise had trouble remembering the way back to Manhattan from Newark. She was extremely happy with the new system.

Denise also completed the other project according to the approved design document, and I delivered it. The finance manager then produced a bevy of changes that she wanted. I offered to quote the changes at TSI’s usual fee of $75 per quote. Alan said that Macy’s was under the impression that these programs fell under the terms of the original contract. It clearly did not include them. He was also surprised that I insisted on charging for my time at Macy’s after the warranty period. I would not give in on these matters, and this caused some bitterness.

At some point in this process TSI leased an AS/400 model B10 from IBM. We hooked everyone up to it, and we converted all of Macy’s programs to run in the native environment instead of the System/36 environment. This project went fairly smoothly. I don’t remember any great headaches, and the programs were considerably faster.

In other respects the installation also proceeded rather smoothly as long as Gary was there, but when he and his wife moved to the West Coast, things started to get a little testy. Alan hired Satish Rahi9 (accent on the second syllable in both names) to manage the installation. Satish must have presented himself as an alternative to paying TSI to program reports. He thought that he could produce any desired output using a third-party query product from a company called Gupta Technologies. Their Wikipedia page is here.

Satish was shocked that the product did not work on most of our tables. I told him that there was nothing in our contract that said or implied that third-party products (of which even then there were quite a few) would work with tables that we designed and implemented. IBM’s Query/400 product had no trouble with any of our tables. After considerable digging I determined that the source of the problem was that we wrote records in BASIC, not in SQL10, which was not even available on the AS/400 yet. The designers of Gupta’s product evidently did not take this into account when they began marketing to AS/400 customers.

Satish started lecturing me about industry standards for databases. I explained that the industry standard for writing x-digit positive integers in BASIC was N x, which left-pads these numbers (such as the ad number) with blanks, as opposed to ZD x, which left-pads with zeroes. In fact, most versions of BASIC did not even have a way to write “zoned decimals” without writing extraneous code to do it11. One day I got so upset while arguing with Satish about this that I seriously considered driving down to the Amtrak stop so that, after sitting on a train for over three hours, I could ride the elevator up to his floor at Macy’s and punch him in the nose.

Not long after this conversation Alan fired Satish, and eventually we changed all the programs to “zone” all the integers. Of course, we got paid for neither this project nor the conversion to the native environment, but we felt that we had to do them to hope to stay in IBM’s and Macy’s good graces.

Denise Jordaens.

From that point on we dealt with Denise Jordaens12 and Lee Glickman13 at Macy’s. Things stabilized, but the department did not get nearly as much out of the system as it could have.

Over these years Macy’s went through a lot of changes. In January of 1992 the company declared bankruptcy, thereby leaving TSI with a stack of unpaid invoices. In 1994 Macy’s was absorbed into Federated Department Stores, which had itself just emerged from bankruptcy. This gave them a new set of standards to abide by. Eventually other acquisitions gave Macy’s in New York a large number of new stores to manage on the east coast. They continued to use the loan room system and to pay our maintenance bills. They never asked about any of the enhancements that were installed at Macy’s South and Macy’s West.

There were other complications as well. On one occasion Macy’s asked for someone from TSI to visit so they could explain their problems with and aspirations for the system. My schedule was totally booked for weeks in advance. I asked Sue to take the trip. She did. I don’t know what transpired, but Denise Jordaens later told me that they made a voodoo doll of Sue and stuck pins in it.

I may have made some bad decisions about Macy’s. I did not yet understand how decisions about products and services like those offered by TSI were made in a large retail advertising department. This issue is discussed in more detail here.

TSI probably should have charged more for the original installation and used the money to hire another full-time programmer. Maybe we should have tried to borrow money from somewhere. I was unwilling to put all of our eggs in the Macy’s basket. Macy’s declaration of bankruptcy was a devastating blow to TSI. When Macy’s was acquired by Federated Department Stores14, it appeared to me that the decision to concentrate our efforts elsewhere had been a sound one.

As it turned out, however, Macy’s eventually gobbled up nearly all of the regional department stores in the entire country. The strategy that I chose helped TSI succeed for more than twenty years, but if I had gambled on Macy’s, we might still be in business in 2021. On the other hand, we would have been working almost exclusively for Macy’s for most of that time. Such an experience might have really driven me crazy.

The story of the Macy’s installation had a bizarre final chapter. It is recorded here.

1. According to his LinkedIn page (which is here), in 2021 Quique Rodriguez is retired and enjoying family time. I suppose that it is possible.

2. Alan Spett lives in Atlanta in 2021. His LinkedIn page can be found here.

3. So, I designed the database with five levels of participants. The lowest level was always called a department, but the names of the other four levels to be used on reports and screens could be specified by each AdDept client. At all Macy’s divisions they were called Administrative Groups, Group VP’s, Senior VP’s, and Group Senior VP’s.

4. This same room housed the AS/400, at least for a while. I sat at an empty desk when I was there. When the first phase of the installation was completed, some of the measurement clerks were reassigned to other tasks.

5. Unfortunately, I don’t think that I was careful enough to account for the large number of unproductive hours that I would spend on trains, in meetings at Macy’s, and in converting files. The round-trip train ride alone accounted for six or seven hours and a drive of nearly an hour, So, each full day at Macy’s was matched by another full work day getting there and back!

6. ROP stands for “run of press”. All display ads (as opposed to preprinted inserts) that are run in a newspaper are called ROP. It is not an acronym; all three letters are pronounced.

7. I am a “morning person”. Any work that I did after 7PM was likely to be counterproductive. Moreover, I needed a few caffeine-free hours so that I could fall asleep at 10PM and stay asleep.

8. I have kept in touch with Gary Beberman. He moved to California to work as a consultant and then was employed by Macys.com. Macy’s West and Neiman Marcus hired him as a consultant during their AdDept installations. He was the only consultant whom I ever respected. He has lived in Marin County for the last five years. He and his wife are hoping to retire to Italy.

9. Satish Rahi’s LinkedIn page is here.

10. SQL (structured query language) was invented in the seventies by two IBM researchers, but at the time of the debut of the AS/400 no IBM computers used it much. The reason, we were told, was that it was much less efficient than the ISAM methods that IBM endorsed. Later IBM computers, including the AS/400, were designed to maximize the efficiencies of SQL queries.

11. What I said to Satish was correct from my perspective, but perhaps I should have asked him what made Gupta Technologies think that the AS/400’s relational database conformed to these “industry standards” that he cited. After all, SQL had been invented by IBM, and IBM was not yet positioning its AS/400 as an alternative to the “standard” databases such as Oracle, Sybase, or Informix.

12. According to her LinkedIn page (here) Denise Jordaens still works as coordinator of media systems for Macy’s.

13. I think that this might be Lee Glickman’s LinkedIn page.

14. A more detailed discussion of TSI’s long and torturous relationships with Federated Department Stores can be found here.