Tag Archives: IBM 5120

1981-1985 TSI: IBM System/23 Datamaster

Posted on by
2

The beloved Databurger. Continue reading →

In July of 1981 IBM announced a new system for small businesses. It replaced the system that we were familiar with, the IBM 5110/5120. Outside of the people who programmed software for small businesses, the unveiling of the System/23 Datamaster was greeted with very little enthusiasm. For one thing the model that IBM was promoting looked very much like the 5120. The cost was half as much as the 5120, but it was still a lot more than what people were paying for “personal computers” that were marketed by competitors. Most people eagerly awaited IBM’s approach in that market.

That answer would come in a few months. To us at TSI the Datamaster was just what the doctor ordered. The information about this system on the Internet is shamefully incomplete and, in a few places, erroneous. Here are details of the original announcement.

The 5322 took up much of a desk. The printed documentation shown here was uniformlyexcellent.
  • The processor was an eight-bit 8085 chip from Intel, which was a little bit surprising. IBM did not usually outsource processors, and the 5110/5120 used a sixteen-bit processor. The 256K of memory seemed more than adequate.
  • The only programming language supported was BASIC. Nevertheless, IBM offered no method of converting programs from the 5110/5120. This did not bother us much, but software companies that had put a lot of effort into systems for those computers were not happy.
  • There were two models. The 5322 looked a lot like a 5120. The 5324 came in three pieces. Its processor and diskette drives were housed in a standing steel box the height of a two-drawer file cabinet. The display and keyboard for the 5324 were separate.
  • The displays for both models used green letters on a dark background. Research had shown that this was slightly easier on the eyes than other combinations. This was somewhat important.
  • Two CPU’s could be connected to a box that held two additional diskette drives. We never saw anyone who purchased this box, which was benerally called a “toaster”.
  • IBM supplied several business applications, including accounts payable, general ledger, and payroll. We worked with several customers that had bought these packages. In general they found them extremely cumbersome and painfully slow.
  • A word processing program was also available from IBM. Unlike the business applications, the word processor was extremely good.
  • At first only two printers1 were available. Both were dot matrix printers. One printed at 80 characters per inch, the other at 120 characters per inch. Only idiots bought the 80 cps one, but it allowed IBM to quote a lower base price.
  • The most important change as far as TSI was concerned was that the BASIC interpreter allowed variable names of up to eight characters. This was a huge improvement over the 5110/5120, which only allowed one character and an optional digit.
  • The BASIC interpreter was also changed to allow up to five digit line numbers. There were a few other improvements as well. I don’t remember all of them, but I remember being very impressed with what we would now be able to do.
  • The system came with a set of templates that fit at the top of the keyboard. Each template displayed what it meant to use the key labeled “Cmd” and one of the keys. Every system command, every BASIC command, and every operation of the word processing program could be accessed by pressing two keys. This feature made it possible even for people who were not good typists to key in long BASIC programs very rapidly.
  • The components of the system were of very high quality. Many of our customers used the systems for years without ever encountering problems with hardware or the system software.
The 5324 was called “ergonomic”. It took up less desk space, and the tilt of the display could be adjusted.

I don’t know the date of the additional features, but they came within a year or so

  • A letter-quality printer that used a daisy-wheel. In my opinion, the addition of this printer made the Datamaster the best stand-alone word processor available. It was certainly superior to the Displaywriter that IBM sold for that purpose. When we got one, we used it for all of our word processing (and everything else) for many years.
  • A hard drive unit that could hold up to 30 megabytes. Up to four Datamasters could be attached to it. The software for record-locking had already been delivered in order to make the toaster usable by two Datamasters. So, the delivery of the hard drive made the Datamaster a true multi-user system. Also, access to the hard drive was much faster than to diskettes. Reliable PC networks were still years in the future, and the PC’s themselves were notoriously subject to the dreaded “blue screen of death” and other catastrophic failures.
The brains of the 5324 was in this stand-alone box designed to fit under a desk. The hard drive was the same shape minus the two diskette slots.

There were, of course, some severe limitations. Most of them were similar to limitations that the users of the 5120 also faced.

  • All of the hardware interfaces were unique and strange. This made it difficult, if not impossible, for third-party hardware vendors to develop printers or anything else that could attach to the computer. IBM had done this for years, but Datamaster prospects were not accustomed to this approach.
  • There was still no way to communicate with the system remotely. This meant that it was very difficult to market a software system to customers outside of driving distance.
  • There were no subprograms that could be called repeatedly as routines. Programs could be linked together, but all the needed data also had to be passed. The first program was erased from memory when the second was called. So, commonly used routines—such as date functions—needed to be built into every program that needed them.
  • There was no text editor with a search function.
  • The system had no graphical capability at all.
  • Calculation-intensive applications were so slow that no one could possibly use them. One company developed and tried to market a spreadsheet program through other software vendors. The instructions for showing the software to a potential client highlighted the places in which the person doing the demo should have some patter ready to distract the prospect from watching the screen. I would not have been able to keep a straight face.
  • The only backup medium was diskettes. We dreaded when users backed up because they sometimes designated the wrong drive as the target.
The system came with several “templates” that showed what the various keys did when used in combination with the Cmd key. One template was for system commands, one for BASIC, and one for the word processor.

From TSI’s perspective one of the best things about the Datamaster was that the IBM sales reps were suddenly eager to work with software companies. They could sell Datamasters to many diverse businesses, and the starting price had been cut in half. They brought us in to meet with prospects, but only when the IBM software packages were not applicable. Therefore, we ended up creating systems with little chance of being appropriate for more than one customer. It was enjoyable and satisfying work, but not very profitable.

Eventually IBM started a Value-Added Remarketer (VAR) program that allowed software companies with qualifying products to sell Datamasters. When that happened, the IBM reps treated us as competitors even though they got some credit for our sales.

1.There was really only one printer. The slow one could be “field upgraded” by an IBM customer engineer who made a slight adjustment to speed the printing.

1979-1981: Detroit: The Birth of TSI

Posted on by
2

An unimpressive beginning. Continue reading →

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

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

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

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

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

Any resemblance was purely intentional.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1979-1981 IBM 5110-5120

Posted on by
Reply

TSI’s first computer. Continue reading →

IBM 5110.

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

The 5120 and the printer that both systems used.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 5120 console weighed ninety-nine pounds!

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

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

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

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

Born free; everywhere in chains.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1977-1980 Part 1: Dealing with Detroit

Posted on by
3

Living in Detroit was convenient but challenging. Continue reading →

U-M’s speech department knee-capped its debate program for the 1976-77 school year. I finished up my masters degree and applied to George Ziegelmueller at Wayne State as a PhD student. I was accepted. My new career as a graduate assistant started in the fall semester of 1977.

This lot is where our house was. The tree was not there.

This lot is where our house was. The tree was not there when we lived there.

When I took the job at Wayne State, Sue was already working at Brothers Specifications in Detroit. It therefore made sense for us to move from our apartment in Plymouth to Detroit. We could get a lot more for less money, and both of our drives would be shorter. We rented a house at 12139 Chelsea, near City Airport (now called Coleman A. Young International Airport) and Chandler Park. We had at least twice as much space as before, and that did not count the full basement with a large wet bar.

At the time of our move I still had my little green Datsun 1200 hatchback. Sue’s Colt had been abandoned after it threw its third rod. She bought a gigantic Plymouth Duster to replace it. We called it the Tank; neither of us had ever owned a full-sized car before. I vividly remember changing one of its tires on an upward sloping exit ramp on the Ford Freeway in an ice storm. I got the card jacked up, but while I was loosening the bolts the jack gave way, and I had to start over. I was in a really rotten mood when I finally arrived home.

Sue and I had no complaints at all about the house on Chelsea. The rent was unbelievably cheap, and the house was well-built and comfortable. Furthermore, we lived there for quite a while without incident. The house to the right in the photo was occupied by a couple named Freddy and Juanita and their holy terror of a son, Fre-Fre, who used to throw rocks at me when I mowed our lawn. We were friendly with everyone in the neighborhood. When we moved in during the summer of 1977, all of the houses on both sides of the street were occupied. By the time that we left in very late 1980 several houses were empty and two or three were boarded up.

The first troubling incident occurred on New Years Eve. Sue and I were watching New Years Rocking Eve or one of the other countdown shows. We heard a fairly loud sound that could only have been a collision between two cars. I went outside and saw that our Plymouth Duster, which, as always, we had parked on the street in front of the house, was now sitting up past the sidewalk into the bushes in Freddy and Juanita’s front lawn. The left front bumper was a little dented, but otherwise it seemed OK.

The boy who lived directly across the street, whose name neither Sue nor I can now remember, told me that he had seen the car that crashed into ours and pointed up the street. I jogged up to where the car had just parked. I memorized the license plate number and the address of the house that the people in the car had entered.

Then we called the police. They came, but they were not much interested in pursuing the matter. They went to the house that I indicated, but the man who claimed to have driven the car said that our car pulled out and struck his car. He was allegedly sober, but the other man was not. Even though I told the police that there was an eyewitness, they said that there was nothing that they could do. Hey, it was New Years. No blood, no foul.

The second incident was at the office that I shared with Pam and Billy Benoit in Manoogian Hall at Wayne State. I was there in the evening because I was scheduled to teach a three-hour speech class in the College of Lifelong Learning. The next morning we all realized that some stuff was missing from the office. We called Wayne State Police. The lady who investigated noticed that the door had been scratched by some kind of tool. Evidently someone forced it open. That was a relief to me. The stuff the Benoits had lost was more valuable than what I lost (I don’t remember the items—a radio, I think). I am notoriously absent-minded, and I feared that I had forgotten to lock the door.

That week all of the doors in the building were outfitted with steel plates that were designed to prevent anyone from tampering with the locks.

PanasonicOur house in Chelsea was attacked three times. The first time was in 1978 or 1979. While Sue was at work and I was at school, someone broke the glass on our back door and entered the house in broad daylight. They took the television, the Panasonic stereo unit that was also in Bob’s apartment on the Bob Newhart Show, and the AR-15 speakers.

AR15We called the police, but they would not come because the perpetrators were no longer there. They told us to come to the precinct station to fill out a report. Since we did not have insurance, we could not see that that would accomplish anything. We did tell our landlord. He commiserated with us, and he replaced the glass on the door.

The second attack came when I was alone in the house taking a nap. I was awakened by a crash of glass that seemed to come from the back of the house. I kept my aluminum softball bat near the bed for just this eventuality. I walked swifty towards the back door brandishing my bat. The guy must have heard me; when I reached the door, he was running through our back yard toward the alley. I was disappointed. I planned to look him squarely in the eye and then swing at his knees. What if he pulled out a gun? Well I was still bullet-proof at that point.

I called the police and the landlord. The former gave me the same answer as previously. The latter replaced with plexiglass all the windows facing the back yard.

When I told some of the people at Wayne State about this incident, Gerry Cox took me aside and said that he and his 9mm handgun would like to move into our house for a little while. I declined his offer, which was serious.

5120By the time of the third attack late in 1980 we had replaced the television and the stereo system. This time when I came home I found the entire back door in the basement at the bottom of the steps. The plexiglass had held, but the hinges had not. This time the house was ransacked. Our brand new television and stereo were gone, but, thank goodness, they did not touch our computer and printer. They were both very heavy, and at the time it was pretty much unheard of for anyone to have a computer in the house.

This time the police came. They were especially interested in the fact that the mattress had been removed from the bed. The investigator told us that they were looking for guns.

This attack was a blessing in disguise. At that point we had already decided to go back to Connecticut after Christmas. The burglary gave us fewer things to move, and the insurance money just about covered the cost of moving what remained.

Sue learned about our last problem before I did. She received a call at home from the police. They informed her that someone had stolen the battery from our car, and they had it at the precinct station near Wayne State. She called me at work. I had driven the Duster that day and parked it on the street near Manoogian Hall.

This was, as I recall, my very last day at Wayne State. I persuaded someone to let me use his battery to help jump-start the car. That worked. I then very carefully drove a couple of miles to the precinct headquarters. If the car had stalled, I would have been stranded. There was no battery in it, and I had no means of communication.

I parked and stepped inside. I had to sit around for quite a while before a detective could talk with me. He said that the theft had been witnessed through binoculars by a Wayne State cop positioned on the roof of one of the buildings. She had called the DPD, and they apprehended the thief while he was still carrying the battery. He told me that the perpetrator was also wanted for grand theft auto.

JCPI asked him for the battery. He said that the police needed it as evidence. I insisted that I needed the battery. My car was parked outside, and there was no battery in it. Furthermore, we were leaving town within the week, and we absolutely needed the battery. He still tried to claim that the battery was evidence, but when I pointed out that they had an eyewitness, and they were actually going to prosecute the guy for the auto theft, he relented.

The property officer led me down to the area where all the “evidence” was kept. There were two batteries in the cage. Neither was tagged. He asked me which one was mine, and I pointed at the JC Penney one. If I had pointed at the other one, I am sure that he would have given it to me. I had heard that every year the DPD had a big event in which it sold all of the unclaimed property. There was no way that anyone ever intended to use my battery as evidence.

WWI had no involvement whatever in the most serious incident. I was home watching Wonder Woman while Sue went to a nearby drug store for something. When she stepped inside the door, a guy with a gun told her to go to the back of the store and sit on the floor. She did so. Eventually, the guy left and the police came. Sue told them that she didn’t know anything, and they let her go.

She was still pretty upset when she arrived back at the house. She said, “I couldn’t believe it. I walked into the drug store right in the middle of a robbery. The guy had a gun!”

I replied with great compassion, “Really? You sound a bit unnerved. You missed a great Wonder Woman. They showed Lynda Carter in a bathing suit.”

There was one other major problem with living in Detroit—the snow. The city plowed the main streets, but it never maintained the streets in our neighborhood. The years that we lived there were characterized by cold and snowy winters. For weeks after a snowfall the streets had two cleared ruts a foot or so wide. Essentially every side street became one-way. Getting from our house to a main road was often a real challenge, especially for my Datsun, which was the absolute worst car in bad weather.

We did not have a problem with rats at our house, but other parts of the city did. The city purchased small steel dumpsters for every residence. The lids were rubber or plastic. Ours was back by the alley. Not long after these dumpsters were in place, somebody discovered that it was fun to put a lit M80 in one and shut the lid. The dumpster survived with no difficulty, but the lid was blown to bits. Pretty soon the rats had easier access to the garbage than ever.