1983-1985 TSI: GrandAd: The Datamaster Clients

Posted on May 6, 2021 by Mike

A good fit for several agencies. Continue reading →

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This requirement alone would leave me out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My fingertips were on the keyboard, not each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. Workstation Basic is described in some detail here.

12. Wang filed for bankruptcy protection in 1996.

1981-1985 TSI: The Office and Employees

Posted on April 25, 2021 by Mike

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 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 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.

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 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.

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.

1981-1985 TSI: A4$1: The Whiffs

Posted on April 22, 2021 by Mike

Not many. Continue reading →

My recollection of the early years of TSI is a period filled with frustration. However, aside from the abortive attempts to take existing installations and transform existing code into marketable systems (as described here), I can remember only three occasions in which we got as far as meeting with the prospect and did not win the contract. Only two possible explanations for this come to mind: either IBM only told us about the basket cases who were desperate to automate, or I have suppressed the unpleasant memories.

One failure I remember fairly vividly, but I cannot recall the name of the company. Sue and I met with a couple (I don’t remember their names either) who were considerably older than we were. So, they were at least in their forties. They owned a parking lot on Route 75 in Windsor Locks, the home of Bradley International Airport. Their business catered to people who needed a place to stow their cars for a few days while they were away on trips. The airport had its own lot, but at least a half-dozen lots in the vicinity offered shuttle services to the terminals and lower rates than the airport’s lots.

I was very interested in doing a system for them. It seemed to me that we could get it up and running fairly quickly and then pitch their competitors who must, I assumed, have very similar requirements for keeping track of the slot numbers in which the cars were parked and the work schedules for the employees.

It did not work out. I am pretty sure that we sent them a letter with a proposal, but we never heard from them. They might have been put off by the cost, especially if they had read about or heard about PC’s for under $1,000. The other possibility is that the owners were afraid of computers. People born before World War II were, for the most part, completely ignorant of what computers could and could not do. In fact, I am pretty sure that this company was out of business by the time that I started flying a lot in the nineties.

It was probably good that we did not pursue this further. Over the next decade or so, almost all of the parking lots changed hands or were sold to hotels. Even if we had gotten a few installations, the long-term prospects were not good.

My memories of the Laurentano Sign Company are not as distinct. It was (and is) located in Terryville, which is several suburbs west of Hartford. I am not even sure exactly what software, other than fairly standard bookkeeping systems, they were seeking. The business consisted of designing and either manufacturing or arranging for the manufacture of signs of all types for their clients. Signs are probably the oldest form of advertising, but for most agencies they are a negligible portion of the workload. So, our experience with ad agencies did not count for much.

I was quite impressed with the company even though there was almost no potential for selling any custom software that might emerge to other businesses. I am pretty sure that we sent a proposal to them, but we never heard from them.

In 2021 the company is still in business, and it is still in Terryville. It claims to be the largest custom sign company in the world.

The Perri Sausage Company was (and still is) located in New Haven. Every grocery store in the area carries their products. The company’s website claims that its secret recipe is 450 years old.

I don’t think that we met with the company’s representative in New Haven, and he certainly did not come to Rockville. Maybe our meeting was at the IBM office in downtown Hartford.

We really had nothing to offer them. If we attempted to do this project we would need to design a very complex inventory system from scratch. Their products obviously changed in value with age. The guy with whom we met told us what they called sausages that because of their age required to be reworked as a different product. I don’t remember the precise term, but it was reminiscent of “the bloom is off the rose.”

At one point he mentioned that one of the other software companies with which he had spoken had no experience at all with food manufacturing or distribution. I immediately admitted that we did not either. That pretty much ended the conversation.

There must have been other prospective clients that we failed to land. If I think of any, I will add them here.

1981-1983 TSI: GrandAd: The First Two Clients

Posted on April 22, 2021 by Mike

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.

1989 The Story Contest

Posted on April 10, 2021 by Mike

My fifteen seconds of fame. Continue reading →

Northeast magazine was a “Sunday supplement” for the Hartford Courant. In April of 1989 the magazine sponsored a contest to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which was written when Mark Twain and his family lived in Hartford. Each contestant was asked to write a story of 5,000 words or fewer that updated Twain’s tale. The first prize was a two-week trip to England. I had never been anywhere on the east side of the Atlantic. I felt ready.

This contest appeared to be right in my wheelhouse. I was pretty sure that I had read the book when I was a kid; I certainly had seen the movie with Bing Crosby. I went to the library and checked out the book. It took me a couple of weeks to read; I was surprised by the dark tone and the carnage at the end. If I had read it in school, I was pretty sure that I would have remembered those scenes and discussed them with my friends. Young guys like to envision massive destruction. Maybe I only read the Classics Illustrated version.

Twain left out the Rhonda Fleming character; so did I.

I had a month or two to write my story. Who would be the protagonist? The people from Connecticut with whom I was most familiar were in advertising or computers. I decided to go with an ad agency executive who knew just enough about computers to be dangerous.

At that time the big controversy in the advertising community was whether agencies were required to charge Connecticut’s sales tax on any or all of the billings_¹. Some did, and they bitterly resented those who did not.

I contrived the deus ex machina for moving the action from the Land of Steady Habits to Arthurian Britain by conflating the confusing roads around the north meadows, a ghastly fog that I endured one evening, and a huge tree that I had seen growing in an intersection in Canton.

LJN produced the WWF action figures available in 1989. I put the wood carvers to work on the ones for the sixth-century knights.

The WWF (now called the WWE) was a client of CDHM Advertising, one of the users of TSI’s GrandAd system. When I combined wrestling with focus groups, the plot rather quickly came together. Coming up with an ending was the really hard part. I wrote one, but I wasn’t a bit satisfied with it. Has any time-travel story ever had a satisfying ending.

I never wrote anything out in longhand. I composed it in my head while I was jogging, which I did during my customary long lunches and in the evening.

The monks made trading parchments for the kids.

I keyed the text in on the Datamaster that was sitting on a table in the entryway between the garage and the house. Attached to it was the daisy-wheel printer. I seriously doubt that anyone in 1989 had access to better equipment for writing a story. I produced at least ten drafts.

I printed out a copy of the final version, which I entitled “Sir Consultant’s Strategic Plan”. I counted the words on the first page and multiplied by the number of pages². It was about 5,000, maybe a little longer. Would they really check? I mailed it to Northeast magazine well before the deadline.

At some point in the fall, someone from the Courant called TSI’s office and asked to speak to me. She said that they wanted to publish my story, and she asked for permission to do so. Of course I agreed.

A few hours later I received a second phone call. This time Lary Bloom³, the editor of the magazine, was on the line. Chris Vegliante answered the phone and put Lary on hold. When she told me who was on the other end, she also added, “You won the contest, didn’t you?”

Lary informed me that I had indeed won the contest. He told me that there had been over two hundred entries, some from professional writers. He asked me if I had ever thought that I might win. I couldn’t lie. I had worked hard on it. I thought that it was a really good story, the best that I had ever written. Never mind that at that point in my life I had written almost nothing beyond technical manuals, TSI’s marketing and sales materials, and a few papers in graduate school. I had never even taken a single English class in my ten and a half years in school. I must have been very arrogant. I simply answered, “Yeah, I did.”

Don’t get me wrong. I was on a cloud for at least a week. I considered winning the contest one of the greatest accomplishments of my life.

Lary asked me to come into the office of the Courant on Broad St. to talk about it. When I arrived he warned me that I could not use “schmuck” or “schlub” because they were curse words in Yiddish. I looked both of them up at the library and decided that he was wrong about “schlub”. I did replace “schmuck” with “cutthroat”. I should have used the wrestling term “heel”, but no one in the wrestling world in 1989 admitted that they had assigned roles. I also didn’t know the industry term for the many wrestlers who always lose televised matches and never appear in major arenas. I subsequently discovered that the accepted description is “jobber”.

Lary emphasized to me that the voting for the prize was very close. He said that one judge, Dr. James A. Miller⁴, a professor of literature at Trinity and Wesleyan, had lobbied hard for my story, and that had ultimately made the difference. The other judges were:

Justin Kaplan, author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain.
David E. E. Sloan, author of Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian.
Garret Condon, arts editor (and former book editor) of the Courant.
Dorothy A. Clark⁵, president of Literacy Volunteers of America.
Kamala Devi Dansinghani, an honor student at East Hartford High School.

Lary asked me if I had counted the number of words. I told him about my arithmetic approach. He told me that I absolutely must carefully count the words of the final version before they published it. He assured me that some of the other participants would check it and would raise a stink if it was too long.

He let me make whatever changes that I wanted. I tried hard to devise a better ending, but I did not have much luck. Instead I did a lot of work on the opening scene. I was pretty well satisfied with the results. When I reread it for this blog entry, I still liked it. Needless to say, there were a few passages that I would have changed.

I have always thought that this shot came out quite well.

Lary gave me three additional assignments before the article was published in December. The first was to go to the studio of a designated professional photographer (whose name I don’t remember) for the cover shot. I was told to bring a keyboard with me. He stuck a fake white mustache on my upper lip and fitted a white ball cap that he must have obtained from a BMW dealer. He wanted me to light a cigar and smoke it, but I balked. The idea of putting lighted weeds in my mouth has always been abhorrent to me. I agreed to hold it after he lit it.

While I was engaged in this, a friend and client of mine, Putt Brown, came into the photographer’s office. I had spent quite a bit of time with Putt a few years earlier, and I recognized him immediately. He did not recognize me at all, and he was astounded when I told him who I was and what I was doing there.

For the second assignment I had to drive to the studios of Connecticut Public Radio. There I met Phyllis Joffe⁶, whom I had heard on the radio many times. She interviewed me about my story, and she asked me to read a couple of passages, including the “all-knighter” section that does not work on radio at all. The thing that I remember the most from her interview was that she thought that my style was more reminiscent of Raymond Chandler than Mark Twain.

I had read every word that Raymond Chandler ever wrote. I took what she said as a compliment. I loved his style, but I did not try to emulate it. I tried to write the way that a smart-aleck ad executive would in the eighties. When making a pitch to a client he took on a totally different persona. When he was disclosing his private opinions of those around him, he was often sarcastically dismissive. It wasn’t my style⁷; it was Ambrose’s.

The interview aired on National Public Radio on Sunday, December 10, the same day that the story appeared in the magazine. I think that it was on Weekend Edition, but I could be wrong.

The third assignment, to which Sue was also invited, was to appear at the Mark Twain House one evening in early December. It was a special meeting of the Samuel Clemens Society, which promotes the activities of the museum on Farmington Ave. The attendees were there to witness Lary announcing the winner of the story contest.

Before the event began I was somewhat surprised to see Frank Lord⁸, who was, as I recall, the president of the society at the time. I knew Frank quite well from the two years that I had worked at the Hartford Life, as described here.

When, after fifteen plus years, Frank saw me and Sue, he blurted out, “What are you doing here?”

When I told him that I had won the story contest, he was certainly stunned. He did not even know that Sue and I were back in Connecticut.

At some point in the event Lary introduced me to Dr. Miller. I may have met one or two of the other judges as well. I don’t recall any of the small talk.

The story was published in the Northeast magazine dated December 10, 1989⁹. We subscribed to the paper. As soon as I awoke, I retrieved the paper from the driveway, extracted the magazine and read the story. I found two mistakes. I have footnoted them in the copy that is posted here. They bothered me, but they did not really disrupt the story.

I remember the reaction of my best friend, Tom Corcoran, after he had read the story in the Sunday paper. “I didn’t think that you had it in you, Mike. I don’t know why.”

Sue’s sister Betty asked me to do a dramatic reading for her and her friend, Jeffrey Campbell. Others may have also been sitting at the table with them. Everyone seemed to laugh in most of the right places.

Sue and I flew to London in February of 1990. That adventure is described here.

1. While I was writing the story for the contest, the state clarified the law. You can read the notice here.

2. It never occurred to me at the time that the Datamaster may well have had a word-counting feature. Does anyone still have one with IBM’s word processing software? Could you check for me?

3. Lary Bloom retired from the Courant in 2001. His LinkedIn page, which can be viewed here, says that he lives in Chester, CT.

4. Dr. Miller died in 2015. His obituary is here.

5. Beginning in 2006 I played bridge with Dorothy Clark many times at the Simsbury Bridge Club, once as a partner and many times as an opponent. I did not recognize her name at the time, and she apparently did not recognize me. She died in 2018. Her obituary is here.

6. Phyllis Joffe died in 2002. Her obituary is here.

7. My other substantial piece of fiction, which can be read here, would remind no one of Raymond Chandler.

8. Frank Lord died on July 3, 2020. His obituary is here. His LinkedIn page, which lists most of his roles in Hartford, is here.

9. The Courant let me have ten copies. I still have two or three.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: IBM Datamaster

1981-1985 TSI: The Office and Employees

1981-1985 TSI: A4$1: The Whiffs

1981-1983 TSI: GrandAd: The First Two Clients

1989 The Story Contest