1999-2002 TSI: The Million Dollar Idea

Posted on August 30, 2021 by Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

General principles:
1. We should get the best people available to help us.
2. We should maintain AdDept as a dependable source of income. Whether we should invest a lot of time and/or money in enhancing and marketing AdDept is still to be determined.
3. We should try to leverage our assets better. Our income is too heavily dependent upon the number of hours put in by Mike and Denise.
4. We should assume that the economy will remain strong for another two years. On the other hand, we should avoid debt or at least large amounts of debt in case this assumption turns out to be false.
5. We should add new skills that are more marketable. That means learning some subset of Windows, object-oriented programming, and the internet. We should be thinking past the next project to the one after that if we can.
6. We should look for partners with skills and assets that complement ours.
7. We should not be deterred by the fact that some of these principles seem incompatible.
8. We need to act fast. Pursuing René² cost us seven months. On the other hand we might have gone down some less profitable paths if she had been on board.
I think we should take the following steps as soon as possible.
1. Find out what it takes to get our existing clients to use AdDept for insertion orders. The following clients are not using AdDept for IO’s: Macy’s East, Neiman Marcus, Filene’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Hecht’s. I checked Herberger’s. They have ads through March 29, 2000, at least. Macy’s West is apparently starting. Gottschalks ran insertion orders yesterday. I don’t know about Meier & Frank, but I can take care of that on my trip.
2. Find out which advertising departments have access to the internet and would be willing to use it to check on insertion orders. I don’t think that this would be a problem with most of them. Unfortunately, we don’t really have anyone in the office who can do this for us.
3. Make an appointment with Ken Owen³ to run the idea of a clearinghouse for insertion orders by him. He may be very interested in working with us on it. I have quite a bit of respect for him. At the very least, he is smart and completely honest.
4. Run the clearinghouse idea by at least one of our clients. Why not schedule our trip to New York and run it by Tom, Chris, and whoever their ROP person is?⁴
5. Run the clearinghouse idea by at least one newspaper or someone who knows how newspapers think about these things today.
6. Start trying to package and market AdDept and/or AS/400 products and services. We need to maintain or enhance our cash position over the next six months.
7. We should find out what, if anything, the National Newspaper Association (NNA)⁵, the AAAA⁶, and AP AdSEND have done in this regard. The AP is a potential partner in this venture. I once had a copy of the NNA’s EDI spec⁷, but I seem to have thrown it out when we moved. I will see what I can find on the Internet.
Requirements for hiring a marketing/client services person:
1. He/she must be able to get along with Mike and Denise. This includes having a good work ethic. I think Doug barely met these qualifications.
2. Must be able to get along with the clients.
3. Must be willing to spend a lot of time on the phone.
4. Must be able to talk to decision-makers and occasionally presidents of corporations without looking foolish. Doug could do this, but his ability to identify the real decision-maker was just so-so. He was also almost always overly optimistic, but this might be necessary to offset my tendency to see the negative side of everything.
5. Must be able to refrain from overselling.
Pluses:
1. Intelligence. Determination can go a long way to overcome deficiencies in this categories, but I don’t think I want to try to explain things to someone any duller than Doug.
2. Retail experience.
3. Newspaper experience.
4. Other advertising experience.
5. Good business sense.
6. Sales experience.
7. Computer experience.
How to proceed.
1. We can run an ad in the Courant. There are almost as many classified ads for sales and marketing people there as for programmers. The only major retailer in the immediate area now is Ames, and they run no ROP. Therefore the chances of finding someone in Hartford who understands retail advertising are slim.
2. We can contact a headhunter. We don’t have to pay unless we find someone, but we will have to pay plenty if we do. It might be worth it if it speeds up the process.
3. We can advertise on the Internet. Does that cost money? If so, how much?
4. In interviews I think that we should consider dangling a carrot of a spinoff of a .com company for the insertion order clearinghouse. I am not exactly sure how to present this idea to someone. Maybe we could offer them a percentage of the new company with the understanding that we would try to sell it once it has become established.

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

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

TSI is in the process of evaluating how best to allocate its resources over the course of the next year or so. Our highest priorities will remain providing excellent support for existing installations and responding to requests for custom programming from existing clients. However, there are a few additional projects that we are considering. We are very interested in learning what our existing clients think about them.
1. Menu maker: This is a fairly simple idea both in concept and in implementation. You would be provided with either a PC/Mac program or an AS/400 program that would allow you to create your own menus. The menus would reside in a separate library so that they would never get mixed up with the standard AdDept menus. You would provide the name for the menu and the heading text. For each option you that want to add, you would be allowed to select from a list of AdDept programs and menus. You could also enter your own command or an IBM command (e.g., WRKQRY). If you selected an AdDept menu or program, the description and the online help would be filled in for you, but you could override the text to make it say what you wanted.
2. GUI front end: Most software companies that market systems of a size comparable to AdDept have budgeted more than $1 million to “modernizing” their data entry screens to use a “graphical user interface” that is consistent with the methods used by Windows and Mac programs. It is now technically feasible to create a fairly nice GUI front end for AdDept for much less than that using products available from third party vendors. However, there is still a considerable capital outlay involved. We also estimate that it would take at least half of a man-year of labor. Furthermore, the PC or Mac would have to meet certain minimum requirements. Terminals would still use the green screens. TSI’s support regimen would be more difficult. The interactive programs would probably run slower on older AS/400’s. They may actually run faster on newer boxes.
3. Output to Excel: We believe that it is technically feasible (albeit difficult) to create a file from the AS/400 that is usable by Microsoft Excel with no intervening steps. It is a relatively straightforward task to download data files (or even spooled files) to spreadsheets today, but many intervening steps are required to get something presentable. TSI’s proposed method would allow you for each report that is eligible for this kind of treatment to designate (and permanently store) the formatting of the worksheet—report titles, column headings, “fit to page”, and most of the other values in “File, Page Setup.” You would also be allowed to designate fonts and sizes for the report title, the column headings, the body text, and each level of subtotals. The subtotal values would be formulas, not simple values. The same program could be used for data files that are produced by queries. The resulting worksheet could then be edited as needed. You can even edit, add, or delete lines in the worksheet. The subtotals will automatically be updated. Most simple reports could be reformatted to use the proposed program. It might be difficult or even impossible to generate some complex AdDept output using this approach.
4. Insertion order clearinghouse: We have long thought that the methods used for reserving newspaper space leave too much room for error and are overly labor-intensive, both for the advertiser and for the newspaper. The purpose of this project is to make the ordering process easier and to minimize the potential for miscommunication.
Instead of faxing the orders, the AS/400 would send them electronically to TSI. We would post them on a website. When the newspaper reps sign on, they would see all orders for them from all advertisers who are using this service. They would be able to add comments or questions and confirm them electronically with or without reservation numbers. They could also print the orders and, eventually, download them directly into their reservation systems. When you sign on, you would see all of your orders. It will be immediately obvious which ones have been confirmed, which have been read but not confirmed, and which have not been read yet.
What do you think of these ideas? Do you have any ideas of your own? We would greatly appreciate it if you would communicate your feedback to us at your earliest convenience. The last thing that we want to do is invest a lot of time and money in something that is of little or no perceived value to our clients.

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

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

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

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

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

I signed on to the IGNITe400 website and registered as a member. It’s free. You can ask questions there. I looked at a few of them. Bob Cancilla himself answered some of the questions! I also looked at IBM’s Net.Data website. It is full of information.
I printed out a lot of documentation. I am now convinced that we can do what we want to do with HTTP server and Net.Data. This is exciting. Buying that book was a great idea. The links alone are worth the price. The biggest difficulty that I see will be working out the process of getting the orders from our customers and then from others.
… I have more than doubled my knowledge about the AS/400 and the internet in the last two days. Moreover, I think I could do it! I think that we should try it some time this coming week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newspaper ads were expensive … and valuable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1991-2012 TSI: AdDept: The Whiffs

Posted on August 8, 2021 by Mike

A few notable failures. Continue reading →

We had a very good record of closing AdDept sales. Most of the whiffs fell into one of two categories:

Divisions of Federated Department Stores. Our relationships with various Federated divisions are described in detail here. They are not included in this entry.
Companies that did not advertise enough to justify a high-quality multi-user centralized database. We actually sold the AdDept system to a couple of these anyway.

TSI’s first efforts to market AdDept were concentrated around New York and New England. I figured that there were not very many retailers who could afford the system to keep track of advertising, but, then again, I did not really expect to justify the cost of the system at Macy’s in the very first module that we activated—ad measurement.

The strip mall in which the Enfield store was located was named after Caldor.

Our first attempt was a quintessential whiff. Kate Behart (much more about her here) had been in contact with someone in the advertising department at Caldor, a discount department store based in Norwalk, CT. Kate arranged for me to give a presentation to them at the IBM office in Norwalk. Of course, we had to make sure that the office had the BASIC program, and I had to install both the AdDept programs and some data that I had dummied up from Macy’s real data.

My presentation was flawless. The only problem that I encountered that day was the lack of an audience. No one from Caldor showed up. We never did find out why not. Kate called them repeatedly, but no one returned her calls. It may have had something to do with the fact that in 1989, the year that we installed the first AdDept system at Macy’s, the May Company sold Caldor to a group of investment houses.

Caldor went out of business in 1999.

I also paid a visit to another local retailer, Davidson and Leventhal, commonly known as D&L. Theirs were not exactly department stores, but they had fairly large stores that sold both men’s and women’s clothing. So, they had quite a few departments. The stores had a good reputation locally. The headquarters was in New Britain, CT.

This D&L ad was on the back cover of the issue of Northeast that featured my story (described here).

The advertising department only employed three or four employees. They wanted to know if they could use the computer for both D&L ads and ads for Weathervane, another store that they owned, as well. That seemed vaguely feasible to me, and so I said they could. In fact, we later did this for Stage Stores and for the Tandy Corporation, but both of those companies were much larger, and I had a much better understanding by then of what it entailed.

I didn’t even write up a proposal for D&L. The person with whom I spoke made it clear that what we were offering was way out of their price range.

D&L went out of business in 1994, only a few years after our meeting. Weathervane lasted until 2005.

I have only a vague recollection of doing a demonstration at IBM’s big facility in Waltham, MA, for a chain of auto parts retailers from Phoenix. The name of the chain at the time was Northern Automotive. My recollection is that I spoke with a man and a woman. If they told me how they heard about AdDept, I don’t remember it. After a very short time it was clear that AdDept was much more than the company needed. Although Northern Automotive had a lot of stores with four different logos, it only ran one ad per week. So there was really not much to keep track of. I had the distinct impression that the demo was just an excuse for the couple to take a vacation in New England on the company’s dime.

I don’t remember either of their names, but the experience list on LinkedIn for a guy named Paul Thompson (posted here) makes him a strong candidate. Northern Automotive changed its name to CSK Auto, Inc. not long after our meeting. In 2008 CSK was purchased by O’Reilly Auto Parts.

Won’t Paul be surprised to be busted thirty years later in an obscure blog?

Tom Moran (more details here) set up an appointment with employees of Genovese Drugs at its headquarters in Melville, NY. The two of us drove to Long Island to meet with them.

I probably should have talked to someone there over the phone before we left. The only impression that I remember getting from the meeting was that they were not at all serious about getting a system. We had a great deal of trouble getting them to describe what the advertising department did at the time and what they wanted to do. I was frustrated because I had considered this a relatively cheap opportunity to learn how chains of pharmacies handled their advertising. It was actually a waste of time and energy.

Tom tried to follow up, but he got nowhere. We did not submit a proposal.

J.C. Penney bought the company in 1998 and rebranded all the stores as Eckerd pharmacies.

Woodies’ flagship store in downtown Washington.

While I was working on the software installation at Hecht’s in 1991, Tom Moran coordinated our attempt to land the other big department store in the Washington, DC, area, Woodward & Lothrop, locally known as Woodies. I found a folder that contains references to correspondence with them. Tom worked with an IBM rep named Allison Volpert¹. Our contacts at Woodies were Joel Nichols, the Divisional VP, and Ella Kaszubski, the Production Manager.

As I browsed through the file, I detected a few warning signs. The advertising department was reportedly in the process of asking for capital for digital photography, which was in its (very expensive) infancy in 1991. Tom was told that they hoped to “slip in” AdDept as part of the photography project. Furthermore, the fact that we were not dealing with anyone in the financial area did not bode well.

Finally, we had no choice other than to let IBM propose the hardware. Their method of doing this always led to vastly higher hardware and system software costs than we considered necessary. I found a copy of IBM’s configuration. The bottom line was over $147,000 and another $48,600 for IBM software. This dwarfed what Hecht’s had spent. If the cost of AdDept was added in, they probably were facing a purchase price of over a quarter of a million dollars! That is an awful lot to “slip in”.

I don’t recall the details, but I remember having an elegant lunch during this period with someone from Woodies in the restaurant of the main store. It may have been Joel Nichols. It seemed like a very positive experience to me. He seemed eager to automate the department.

We lost contact with Woodies after early 1992. I seriously doubt that the advertising department even purchased the photography equipment that they had coveted. The early nineties were very bad for retailers. By 1994 the owner of Woodies and the John Wanamaker chain based in Philadelphia declared bankruptcy and then sold the stores to JC Penney and the May Company. Many of the stores were rebranded as Hecht’s or Lord and Taylor.

In some ways Fred Meyer, a chain of department stores based in Portland, OR, seemed like a perfect match for TSI. At the time they were almost unique, and we usually excelled at programming unusual ideas. Their approach to retail included what are now called “hypermarket” (department store plus groceries) stores, although they definitely had some much smaller stores as well. The one in downtown Portland was very small. I really thought that we had a good shot at getting this account, largely due to the fact that the IT department already had one or two AS/400’s. So, the hardware cost would probably be minimal.

She would be lucky to make it in nine hours; there were no direct flights.

I was asked to work with a consultant who, believe it or not, commuted from Buffalo, NY, to Portland, OR. I can’t remember her name. She knew computer systems but virtually nothing about what the advertising department did. She wanted me to tell her what AdDept could do, and she would determine whether the system would work for them. I have always hated it when a “gatekeeper” was placed between me and the users. I understand that they do not trust the users to make a good decision, but advertising is very complicated, and almost no IT consultants know much about it. I would not have minded if the consultant sat in on interviews that I conducted with people in advertising.

If I was allowed to meet with anyone from the scheduling or financial areas of the department, I do not remember it at all. I do remember spending an afternoon with the head of the company’s photography studio. AdDept had a module (that no one used) for managing shoots and another (used by Macy’s East) for managing the merchandise that is loaned to the studio for a shoot.

I remember the photo studio guy mentioning that they also did billable work for outside clients. He mentioned Eddie Bauer by name. He could not believe that I had never heard of it/him.

I probably botched this opportunity. Before agreeing to come out the second time, I should have insisted on meeting with whoever placed their newspaper ads and the person in charge of advertising finance. I did not want to step on the toes of the lady from Buffalo, but I probably should have been more aggressive.

Kate accompanied me on one of these trips. We probably flew on Saturday to save on air fare. On Sunday we drove out to Mt. Hood, where we saw the lodge and the glacier, and visited Multnomah Falls on the way back.

Freddie’s was acquired by Kroger in 1998, but the logos on the stores were maintained. There still is a headquarters in Portland, but I don’t know if ads are still created and/or placed there.

Aside from our dealings with Federated divisions² TSI had very few whiffs during the period that Doug Pease (described here) worked for us. After one of our mailings Doug received a call from Debra Edwards³, the advertising director at May Ohio, a May Company division that had its headquarters in Cleveland. Doug and I flew Continental non-stop to Cleveland and took the train into downtown. My recollection was that we were able to enter the store from the underground train terminal.

The presentation and the demo went very well. I am quite certain that we would have gotten this account were it not for the fact that in early 1993 the May Company merged the Ohio division with Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh. Management of the stores was transferred to Pittsburgh. Debra was hired as advertising director at Elder-Beerman Stores.

We stayed overnight in Cleveland and had time to visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which was right down the street from the huge May Co. building. I cannot say that I was greatly impressed with the exhibits.

A few years later Doug and I undertook a second trip to Cleveland to visit the headquarters of Sherwin Williams. Doug had talked extensively with the lady who was the advertising director there. He was very enthusiastic about the prospect of making this sale. By that time Doug had already closed a few big deals for us, and so I trusted his judgment. However, I could not understand how a company that really only sold one product could possibly need AdDept. Yes, they have thousands of stores, but how many ads do they run?

I don’t honestly remember anything about our discussion with them. Needless to say, Doug did not close this one, although he never stopped trying to revive it.

I don’t really count it as a whiff, but Doug was unable to close the deal with Liberty House in Honolulu after our epic trip to Hawaii in December of 1995. The details are recounted here.

I drove past two of the stores in Texas, but I never went inside.

Just as Marvin Elbaum had backed out of his contract with TSI for a GrandAd system in 1986 (as described here), so also one company signed an agreement for TSI’s AdDept system and, before we had installed the system, changed its mind. There was one big difference in the two situations. The second company was the Tandy Corporation, which had actually ordered installations of AdDept for all three of its retail divisions. At the last minute the company decided to close down Incredible Universe, one of the three divisions. The other two companies became TSI clients in 1997, as is described here.

It was not a big loss for TSI. IU was one of a kind. Its stores were gigantic multi-story combinations of electronics and theater. There were only seventeen stores, and only six were ever profitable. Those six were sold to Fry’s Electronics. The other eleven were sold to real estate developers at pennies on the dollar.

I did a demo for Mervyn’s California, a department store based in Hayward, CA. I think that I must have done the demo after finishing a training/consulting trip at Macy’s West in San Francisco. I cannot imagine that I would have flown out to the west coast to do a demo without spending a day or two gathering specs.

The IBM office nearest to Hayward was in Oakland. I took BART in the late afternoon from San Francisco to Oakland. There was quite a bit of excitement at the Holiday Inn at which I was staying. Someone had been murdered on the street in front of the hotel the previous night. There was one other very peculiar thing about this stay. I checked into a Holiday Inn with no difficulty, but I checked out of a different hotel (maybe a Ramada?). The hotel had been sold, and its ownership had changed while I was asleep.

The demo went fine. The guy who had contacted me—his name was Thiery or something like that—liked what he saw. However, the sale never advanced any further. This was almost always what happened whenever I got talked into doing a demo without taking at least a day to interview the potential users. At the time that I did the demo Mervyn’s was, unbeknownst to me, owned by Target. This might have explained the lack of progress. Target may have been restricting or rejecting any capital purchases at the time.

Mervyn’s was sold to some vulture capitalists in 2004. A much smaller version of the chain went out of business in 2009.

For some reason Doug and I once had a very short meeting with the president of Gottschalks, a chain of department stores based in Fresno, CA. He told Doug and me that he would get all of the other members of the Frederick Atkins Group to install AdDept. This organization (absolutely never abbreviated by its initials) somehow enabled its members to shop for foreign and domestic merchandise as a group. Nearly every department store that was not owned by the May Company or Federated belonged to it.

A few years after he made this promise he (or someone else at Gottschalks) arranged for me to speak before the members at one of their conventions in Naples, FL. I flew to Fort Meyers and rented a car from there. Naples was beautiful and reeked of new money. I gave my little spiel, but I did not have an opportunity to interact with any of the members of the audience. So, I did not get any direct feedback.

We eventually did sign up a few members of the group—notably the Bon-Ton (described here) and Elder-Beerman (described here). I don’t know whether my speech had any effect.

I think that the Frederick Atkins Group is defunct in 2021. The references to it that I could find on the Internet were all from decades past.

In (I think) 1999 Doug Pease and I made an unproductive trip to Columbus, OH, to talk with the IT director of of Value City about the possibility of installing the AdDept system for use by the advertising department. That adventure is described here.

TSI got a phone call from a chain of furniture stores in coastal Virginia, Norfolk⁴, as I recall. As part of my crazy automotive support trip, I stopped by to talk with the advertising director at this company on my journey from Home Quarters Warehouse in Virginia Beach to Hecht’s in Arlington. I spent a couple of hours with him. When I discovered that the company had only three stores, I knew that this was a mistake. I told him that our software could address his problems, but the cost and effort would not be worth it for either of us. I advised him to hire someone who was a wiz with spreadsheets.

I think that I got a free cup of coffee out of it.

I can’t tell you what happened to the company thereafter because I don’t even remember its name.

We had two reasonably hot leads in 2000. I had to handle both of them myself. The first was at Bealls department store, which has its headquarters in Bradenton, FL. This was another situation is which I had to deal with the IT department rather than the advertising department. I am pretty sure that the company already had at least one AS/400. I have a few notes from this trip, but it is not clear whether I intended to do the demo on their system or on one at a nearby IBM office.

In any case I think that there was a technical problem that prevented a successful installation of the software needed for the demo. So, I had to improvise, and I did not get to spend much time with the people who would have benefited from the system. The whole thing made me very depressed.

I had some free time, and so I went to the beach. I stopped at a Jacobson’s store to buy a tee shirt to wear at the beach. The cheapest tee shirts in the store cost $100!

The beach was lovely, and it was unbelievably empty. The weather was pretty nice. A beach in Connecticut would have been packed in this type of weather.

We did not get the account, but the tale has an interesting coda. Bealls is still in business today. For years Bealls could not expand outside of the state of Florida because a different store with exactly the same name was already using it in other states. These Bealls stores were run by Stage Stores, a long-time AdDept client that was based in Houston. Stage Stores was still using AdDept when TSI went out of business in 2014.

In 2019 Stage announced that it was changing all of its stores into Gordmans, its off-price logo (which did not exist while I was working with them). When the company declared bankruptcy Bealls purchased, among other things, the right to use the Bealls name nationwide.

I remember going to Barneys New York in late 2000 to talk with someone in advertising. I also have discovered three emails that I sent to Christine Carter, who was, I think, either in charge of the advertising department or in charge of the financial side. Barneys only had twenty-two stores, and that included some off-price outlets. I don’t know how much they actually advertised.

We never heard from them after my last email, which emphasized how easily AdDept could be adapted to differing needs even for companies the size of Barneys. By this time the very affordable AS/400 model 150 had been introduced. It would have been perfect for them.

I think that Barneys is dead or nearly so in 2021. All of the stores in the U.S have been closed, and even the “Barneys New York” brand was sold to Saks Fifth Avenue. However, the company also had a Japan division, which is evidently still operational.

I received a very unexpected phone some time in 2001 or 2002. It came from a man who had formerly worked at Saks Fifth Avenue and had taken a job as a Vice President at Sears. He knew that the advertising department at Saks had been doing things with its AdDept system that Sears’ advertising department seemed utterly incapable of. He invited me to the Sears headquarters in Hoffman Estates, IL, to investigate the possibility of installing AdDept at Sears.

At about the same time I had been in contact with the agency in a nearby town that Sears used for buying newspaper space and negotiating newspaper contracts. They wanted to talk with me about the possibility of working together. The agency’s name was three initials. I think that one was an N, but I am not sure.⁵

I arranged to spend consecutive days at the two places. It was cold on the day that I visited the agency. I learned that it recruited new clients by claiming that they could negotiate better rates for them because they also represented Sears. I suspected that this was baloney. Sears was a bid dog nationwide, but the amount of newspaper ads that they bought in any individual market was not that impressive. They were just in a lot of markets.

After the people explained the services that they offered to clients, I remarked that about 10 percent of what they did overlapped with about 10 percent of what we did. Privately I could not imagine that any of our clients who would benefit from their services.

I told them about A^xN, our Internet product. They informed me that the papers did not want to sign on to their website for insertion orders. Of course, they wouldn’t, and they had nothing to hold over the papers.

We ended the meeting with the usual agreement to stay in touch and look for synergies, but privately I considered them the enemy.

I did not see a parking structure. Maybe I entered on the wrong side of the pond.

The next day was bitterly cold, and there was a strong wind. I located the sprawling Sears complex and parked my rented car in a lot that was already nearly full. I had to walk a long way to the main building, and I have never felt as cold as I did on that walk.

I could hardly believe it when I walked into the building. The ground floor was billed with retail establishments—a drug store, a coffee shop, a barber shop, and many more. I had to take the escalator up to get to Sears. I was met there by the woman with whom I had been in contact. She was from the IT department.

OK, now I get it. Our problem was that we did not have enough architects.

She took me up to meet the “advertising team”. Six or eight people were assembled in the room, and they all had assigned roles. I remember that one was the “system architect”, and one was the “database manager”. I almost could not suppress my amusement. What did all these people do? There was no system, and there certainly was no database. At TSI I handled essentially all the roles that everyone at the table described.

They asked me some questions about the AdDept system. When I told them that it ran on the AS/400, the system architect asked me if that system was not considered obsolete. I scoffed at this notion and explained that IBM had introduced in the AS/400 64-bit RISC processors that were state-of-the-art. I also said that, as far as I knew, the AS/400 was the only system that was build on top of a relational database. That made it perfect for what AdDept did.

I wonder how many “OS/2 shops” there were in the world.

They informed me that Sears was an OS/2⁶ shop. I did not know that there was such a thing. In the real world Windows had already left OS/2 in its dust by that time. In all my time dealing with retailers I never heard anyone else even mention OS/2. It might have been a great idea, but IBM never did a good job of positioning it against Windows.

Besides, just because the corporation endorsed OS/2 should not eliminate consideration of multi-user relational databases where appropriate. The devices with OS/2 could serve as clients.

They explained to me that Sears’ advertising department had hundreds of employees, most of whom served as liaisons with the merchandise managers. Most of the ads were placed by agencies. I presume that the newspaper ads were produced in-house. No one whom I talked with seemed to know. The people on the committee did not seem to know anything about how the department did budgeting or planning.

Someone talked about Sears’ competitors. The example cited was Home Depot. I don’t know why this surprised me. I must have been taken in by the “softer side of Sears” campaign a few years earlier.

After the meeting my escort took me to a remarkable room that was dedicated to the advertising project. It was a small theater that had ten or so posters on the wall with big Roman numerals at the top: I, II, III, IV, etc. There were no statues, but otherwise I was immediately struck by the resemblance to the Stations of the Cross that can be found in almost any Catholic church in the world. I asked what the posters represented. The answer was that they were the “phases of the project”. I was stunned by the assumption that the project required “a team” and that it was or indefinite duration. No one ever allowed us more than a month or two to have at least portions of the system up and running.

At some point I was allowed to give my presentation. The man who had worked at Saks attended along with a fairly large number of people. Maybe some were from advertising. I was never allowed to speak with them individually.

I never got to read the advertising department’s Wish Book.

My talk explained that AdDept was a relational database that was specifically designed for retail advertising departments. I described a few of the things for which it had been used by other retailers. I could not do much more than that. I had not been able to talk with any of the people in the department, and the IT people were clearly clueless.

When I returned to Connecticut I wrote to both my escort and the man from Saks. I told both of them that I did not know what the next step might be. I had not been given enough access to the advertising department to make a proposal. The whole experience was surreal. If someone had asked me to return, I would only have done it if I were granted unfettered access to potential users.

No one ever contacted us. I told Doug not to bother following up.

One puzzling whiff occurred during the very short period in which Jim Lowe worked for us. The strange case of Wherehouse Music is explored here.

Perhaps the strangest telephone call from a genuine prospect that I ever received was from Albertsons, a very large retailer with is its headquarters in Boise Idaho. The person who called was (or at least claimed to be) the advertising director there.

I had heard of Albertsons, but I did not know very much about the company. All I knew was that they were a chain of grocery stores in the west. Since advertising for grocery stores is basically limited to one insert/polybag⁷ per week, they had never seemed to be great prospects for AdDept. However, I never hung up on someone who expressed interest in the system.

The problem was that this lady insisted that I fly out to Boise to meet with her and her crew the next day. I tried to get her to explain what the situation was, but she said that she had no time to talk. She needed to know if I would make the trip. It was a little tempting for a peculiar reason. Idaho was one of the few states⁸ that I had never visited. Still, this sounded awfully fishy. I passed.

The incredibly bumpy road that Albertsons has traveled is documented on its Wikipedia page, which is available here. I don’t remember when the call from the advertising director came. I therefore have no way of knowing whether she was in charge of advertising for a region, a division, all of the grocery stores, or none of those. I might well have passed up an opportunity that might have extended the life of the company. Who knows? It looked like a goose, and it honked like a goose, but maybe going to Boise would not have been a wild goose chase.

Jeff Netzer, with whom I had worked in the nineties at Neiman Marcus (recounted here), called me one day in 2010. He asked me if I remembered him. I said that I did; he was the Aggie who worked at Neiman’s.

He informed me that he was now working at Sewell Automotive, the largest Cadillac dealership in the Dallas area. He said that they were looking for help in automating their marketing. I was not sure how well AdDept would work in that environment, but I agreed to visit them. His boss promised to buy me a steak dinner.

I flew Southwest to Dallas, and for the first time my plane landed at Love Field. It was much closer to Sewell than DFW would have been.

I found a great deal out about their operation. I doubted that we could do much for the agency for a reasonable amount of money. On my computer I recently found a three-page document dated September 23, 2010, in which I had listed all of the issues that I learned about at Sewell. A woman named Tucker Pressly entered all of their expense invoices into a SQL Server database. It was inefficient, and there were no programs to help them compare with budgets.

The main objective of the marketing department was to make sure that they were taking advantage of all available co-op dollars from Cadillac and other vendors. We could not help with this unless we wrote a new module. I described my reactions to their issues in a letter to Jeff.

I never heard back from Jeff, who left Sewell in 2012. Nobody ever bought me a steak dinner.

Sewell Automotive is still thriving in 2021.

In 2011 or 2012 I received a phone call from a lady from the advertising department at Shopko, a chain of department stores based in Green Bay, WI. I don’t recall her name. She said that she worked for Jack Mullen, whom I knew very well from both Elder-Beerman and Kaufmann’s. Before Doug Pease came to TSI, he had worked for Jack at G. Fox in Hartford.

I flew out to Packer Land to meet with her. They had a very small advertising department. They basically ran circulars in local newspapers on a weekly basis. As I remember, she and one other person ran the business office.

I worked up a proposal for the most minimal AdDept system that I could come up with and sent it to her. When I had not heard from her after a few weeks I called her. She said that the company was downsizing and, in fact, her position was being eliminated.

Jack also left the company in July of 2012. His LinkedIn page is here. Shopko went out of business in 2019.

1. Allison Volpert apparently still works for IBM in 2021. Her LinkedIn page is here.

2. As I write this I can easily visualize Doug stabbing a box with a pencil after a frustrating telephone conversation with someone from a Federated division.

3. I worked fairly closely with Debra Edwards when I installed the AdDept system at Elder-Beerman stores in Dayton, OH. That installation is described here. She was the Advertising Director there. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. The “l” in Norfolk is silent, and the “ol” sounds much more like a short u.

5. I later learned that there were actually two affiliated agencies across the street from one another. I encountered the other one, SPM, in my dealings with Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc., which are detailed here. The agency was still around in 2023. Its webpage is here.

6. In fact IBM stopped updating OS/2 in 2001 and stopped supporting the operating system in 2006. I cannot imagine how Sears dealt with this. I pity their employees with nothing OS/2 experience at Sears on their résumés.

7. Polybags are the plastic bags that hold a group of flyers from diverse retailers. they are ordinarily distributed to people willy-nilly.

8. The others are Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska. I am not certain of Arkansas. I might have gone there with my grandparents when I was a youngster. The only place that I have been in Utah is the Salt Lake City airport.

1993-1996 TSI: AdDept-Burdines Interface

Posted on July 5, 2021 by Mike

The proverbial brass ring? Continue reading →

Even before I became a professional software developer, my friends and acquaintances often approached me with their ideas for computer programs. It started in the Army with Doc Malloy’s idea for a tennis game, continued through graduate school, and was nearly ever-present in my business life. It seemed peculiar to me that so many people seemed to imagine that I had a skill that they lacked but no idea how best to employ it.

I have a great idea for a software project!

In point of fact, the limiting factor in software development was almost always money. A new software system required a substantial investment to cover development and testing costs, as well as marketing expenses. Very seldom did the people who propose these project give any thought to helping to finance them. At least they never volunteered information about having a secret source of funds. They evidently thought that they should share in the imaginary profits because they provided the original idea. I sometimes told them, “ideas are a dime a dozen. Implementation is everything, and marketing brings it home.”

I had plenty of ideas of my own. A few of them, such as the idea of running several simultaneous “threads” for the cost accounting programs generated a bit of revenue for TSI. One of my ideas, the use of a butterfly-shaped website for insertion orders and emails for notifications, resulted in a very profitable product for TSI, A^xN. The genesis of its design and the marketing concept that turned it into a financial winner is described here.

TSI’s clients also had a large number of ideas for programming, but they seldom expected us to work pro bono. I spent many hours researching and writing quotes for changes to our systems requested by our clients. I doubt that a month went by in which I failed to produce produce ten or twenty of them. I considered my most important responsibility at TSI to be providing a clear description of each requested project and assigning an appropriate cost figure.

Very seldom did someone approach me with a project that included funding. I can think of three times in forty years. Only one of these concerned software that we had already designed and coded. The person making the proposal was Gilbert Lorenzo¹, who was one of the top bosses in the advertising department at Burdines, the Florida division of Federated Department Stores.

Gilbert telephoned TSI’s office in the early nineties. He had received one of our first mailings about AdDept, our administrative system for large retail advertising departments. He said that he would be in New England to meet with some people at Camex², the company based in Boston that marketed a system for digitally producing page layouts for newspapers and large advertisers. He requested us to show him a demonstration of the AdDept system.

Most of this huge structure served IBM’s business partners.

We reserved some time in a demonstration room at the elegant IBM office in Waltham, MA. We had a relationship with this office, but we had never done an AdDept demo there before. I arrived there as early as I could to get the system set up for my presentation. It was a very nice facility that always impressed potential clients.

The AdDept system in those days was fundamentally sound, but many “bells and whistles” were added on in the subsequent decade. In almost every case they were suggested by and paid for by one AdDept client or another.

The most impressive thing about the demos in the early years was the speed with which the programs moved from one screen to the next. Once the tables were set up, a user could define all aspects of a new ad to run in dozens of papers in just a minute or so. This always generated the biggest “Wow!”

In our discussion after the meeting Gilbert said that he liked what he saw. He might have even said that he wanted to buy the system. However, I did not hear from him again for several years. This was consistent with what always seemed to happen with Federated’s divisions, a phenomenon that is explored in more detail here.

Meanwhile Burdines was—unbeknownst to me—experiencing explosive growth. In 1991 alone the number of stores increased from twenty-seven to fifty-eight through the assimilation of two Federated divisions— the Maas Brothers and Jordan Marsh stores in Florida. More stores were added throughout the rest of the nineties. By the end of the decade Burdines dominated the department store market throughout the entire state.

The purpose of Gilbert’s second contact with TSI was to invite me to Huntsville, AL, the home of a software company with which he was working at the time. I don’t remember the name of the company. I do recall that two of the team assigned to this project formerly worked as software developers at Camex before DuPont purchased the company and changed its focus. One of them was Mike Rafferty³, whom I had met at Camex’s headquarters when our common customers had requested that an interface should be constructed between the two systems, a project that was described here.

The software company in Huntsville had a very impressive headquarters. As I understood it, the company’s primary customers were NASA and companies that worked with NASA. That was de rigueur in Huntsville.

Gilbert explained that he was working with Mike and the others to develop a comprehensive software system for the advertising department at Burdines, and he hoped and expected that the other Federated divisions would also use it. He wanted TSI (or at least me) to participate in the project, and he insisted that he had the funding for it.

Mike described their approach to the project. They intended to use a home-grown database that resided on a server, but most of the programs would reside on the individual “clients”—PC’s or Macs. When I told him that TSI’s programs were written in BASIC, he suggested that we consider converting them to use Microsoft’s Visual Basic.

Most of the discussion concerned the scope of the project. They were interested in integrating something like AdDept into the unitary structure that they envisioned. No one addressed how TSI would be integrated into the development process. Maybe they expected me to fill in some of the details or to volunteer to research how difficult it would be. Maybe they knew that we seldom backed down from a project just because it was difficult.

The atmosphere was cordial and positive. I remember that we all went out to lunch together, and I ordered a Monte Cristo sandwich. Nevertheless, this meeting made me very uncomfortable. On the one hand, the prospect of installing a version of the AdDept system into all the remaining Federated divisions was way beyond tantalizing. It would be a dream come true. What they suggested would undoubtedly a big job, but TSI had a talented group of programmers who were quite familiar with both the subject matter, and the way that I liked to approach big challenges.

On the other hand, from my perspective the way that this project was described was adorned with “red flags”.

I had already researched the possibility of using Visual Basic. It might have been possible to convert some of the programs, but there were no tools designed to help. It would certainly have taken TSI several years to produce a workable system. We would be discarding all of the tools that we used in favor or ones that we had never used and, to my knowledge, had never been used by anyone in a data-intensive situation. TSI’s programmers would certainly need a lot of training. We would probably need to hire skilled employees or at least consultants to achieve any degree of efficiency.
Their whole architecture was different from what we used. In the AdDept system the data and all the programs resided on the AS/400 server. The “client-server” approach that they proposed located the data on a server, but the program were all distributed to the PC and Mac clients. To me this sounded like an administrative nightmare. All changes—including emergency fixes—must be installed on all of the clients.
I considered the AS/400 integral to AdDept’s success, and so did our customers. The operating system code was built on the database rather than the other way around. That meant that the system itself could never be used for programs with the the huge requirements for memory, disk, and processing speed that design and creation of advertising layouts required. The AS/400 was definitely not designed for that. However, it was ideal for administrative systems like AdDept. It competently handled so many problems with which all-purpose operating systems constantly struggled.
I trusted IBM and the AS/400’s database. I knew how to get the latter to function efficiently, and IBM’s support was unmatched in the industry. The idea of converting to a home-grown database seemed just preposterous.
By the time of the meeting in Huntsville TSI had finally turned the corner. The AdDept product had a solid client base and a good number of prospects outside of Federated. How could we continue to pursue AdDept development for those companies—which was relatively certain to generate revenue and good will—while devoting a great deal of time and attention to the massive Federated project? It did not seem possible to me.
Gilbert had said that he had funding, but he never provided any details about who, how, or how much.

Something about the project sounded fishy to me. They were interested in my participation, but they never specified how. Did they want to buy TSI? No one mentioned anything like that. Did they want to hire some or all of us? Did they just want me to consult with them as to the system design? Or was there something else?

At the end of the meeting, Mike asked me what format TSI preferred for exchange of information. Both of the programmers were very surprised when I told them that our offices were connected to all of the clients’ AS/400s via phone lines. We used the AS/400’s built-in messaging and word processing. No one had ever asked us to communicate outside of that.⁴ I told them that TSI’s employees had PC’s, and the company had a few modems, but we mostly used the PC’s as terminals to the AS/400.

The group did not come to any agreement about how the project was to proceed. I had an impression that they thought that I (who was well into my fifth decade on the planet) was a fossil. I, on the other hand, thought that they, who had dealt almost exclusively with production of ads for newspapers, dramatically underestimated the difficulty of designing a single multi-user database that was capable of handling all aspects of scheduling and managing the financial aspects of all media. The planning and cost accounting modules were even more challenging.

After the meeting I had a little bit of private time with one of the principals of the software company. He asked me what I thought about the project. I told him that it was interesting, but I did not see the ROI (return on investment) for combining the two systems. I remember his exact words. “ROI. Oh, yeah, where’s the ROI?”

I did not hear from any of them again, and I did not press for inclusion in their project. In all honesty I had too many other things demanding my attention. After a year or two I sometimes wondered whether Gilbert had abandoned the project or had gone ahead with it. The answer, it turned out, was somewhere in between. I spent no time searching for information about the project, but little hints turned up occasionally.

Our liaison at Lord & Taylor, Tom Caputo, described to me his experience interviewing for a job in the advertising department at Bloomingdale’s, a Federated division in New York City. He asked the people there about their computer system. They showed him boxes that contained the software for the FedAd system, which Federated had sent them and told them to use. The people at Bloomies had never unsealed the boxes.

When I installed the AdDept system at Macy’s South⁵ in December of 2005, TSI’s liaison there was Amy Diehl. Her official title was “FedAd Coordinator.” By then I knew that FedAd was the culmination of the project begun by Gilbert Lorenzo more than a decade earlier.

I soon learned that the advertising department at Macy’s South was not actually using the FedAd system at all because the programmers had admitted that it could not handle the department’s planning process. Instead they had been using parts of a previous version called Assets for a few tasks. I was astounded to learn that the Assets system used a Microsoft Access database. They had sent a boy to do a man’s job! Federated Systems Group no longer supported it.

Later we heard that Macy’s East was using the FedAd system, which by then had been given a different name. At the time its advertising department was still using the Loan Room system that TSI had written and implemented for them in the early nineties. That meant that for years the details of every ad were being entered into at least two separate systems.

I even quoted a bizarre request from Macy’s systems people to write an interface between their system and A^xN. I provided them with a quote, but nothing came of it.

In all of that time—more than two decades—I never heard anyone say anything good about FedAd. As far as I know it generated a great deal of expense and not a penny of revenue for the company. I only knew of one department that used it. TSI, in contrast, sold and installed thirty-five AdDept systems, each of which was customized to the needs of the individual departments.

On the other hand, I might have been able to carve out a career as the guru for Macy’s concerning administrative software for advertising. That would have certainly been something to crow about. After all, when the game was finally ended, Macy’s had all the marbles.

I doubt that they would have let me—and whatever portion of TSI was involved—participate from Enfield or East Windsor, and I doubt that they would have let us continue to perform or oversee work for their competitors. They might have allowed me to program for the AS/400—I saw several of them at the FSG data center in the Atlanta area. However, it was more likely the Gilbert would have required everyone in the process to use the same database. He seemed to be calling all the shots.

So, I probably would have had to sell my soul to Macy’s. I might have made a lot of money, but I think that I would have been miserable. Almost everyone in my acquaintance who had worked for one of our clients and then worked for Macy’s or a Federated division quit in the first few years and was openly bitter about the experience.

Finally, I must add that I suspect that there was a good possibility that the invitation to Huntsville was just a ruse to get me to expose the totality of the AdDept system to people who might be able to replicate it.

Epilogue: While researching the blog entry for TSI’s relationship with Federated Department Stores (posted here), I discovered that Val Walser’s LinkedIn page prominently features how she “directed development of a sophisticated, integrated software product” in the division run from Seattle. It must be referring to the system that Gilbert and Mike envisioned so many years earlier. I never heard anyone mention any other such system.

1. For some reason Gilbert Lorenzo has two LinkedIn pages. They are available here and here.

2. The Camex system was used by both of the first two AdDept users, Macy’s East, and the P.A. Bergner Co.

3. Mike Rafferty’s LinkedIn page is here. It did not provide much information about him when I discovered it in 2022.

4. Keep in mind that the Internet was in its infancy. At that time Microsoft had not yet completed its domination of the word processing and spreadsheet markets. Technical people used “message boards”, not email, for communication. AOL did not hit the web until 1997.

5. The installation at Macy’s South is described in detail here.

1988 TSI: The First Crisis

Posted on June 21, 2021 by Mike

Many factors forced a tough decision. Continue reading →

In retrospect it does not seem like that great of a crisis. However, I have a very strong recollection that Wednesday, August 17, 1988, my fortieth birthday, was one of the worst days of my life.

I intended to to go the office and work all day, but the employees pretty much insisted that I take the day off. I was alone in our new house in Enfield. Well, Rocky and Jake were around somewhere, but cats are seldom sociable during the middle of the day. I don’t remember what Sue was doing.

I also don’t remember what I did all morning. I probably either went for a run of four or five miles—the heat did not bother me in those days—or tended to my vegetable garden.

I fixed myself something for lunch. I always ate early. Then, as usual, I lay down for a nap. I may have dozed off for a few minutes. When I arose from the bed, a crushing wave of melancholy swept over me.

I must have had a book to read; I always did. However; I did not feel like reading.Instead, for the first and only time in my adult life, I got down on my hands and knees in the yard that faced Hamilton Court and picked weeds.

I had been told by our neighbor, whose name was Fred, that both the previous resident of our house and the one before him were professional landscapers. They left us a beautiful lawn of bluegrass on the sides that faced the two streets and zoysia grass in the back. There were almost no weeds when we moved in, and, despite four months of neglect, there were still only a few patches.

While I attacked the invaders into our greensward, I took stock of my situation as I entered my fifth decade on the planet. There were undeniable positives:

I was healthy. Sue was reasonably healthy. She had recently quit smoking, and that was very difficult for her.
Sue and I had a nice new house.
We had two nice pets.
TSI had a real office that was smoke-free.
We were in the process of negotiating a big contract with a client that everyone had heard of—Macy’s. The wooing of Macy’s and the subsequent installation there are described here.
For the first time ever TSI had a salesman who was aggressive and appeared to be competent.

On the other hand, the mortgage meant that our nut at home was higher than ever, and our payroll was considerably higher than ever. IBM’s announcement of the AS/400 (described here) was very troubling. There was no provision whatever for the types of customers that we had been chasing for the last seven years. The new systems were considerably more expensive and less powerful for the models at the low end. I did not see how we could sell them to small ad agencies. The other software vendors could offer much cheaper systems. The alternative was to try to find larger agencies around the country with the budgets to buy more expensive systems. This was, from a marketing perspective, a new business.

Eventually we faced facts and leased an AS/400 model B10.

I could see more unavoidable expenses on the horizon, too. We would almost certainly need to buy an AS/400 for development and support of the Macy’s installation.

We faced a lot of difficult work in the upcoming months. We would need to do the work to assure that our system for advertising agencies worked on the new system. At some point we would need to address the Y2K issue that was beginning to raise its ugly head in the press. Our date functions would not work in the year 2000, which really meant 1998 or 1999.

We did not really have the programming staff to meet these challenges. I could not depend on Sue to help. Denise Bessette was excellent, but she only worked part-time. Sandy Sant’Angelo could help a little, but she could not handle anything difficult. There was no getting around it; the bulk of the work was going to burden my undersized shoulders.

I could not see how the current arrangement could possibly work. Unless we received several surprise phone calls in the next few months, we must depend upon getting a second and third user of the new system that we planned to develop for Macy’s. I did not think that I could possibly get that system as then envisioned to the point where it was reasonable to market it before the company (i.e., Sue and I—the only partners) ran out of money.

I think that at this point I need to address what I call The Curse.

In nearly every respect my parents provided me with an exemplary upbringing. They somehow got me the medical care that I needed to overcome what could have been a debilitating birth defect. I did not have many medical issues thereafter, but they ably and promptly addressed my dental and vision issues. They paid for an excellent education. We had food, clothing, and shelter in a very safe environment. They let me follow my own interests. They let me play tackle football for two years, although I am positive that my mother thought that it was foolish. They did not even make me take dancing lessons after I threw a tantrum about it.

There was one thing, however. I remember distinctly them telling me on several occasions, separately and jointly, “Mike, we don’t care what you decide to do. We just want you to be the best at it.” Not “the best that you can be”, just “the best”. There is no “absolute superlative” in English. Unless a group is specified, it means “better than everyone”. In 1988 the world’s population was around five billion. In any endeavor only one of the five billion is the best.

So, by the standards that they had set for me, at age forty (40!) I was an abject failure. I had never been the best at anything in high school. If you took the worst quarterly grade average that everyone had, mine was the highest, but that counted for nothing. The goal was not consistency, it was supremacy. I was not the best at anything in college either. OK, I was the best debater at the University of Michigan, but I was not even good enough to compete in the National Debate Tournament. After that I was a horrible soldier. I was nowhere near to being the best actuary, if that even means anything. I was not the best debate coach, and, in the end, I could not see any path for pursuing that goal.

I was a really good programmer, but nobody considered me the best at any aspect. In fact, in the area that we had concentrated—ad agencies—we had apparently reached a dead end.

I did not articulate this line of reasoning even to myself as my pile of weeds grew, but it must have burned in my subconscious: At age forty this was probably my last chance to be the best at anything. But how?

From somewhere it popped into my brain that I had to fire TSI’s salesman, Michael Symolon, whose career at TSI is described here. The company had no choice¹. We had to sacrifice marketing in order to get the new product ready. The income from the software maintenance contracts and the big Macy’s check might be enough to cover the payroll without Michael’s salary until I could get the product in good enough shape to sell to other retailers. It just had to. It would take a Herculean effort to accomplish all this, but I resolved to do it.

I felt horrible about this decision. I hated firing people. I only needed to do it a few times in thirty-five years in business. All of those occasions were awful, but this one was the worst. I felt that it was more my fault than Michael’s that we were in this position.

I told Sue my decision that evening. She agreed. I talked with Michael a few days later. I assured him that we would pay him his commission on the Macy’s project as soon as everything was completed. He seemed to take it fairly well.

One of the last things that Michael did was to schedule meetings for me in Chicago and South Bend, IN. In Chicago I was allowed to explain the AdDept system that we were about to install at Macy’s to IBM reps who specialized in retail. I knew that quite a few large retailers—Sears, Walgreens, Montgomery Ward, Marshall Field’s, and Carson Pirie Scott, to name a few—were based in Chicago. I thought that they would be very interested in being able to sell a new application and a (newly announced) AS/400 to a previously unautomated department. I am not sure why, but the reception to my presentation was disappointing. They did not even ask me many questions.

I rented a car to drive to South Bend for a demo of the GrandAd system the next day. I am not sure when this occurred, but my credit card was declined somewhere, maybe at the hotel in which I stayed in South Bend. I had to make a very depressing and stressful call back to the office to arrange payment.

We (or perhaps the IBM office) had done a mailing to all of the ad agencies in the area. Five or six had reported that they planned to attend. As usual, I loaded our software and demo data onto the System/36 at the IBM office. Only three people attended the presentation. They all sat together, paid little attention, and took no notes. After my presentation I talked with them for a few minutes. They were all from the same agency. They already had a UNIX-based system running a product called Ad-Aid. I asked them whether they liked it; they were noncommittal.

As I made the long drive back to Chicago that evening I mulled over what had happened. The more that I thought about it, the more convinced I was that the ladies in the audience were spies sent to learn the strengths and weaknesses of our system. This would ordinarily have made me angry; on that day it just depressed me.

For the next three and a half years I worked a large number of hours per week for fifty-two weeks of the year. We sent out a couple of sets of letters to advertising directors at large retailers across the country, and we received just enough positive responses to get by.

The second installation of AdDept (described here) was even more difficult than the first. Hecht’s, the third installation (described here), was a genuine turning point, but it wasn’t really until 1993 that we could consider investing in another genuine salesman—five years of scraping by with only one break, our short cruise of Greece and Turkey in 1992, as described here.

I think that I made the right decision. I cannot envision what life would have been like if I had chosen otherwise

1. Yes, we could have tried to borrow some money. However, we had no assets to use as collateral. The prospect of going down a path that might well have ended in bankruptcy seemed unthinkable to me. The idea of begging for money from relatives never occurred to me.

1981-1985: TSI: A4$1: The Clients

Posted on April 6, 2021 by Mike

We delivered the code. They paid us the buck. Continue reading →

IBM’s introduction of the System/23 Datamaster in June of 1971 was a tremendous opportunity for TSI. In fact, if the announcement had been a month later, I probably would have given up on TSI and looked for a job.

The Datamaster was one of the very few systems in the early eighties that offered small businesses of all shapes the opportunity to automate their operations. There were competitive hardware systems, of course. Some of them offered more processing bang for the buck, but none of them had the three magic letters I-B-M on the hardware. IBM had a well deserved reputation of delivering high-qualiity system with unmatched service. “No one ever got fired for recommending IBM,” was a popular saying.

What we did not realize until we got our hands on it was that the Datamaster was extremely easy to program. Of all the systems that we worked with, I enjoyed working on a Datamaster the most. We delivered an enormous amount of code to meet incredibly diverse requirements in a very short period of time.

We depended on IBM for most of our new clients. The exceptions were Harstans Jewelers (described here) and advertising agencies (described here and here). I am uncertain of the order in which we acquired the new clients. The order in which I have listed them here may not correspond to the order in which we did the projects.

In most cases we took delivery on their systems in our office in Rockville and then carted them to the user’s location when the systems (or at least the most important modules) were ready. Once this started we always had at least one system in the office until the time that we bought one for ourselves.

Paul Prior sold Ledgecrest in the eighties or nineties, but it is still in business in 2021. It is now called Ledgecrest Health Care Center.

One of the most memorable clients was Ledgecrest Convalescent Hospital, a nursing home in Kensington, CT. The proprietor was Paul Prior¹, one of the most interesting people whom I have ever met and one of the few clients whom I got to know pretty well.

When Sue and I first met Paul I was quite intrigued by his business. Paul’s goals were not much different from those of any other small business. He wanted to bring his company into the twentieth century. Most of the applications that interested him were fairly standard,—patient billing and accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger.

The last was his top priority because a high percentage of his receipts came from reimbursement from the government. The amount that the state reimbursed the business depended on his keeping a close eye on expenses. A mistake could cost thousands. So, the objective was to produce a system that allowed Paul to keep Ledgecrest’s expenses within state guidelines year after year. Anything over the legally prescribed “caps” would be disallowed.

The important thing was for him to learn where he stood while he still had time to do something about it. He needed to project his spending fairly accurately beginning in the middle of the year or even earlier. This sounded to me like something that would be valuable to all of the nursing homes in Connecticut. I had high hopes of marketing it to the dozens of nursing homes in the state, and I did. That effort is detailed here.

Paul also ran a second company called Priority Services. It provided Meals on Wheels to aged and disabled people.

After we won the contract and delivered the first part of the system, Paul told me how much he enjoyed working with the system. For reasons that I did not yet understand he had done all of the initial data entry himself. As usual he was drinking coffee from his dirty cup. He never washed it because, he said that it protected him from a weak cup. That was the day that he identified for me the feature in our systems (I forget exactly what impressed him) that convinced him to hire us. I chuckled when I informed him that our systems did not actually have that feature. He must have mixed us up with someone else.

Paul told me that he had been drafted in the fifties and took part in the Korean War. I don’t use the word “fought” because he told me that as soon as he got close to combat he “went over the hill”, was apprehended by MPs, and then spent some time in the brig.

When he got his discharge (I didn’t press him for details) and came home, he discovered that his older siblings had taken control of the family business that had been founded by their parents. According to Paul, everything was a mess. Bills were going unpaid, and the standards of patient care had dropped precipitously. Meanwhile his brothers and sisters were living high on the hog.

Paul somehow chased them out and took over the management and eventually the ownership of the business. He went to each creditor and arranged a plan for paying all the bills. Eventually he reestablished the reputation of the institution. I was very impressed by this. Nobody had ever related for the origin story of his business.

While I worked with Paul on getting reports from the G/L system to provide the information needed to maximize his income from the state, I got to meet the other three people in the office, all of whom were female. The first was named Dorie. She served as secretary and reception. She also paid all the bills. I don’t remember the second lady’s name. She was, among other things, in charge of Priority Services. The last was Paul’s daughter, Kathy, who helped out part time. I think that she was engaged to be married.

I don’t remember exactly what the system that we designed for Priority Services did. I think that they recorded who was to receive meals on specific days, and the computer printed delivery routes. I seem to remember that it also did billing. One day Paul asked the lady who ran this system to get me a cup of coffee. She asked me how I liked my coffee. I requested just a little bit of sugar and no cream.

The beverage that she brought me back was so sweet that I could not drink it. She explained that she could not find any sugar, and so she substituted a packet of Sweet’n Low. That didn’t seem like enough to her, and so she poured in a second envelope. From that day forward I drank my coffee black. I eventually learned to appreciate the bitterness.

The last system that we got working was accounts payable. I spent one session with Dorie in which I tried to learn how she did things. I asked her how many bills they had in accounts payable. She responded “None.”

I mansplained to her that I meant how many invoices that she had not paid yet. She insisted that she had none. Eventually I realized that, unlikely as it may seem, she was right. As soon as she got an invoice from the mailman she wrote out a check, stamped it with Paul’s signature, put it in an envelope, and mailed it.

Paul, perhaps mindful of his terrible experience with debts to vendors when he took over the business, tolerated this approach. However, he understood, that it tied his hands with respect to cash flow. Furthermore, after Dorie paid the bills they still had to be entered into the general ledger system.

The problem was that Dorie was terrified of the computer. The night after I talked with her about accounts payable, she could not sleep at all. I wasn’t there, but the next day she came to Ledgecrest and was ready to quit her job. Paul assured her that she would not be required to use the computer.

Instead, Paul entered in records for all the vendors himself. Once he had done so, it was easy for him to keep up with them. He did not need to enter a stack of open invoices and reconcile balances. Paul found something else to keep Dorie busy.

I doubt that anyone with an MBA would have approved of this extreme “Theory Y” management style, but it seemed to work for Paul.

Ledgecrest and Priority Services upgraded to a System/36 in the late eighties.

I can’t prove it, but I strongly suspect that NSNE was in the west side of the indicated building.

In many ways National Safe Northeast was not an exceptional company. Most of their customers were banks. By the time that I started working with them their primary products were no longer safes, but Automated Teller Machines (ATMs). Their office was in an industrial park in West Hartford². The most peculiar thing about it was that four family members were often present: Tony Bernatovich, who ran the company, his wife Lynn, who had a title but no evident responsibilities, his daughter, who was sort of the office manager when she was there, and a very large dog.

They wanted us to install a rather standard bookkeeping system. We made very few adjustments to the accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger systems. It made me wonder why the IBM rep did not just sell NSNE IBM’s packaged systems. They would have worked pretty well.

Tony’s real interest was in a customized payroll system. NSNE used a method called “half-time due”. You haven’t heard of it? Neither has anyone whom I have ever met. There is not the slightest passing reference to it on the Internet.

NSNE did not want its installers to work overtime. Since they were out on the road, it was difficult to control their hours. Employees who put more than forty hours on their timesheets were only paid half of their usual rate for the excess. Not double-time, not time-and-a-half, just half-time. If the total pay for the period was less than the minimum wage, they were paid the minimum wage.

Was this legal? I don’t know. There are several case files for lawsuits involving NSNE³, but I did not find any that involved complaints about illegal compensation schemes. Incidentally, although I was always on the lookout for an edge for our software, I never considered marketing this feature.

We primarily worked with three people at NSNE. Joan Kroh was the accounting manager. Her assistant’s name was Darlene. There was another employee named Jimmy. I do not recall either last name.

I am not sure what Jimmy did, but one morning no one else was there, and he was supposed to enter some accounts payable. The system was on, but he could not get it to work. I tried to talk him through it over the phone. I asked him to key in GO APMENU and then press Enter. As God is my witness, I talked on the phone with him for forty-five minutes, and he could not accomplish this. Finally, Darlene came in and keyed it in with no difficulty. It took her less than a minute.

I have two other fairly vivid memories. In one of them I was driving my car to NSNE. It overheated. I had to pull over to the side of the road. I loosened the cap on the radiator, and steam and hot water blasted me in the face. I was not hurt, but I was a mess. I went to NSNE anyway. I never have cared much about appearances.

Darlene and Joan played in a woman’s football league. It was flag football, but these ladies were serious, and Joan was one of the best players. I was very impressed.

When the Lingerie Football League appeared on television I could not help thinking about the contrast between the ladies on TV playing “tackle” football in bikinis and shoulder pads and Joan’s teammates wearing sweatpants and tee shirts knocking one another on their asses.

This was not a pleasant drive. Route 44 can be very busy.

I never felt as ill-at-ease at a client’s offices as I did at John LaFalce, Inc., on Route 44 in Canton, CT. John⁴ was (and apparently still is) an interior designer. His retail office in Canton showcased a lot of eclectic furniture and doodads. I avoided the showroom lest one of my elbows occasion an unintended purchase. Rich people came there to hire him to redo the interiors of their Connecticut homes while they were living in one of their other houses. Or maybe vice-versa.

I think that TSI just implemented accounts payable and general ledger systems for them. We might have done some other programming that I don’t recall. There really was only one user, the bookkeeper, whose name was Jan Shustock.

I remember a meeting that involved one of the guys who ended up buying out John LaFalce, Inc. After the purchase they changed the name to LaFalce Campbell Robbins. The third person in our meeting was an IBM sales rep. The new owner mentioned something about red and blue not going together. As one, the rep and I held out our red and blue ties and looked down at them.

I also remember being stunned when TSI delivered the Datamaster that we had been working on to JLF. They asked me where, in my professional opinion, in their business office they should locate the computer system . They had sixteen employees, most of whom designed interiors for a living. They were asking a coffee-swilling code jockey how to arrange their furniture. I told them how long the cables were, but I refused to venture any further opinions.

SMI, in the south end of Hartford, has hardly changed in appearance at all in forty years.

Sue did most of the work for Standard Metals. The proprietor was Steve Buzash⁵. The person with whom we worked the most was named Carol. I recall very little about what we did for them, probably A/R, A/P, and G/L. I remember Steve talking with us about designing an inventory system. His inventory consisted of pieces of metal of various compositions, shapes and sizes. He often cut off pieces and sold them. It sounded like a nightmare to me.

Carol and Steve got married. They invited us to their unusual wedding, which took place on a large boat on the Connecticut River. After the ceremony there was a supper, which was followed by something that most of the people in attendance had never heard of, Karaoke.

Two people ran the show, a guy who served as MC and a woman in a sparkly dress who was obviously a professional singer. He told us tha we were going to be the entertainment, and we were going to have FUN!!!

To get things started, the lady sang a song. Needless to say, she hit every note perfectly and also inserted a few bel canto flourishes. Everyone was totally intimidated. I, for one, was wondering how far the shore was, and whether it would be worthwhile to try to swim for it in my suit and dress shoes.

When no one volunteered, the MC tried to coerce people into trying it. He promised “we will make you sound good.” A few people eventually ventured forth. I think that Sue sang a duet of something with Carol. The event lasted at least ten hours. No, I guess that would be impossible, but it sure seemed like it.

Dave Tine asked us to provide a computerized system for his sister’s company, Videoland, a company that sold home entertainment systems and rented VHS tapes. Its store and office were on Farmington Avenue in Hartford, but we never went there. I have a vague recollection that TSI did a simple inventory system for her. We probably also provided A/P and G/L systems. We billed Dave Tine for our work.

The company went out of business when Blockbuster Videos started appearing on every corner.

After we had a few installations, IBM accepted us into its fledgling Business Partner Program, which meant that we could make a little money selling hardware. One of our very first sales was to the Business Office of Avon Old Farms School. The Business Office Manager was Walter Ullram⁶. We sold them three diskette-based Datamasters. One was used for accounting functions by Mary Lee Pointe. One was used strictly for word processing by Walter’s secretary. The third was used by the bank. I don’t remember the names of either of these ladies.

The best thing about the AOF installation was that one-third of it required no support at all. The secretary loved IBM’s word processing system, and she learned how to use it from the manuals.

The first time that I visited AOF Walter showed me the system that he had developed for tracking on accountants’ sheets the school’s usage of oil in comparison with the heating-degree days. I was very impressed with how he had devised a scientific system to pinpoint inefficiencies and control the amount of money spent on heating all of the buildings. I was less impressed when I visited a few of the other buildings and saw that people there were coping with the cold weather by using incredibly inefficient electric space warmers.

I went to a very good prep school, but it was nothing like AOF. All Rockhurst students commuted. Most of the AOF students were boarders. They had uniforms, but they deliberately looked like slobs. We had no uniforms, but everyone dressed pretty nicely. The tuition at AOF was about thirty times what my parents paid. I soon learned that a lot of the AOF guys were “trust fund” students. Neither parent paid the tuition. It was paid by a trust set up when the parents divorced. Nearly all of the students were wealthy. Few were on scholarships.

I mostly worked with Mary Lee, whom I liked a lot. She had one very strange mannerism. A light on her telephone indicated whether calls originated inside the school or outside. When she answered outside calls, she began in a voice nearly as deep as Lauren Bacall’s, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Pointe speaking.” For inside calls, she sounded like Jerry Lewis’s falsetto, “Hello-oh?”

AOF reported a problem with connectivity. I cannot remember why they had to run long cables (maybe for Mary Lee’s printer), but they did. The cables did not run along the floorboards. They went through the walls and ceiling. We eventually discovered that the connections were OK, but some squirrels living above the ceiling had chewed through the cables.

Deposits at the AOF bank were not insured by the FDIC.

I was surprised to learn that AOF had a bank for its students. The parents did not send money for incidentals directly to the students. Instead the money went to the school, and the students were allowed to withdraw it. It was a simple system to write, and the lady who used it really liked it.

All in all this was a very satisfying installation. Walter and the users bragged about it to others in the faculty. I was considered a hero by all of the people that I worked with, and TSI made quite a bit of money on it.

I knew that there were quite a few prep schools in New York and New England. I was hopeful that there might be business office managers at some who were interested in automating. When I learned that Walter’s brother held that position at Westminster School in Simsbury, I was pretty optimistic. The story of our attempt to market Mary Lee’s system is told here.

Another favorite client was Viscom International in West Simsbury. Although their business was the importing and marketing of parts for boats, three of the four employees had formerly worked at advertising agencies. In fact, “Viscom” was short for “visual communication”. They were therefore very interested in the ad agency system that we had developed for Harland-Tine.

The principals were Curt Hussey and Frank Hohmeister⁷. The third advertising guy was an artist. I don’t remember ever even talking with him. Mostly I dealt with Curt and the administrative person, whose named was Mary. She also doubled as a model in ads that they produced to feature marine equipment that they imported from France. As Frank remarked once, “She could fill out a pair of jeans.”

The most enjoyable thing about this account were the lunches that Kurt, Mary, and I consumed in the small restaurant in the shopping center in which they were located. I recall good food and good conversation.

The account itself was a fairly difficult one. The primary system was inventory, and users are often unhappy with their inventory systems. Every transaction must be perfect, and designing a bullet-proof auditing system is difficult. Although their system was working fine at the time, they eventually decided to buy an IBM AT and ditch the Datamaster. The primary motivation was that Curt wanted to be able to do spreadsheets.

My recollection is that Curt had a heart attack while I was still visiting Viscom frequently. He came back to work not too long after that.

Mary left Viscom to work in a restaurant well south of Hartford that was managed by her husband. Sue and I went there for supper once, but I don’t remember any details about it.

Viscom went out of business in 1993.

We sold two Datamasters to the Feldman Glass Co. in North Haven. That was one less than the number of companies that they had. The parent company manufactured glass bottles that they sold and delivered to companies in the Northeast that distributed food or anything else in bottles. This company required only fairly standard accounting software.

The second company was named Anamed. It provided hospitals and the like with small plastic bags that contained tooth brushes, combs, and other hygienic items for patients. I think that we wrote a billing program for this service.

The bookkeeping for these two companies and the data entry for the computer was done by a mother-daughter team. The mother was named Isabel Blake. I don’t remember the daughter’s name.

I don’t remember the name of the third company. It specialized in “fulfillment”. Liquor companies ran contests in which they awarded fairly valuable prizes in exchange for some large number (fifty or more) of labels from their bottles. I don’t know how that Feldman Glass got involved in organizing and keeping track of all of this, but I guess that it was no more distant from its core business than Anamed was. At any rate they told me how they wanted it to work, and I did it.

One day I overheard one of the Feldman/Anamed ladies say that they had bought the wrong computer. I knew very well that it was unlikely that they would have found anyone who was willing to customize three different systems for them on any other computer. It was much easier to criticize the Datamaster’s specs than the quality of the installations. Someone had probably scoffed a the notion of using an underpowered system. I assume that they bought something else after using our systems for several years. It was just as well. Their businesses were so unique that we could not really even use them as a reference account.

I could find no evidence of the existence of any of these companies past the early nineties.

One of our strangest clients was Hartford Cutlery, a one-man operation owned by Bob Burke⁸. His parents owned East Granby Machine⁹, which had actually purchased the Datamaster. Bob’s business was sharpening knives and scissors for restaurants. I don’t think that he had any employees. His grinding equipment was kept in a little room at his parents’ company, but the Datamaster was actually in his house a few blocks away. That’s right. We sometimes made house calls.

Evidently all restaurants of any note had at least two entire sets of knives and scissors. Once a week Bob picked up a tray of cutlery from his clients, sharpened all of the pieces, and then returned them to the restaurant. Maybe he could pick up and deliver at the same time if he came very early or very late.

We wrote a billing program for him. It saved him a lot of time. It fed accounts receivable and general ledger systems.

Bob felt constrained by geography. There were not enough high-quality restaurants within an easy drive for him to make very much money. I could see what he meant; East Granby is not usually considered the center of the culinary universe.

Bob then told me his plan, or maybe it was his dream. He wanted to invade New York City. His scheme was to rent (or inherit or buy or steal) a helicopter and begin making daily flights to the city to collect knives to sharpen. He figured that he could undercut the prices of the local competition and still make a hefty profit. We didn’t talk about how he would get around in the city. I suppose that he could buy (or inherit or rent or steal) a truck of some sort to hold the trays of cutlery as he went from one posh dining establishment to another. There might be a place to park it near the helipad, although, now that I think of it, parking spaces there went for upwards of $50 per day even in those days.

Bob used our software for quite a while, but then we lost touch. I have seen no evidence that he ever implemented the plan or, for that matter, that he didn’t.

Putt Brown ran his family’s business, Mono Typesetting, in Bloomfield. I think that he may have gotten our name from a mutual friend and client, Ken Owen, whose story is here. We did a time and materials billing system for him that fed rather standard accounting systems.

These were great, but newer ones were better.

Putt and I often ate lunch together. He was a peculiar dining companion in that he saw a menu as not so much a list of food choices as an agglomeration of type fonts. He often lamented about the state of his industry. He said that he was forced to purchase new electronic typesetting equipment every year. As soon as he got a new system it was obsolete.

I don’t think that he realized it yet, but not very long after this conversation everyone would become a typesetter. Every font imaginable became usable by every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a personal computer that cost a tiny fraction of the systems that Putt was burning through. I am pretty sure that Mono was the last standing typesetting company in the Hartford area, but Moore’s Law killed it as well.

At the time I was a fairly serious vegetable gardener in the small patch of courtyard behind our house in Rockville. Putt told me that he was going to try raised beds for his next planting. Raised beds are quite a bit of work, but they allow more heat to reach the roots, which, for some plants, stirs more growth. It seems like the technique would work best for root crops. The other advantage is that you can sit down rather than kneel down when weeding the crops.

I wonder if Putt actually tried it and whether it worked.

In 1988 I was very surprised to see Putt again in a very unusual setting. In fact, I was wearing a disguise. The incident is described here.

This Atari ST sort of looks like a computer

Suzanne Nettleton owned and operated a company in Middletown, CT, called Professional Relief Nursing. The company maintained two lists, nurses looking for work and institutions looking for nurses. PRN then matched them up.

Suzanne had already had two bad experiences with computing systems. Several years earlier she had tried to get someone to develop a system for her on an Atari computer. You could play Pong on it, sure, but I never heard of anyone trying to develop an administrative system on one.

On her second attempt she did a better job of selecting the computer (a Datamaster), but she chose the wrong people to develop the software. It worked OK at first, but at some point they refused to support it any longer. So, Suzanne asked us to take over the maintenance.

We printed out the listings of the programs. They did not meet our standards by a long shot, but they were fairly simple. We insisted on converting the programs to meet our standards. She agreed, and we signed a contract. Over the years we did a fair amount of additional programming to provide a more comprehensive system.

I have two vivid memories of this installation. The first was the drive to the PRN office. I was shocked that there were two stoplights¹⁰ in Middletown on Route 9, a six-lane high-speed highway.

The second memorable event occurred when I showed up early one afternoon for an appointment with the guy that Suzanne had hired to operate the Datamaster system. When he saw the McDonald’s bag that I brought with me, he exclaimed, “Oh, you eat styro-food!”

By far the most prestigious name on out A4$1 client list was only three letters long, IBM. A new department devoted to the IBM Business Partner Program resided in the company’s Armonk, NY, complex. We drove there and talked with Dick Patten, the IBMer in charge of the program, about installing a customized system for lead-tracking on a Datamaster. He liked our approach, and we were equally enthusiastic because we had already developed lead-tracking software for our own use. We also had installed it elsewhere a couple of times.

So, we signed a contract. Dick was then shocked to find out that he could not get IBM to deliver him a Datamaster for several months. He was astounded even more when we told him that if he ordered it through TSI, we could deliver a system in two weeks. Our orders went through “the channel”, which, sometimes but not always, had much better delivery times than were available elsewhere.

For a moment Dick actually considered our offer. Instead, he informed his hardware contact at IBM about our offer. He then demanded to know why the business partners had better access to systems than the man IBM had chosen to manage the business partners. Evidently they found one for him.

While we were in Armonk we chatted one day with a female college student who was employed by IBM for the summer. She told us that IBM had a policy of providing summer jobs to offspring of its employees who were at or above a certain level. She qualified because of her father’s rank.

She said that hers was the best job ever. She astounded us when she disclosed her hourly pay rate. $17 sticks in my mind, but that seems excessive. Also, on her first day her supervisor told her to go to the supply closet and take whatever she thought that she might need. No one kept track of anything like that.

When IBM found itself in financial difficulties in the nineties, this young lady’s tale popped into my head.

TSI had two clients in East Greenwich, RI. One of our most important was an advertising agency that is described here. The other was on the other end of the spectrum. Thorpe’s Wine and Spirits, which I think was just called Thorpe’s Liquor Store in those days, was a small adjunct to Thorpe’s Pharmacy. The pharmacy was sold to a major chain (weren’t they all?), but the liquor store still survives.

The proprietor, Gill Thorpe, told us that he had a Datamaster that he would like to used for an inventory system for his liquor store. We had quite a bit of experience doing retail inventory by this time, and the liquor operation was much simpler than a chain of jewelry stores. So, we took on the project in spite of the distance. I found the contract for this account in a box that Sue stored in my garage. We only charged them $500!

We evidently did a good job. The operator, Richard Thorpe¹¹ (Gill’s son), called us for support a couple of times, but he never complained about the system, and they never asked for any enhancements.

One of the last Datamaster clients that we worked on, and certainly the site of the last such system that was still in use was the Regal Men’s Store of Manchester, CT. This store also had the distinction of being the only TSI client (other than IBM) that I personally patronized. I did not go there often, but when I needed something, I generally made the drive.

There was not much to the system. My recollection is that they did nothing but accounts payable on their Datamaster. I would have remembered if we had installed an inventory system.

IBM stopped marketing the Datamaster in 1985. We still supported our clients, and more than once we helped them find used parts—usually diskette drives. In the early nineties we were still supporting all the software that we had written for the Datamaster, but we sent a notice to all of these clients that we would NOT address the Y2K issue on these systems, and we would not support them after 1999. By this time IBM had reasonable hardware alternatives for most of them, but none of the A4$1 clients hired us to convert their code.

This tiny ad is the only reference I could find on the Internet.

In 1999, however, the computer operator at Regal’s, Ann Gareau, begged us to make her system work past New Year’s Eve. I told her that they really should get a new computer and that all of our other Datamaster customers had moved on. She told me that management would never approve the purchase of another computer. She was probably right. The company closed its doors in 2000.

I told Ann that the programs would probably still work in 2000, but the aging would look strange. They might occasionally need to fudge the system date to get the program to accept some dates. She seemed satisfied by that.

I have a strong feeling that I left out at least one other A4$1 client.

1. I think that Paul still lives in Berlin, CT, in 2021.

2. The address was 21-C Culbro Drive. The street no longer exists. I don’t know what happened to it.

3. Among these is one that mentions the NSNE computer system. That’s us!

4. John LaFalce’s LinkedIn page is here.

5. Steve Buzash’s LinkedIn page is here. Evidently he has moved to Jacksonville, FL.

6. Walter Ullram is retired. He lives in Farmington, CT.

7. Frank Hohmeister died in 2015. His obituary is here.

8. Bob Burke died in 2015. His obituary is here.

9. East Granby Machine is now called Burke Precision Machine Co., Inc.

10. The state has a plan to remove these annoying lights in 2023.

11. Richard Thorpe died in 2010 at the age of only fifty. His obituary is here.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: IBM

1999-2002 TSI: The Million Dollar Idea

1991-2012 TSI: AdDept: The Whiffs

1993-1996 TSI: AdDept-Burdines Interface

1988 TSI: The First Crisis

1981-1985: TSI: A4$1: The Clients