Tag Archives: System/36

1999 TSI: Transition to East Windsor

Posted on by
1

Moving to 7B. Continue reading →

By 1999 the office in Enfield no longer seemed suitable for TSI. We had been doing more training there than we anticipated. Fortune 500 companies had been sending employees to be trained for three or four days in a converted barn with no training room. My office, which was already also serving as the home of our AS/400s, System/36s, and their system consoles, had to be used for the training sessions, It did not give us a professional appearance.

There were many other reasons that Denise Bessette (introduced here) and I wanted to move. In the first place, since Sue Comparetto was no longer working in the building much (explained here), I felt uncomfortable being in a building owned by her father and shared with his company and Sue’s siblings, all of whom worked for the Slanetz Corporation.

I was sure that Denise would be happy to move into an office that she designed rather than the one that she had shared with Sue. Sue was hardly ever there, but many of her bags, boxes, and piles of her junk were still in evidence.

Big junk …

Behind the office building was a lot that was the home of (literally) tons of discarded equipment and machinery, including a fire truck, a blue school bus, a rusty tractor from before World War II, innumerable tires, and at least twenty fire hydrants. These all belonged to some iteration of the Slanetz Corporation. Personally I did not care if they wanted to have a junkyard there, but as the proprietor of the business, I had to think about what our clients thought. If we ever needed to bring someone really important to the office, we would certainly be embarrassed.

… junk of all shapes and sizes.
My workspace in Enfield when I had only a “dumb” terminal. The photo on the wall depicts my nieces Cadie and Kelly. The stacked trays held materials for each client. The accordion files on the left contained program listings. The shoes are Stan Smith models.

One important person whom we wanted to contact quickly was someone to manage our marketing. Doug Pease (introduced here) had done an outstanding job working out of what was supposed to be a closet, but we could not expects someone who could acquire contracts with billion dollar corporations to do so.

We also needed to rewire our office to allow easy access to the servers from PCs and to use the Internet. Denise took charge of all of this, and she preferred to do it from scratch rather than to retrofit the scheme onto what we had.

Another neglected priority was the furniture. We had a mishmash of second-hand pieces that we had accumulated over two decades. In general we wanted a more functional and more modern working environment. Jamie Lisella (introduced here), who was doing the administrative and bookkeeping functions, needed a better setup. We also wanted to move Sandy Sant’Angelo (introduced here), who dealt with support calls from clients, an area in which her voice, which really carried, did not disturb the programmers.

A limiting factor was the fact that Denise lived in Stafford, which was already a twenty-minute drive. Most of the available office space would be towards Hartford and therefore farther for her. She was amenable to increasing her commute a little, but she did not relish the prospect of a two-hour round trip.

Kohl’s is the big white building in the upper left. The space that we looked at was the other white building labeled “Blush Med Spa:.

Jamie did most of the research into places looking for tenants. I remember that she found a place in a medical building near Kohl’s. Denise and I went to look at the space, which was on the second floor of a building that had mostly medical tenants. I thought that it was OK, but Denise did not like the fact that it was so close to a shopping center where people might be hanging around in the evening. She sometimes worked by herself and did not leave until it was dark.

A place on Hazard Ave. would have been very convenient, but the only space that was available was disqualified for some reason. I never saw the interior of the place. I think that a chiropractor moved in.

My lobbying to move the operation to North Hollywood, CA, (explained here) was dismissed by the other participants in the search.

The door to 7B was on the far right.

I am sure that Jamie located the site in East Windsor. I remember her saying, “I think that I have found TSI’s new home.” It was in Pasco Commons, a group of buildings that were designed to be homes, offices, or both. Building #71 was owned by Rene (RAY nee) Dupuis, the owner and operator of Tours of Distinction2, a travel agency that specialized in arranging bus tours in New England.

TofD took up the bottom floor, Suite A. Rene wanted to rent TSI the second floor, Suite B. We would be able to add or remove interior walls and shape it the way that we wanted it. There was also a unit in the basement, which he rented as Suite C once or twice.

The red balloon indicates Pasco Drive. Building #7 was a little bit east of the balloon. The river is on the left. The yellow road labeled “S. Main St.” is Route 5.

The location was East Windsor just off of Route 5, a major US highway, and less than a quarter mile from the Connecticut River. The location was quite good. Building 7 had its own parking lot with five or six slots on each side. Two doors opened onto the parking lot, one from Suite A and one from the stairs to Suite B. The rent was not much more than we paid Sue’s father. If the traffic was light I could reach the office in fifteen minutes—my record was twelve.

Preparations: I found some graph paper that we could use to plan where all of the walls and doors would be. We put a conference room, the area for Sandy and the administrative person and the sales office on the south side. The programmers and office equipment were in the middle, and offices for Denise and me were on the north side. The east side had the server room, the kitchen, and the bathrooms. The server room was supposed to be big enough to hold our supplies, too, but somehow we lost a couple of feet of space. Fortunately, Rene allowed us to make a last minute change to wall off an area for supplies and storage.

Denise made most of the arrangements for the transition. The furniture was mostly new, or at least new to us. We got a nice table for the conference room with comfortable chairs and a beautiful bookcase that I claimed when we closed down in 2014. We ordered five phone numbers. The last four digits were 0700-0704, which was convenient. In the entire history of the company no employees—not even Denise and I—ever had personal phone numbers or extensions. I have always thought that that was smart for a company of our size.

The part of the old building used by the Slanetz Corporation had a kitchen, and they let our employees use the small refrigerator. The new kitchen also had a small refrigerator, a microwave, and a table. It also contained a sink, counter, and cabinets, but no stove.

My office in Enfield. My big red mug is visible in front of the window with a photo of W.C. Fields and a Realistic radio from RadioShack. Later I purchased Bose radio to replace it. The big red mug was lost when I left it on the roof of my car one evening.

The big move: We did not take occupancy of 7B immediately. The furniture and the new separation panels arrived at separate times. I must have been involved to some extent in the assembly and placement, but I have no distinct memories. I am pretty sure that I brought the computers from Enfield over the weekend in my car. I probably needed some help with the AS/400.

After all the furniture had been received and the equipment collected we moved in and shortly thereafter we had an open house party. I don’t remember everyone who came, but I do recall that Denise’s mother and at least one of her sisters were there.

Someone brought us two nice plants in large pots. Both of them survived our entire stay of more than fourteen years in East Windsor. By 2014 they were both gigantic. I sold them to someone who probably dumped them somewhere and kept or sold the pots.

La Notte had a huge parking lot.

Life in East Windsor: Before Pasco Commons existed, Jonathan Pasco’s restaurant was an institution on Route 5. TSI had a couple of outings there, and we occasionally entertained clients or others we were trying to impress. I think that we also went to La Notte, an excellent Italian restaurant in the middle of a nearby industrial park.

On many evenings and weekends I went for runs on the roads around that industrial park and the adjoining Thompson Road. I often did as much as ten miles. I sometimes left my water bottle at the Thompson Road entrance. Once I was approaching that spot having completed my first loop. A police car was surveilling the bottle from across the street. When I approached it the officers accosted me and asked what the “device” was. I told them that it was my water bottle. They asked me to take a drink, and I did. This occurred shortly after 9/11, when half of America was paranoid about terrorist attacks.

On one of my runs I aw a very large snapping turtle on grass besidee Thompson Road. Inside the industrial park I often saw wild turkeys and once spotted a bobcat. I also once observed two hawks “doing it” on the ground.

I usually arrived at work before 6:00 in the morning. I worked for an hour or two and then took a nap on a mattress from a portable cot that Sue had bought for camping and only used once. On a couple of occasions someone was surprised to find me asleep on the floor of the server room.

Every few days I would go to Geissler’s grocery to buy Red Delicious apples and diet cola in two-liter bottles. On one of those occasions I ran my Celica into the side of a Lincoln. I was driving on the exit lane on the right in the photo. The Lincoln was traversing the lane in the foreground.In my hundreds of trips to Geissler’s I had never seen a car using that lane.

The policeman investigating the accident did not give me a ticket. He said that the East Windsor police were called for accidents there every week. Eventually they reconfigured the parking lot to prevent the kind of accident that I was involved in.

Every day I brought my lunch from home or bought a sandwich or salad at Geissler’s. If the weather was good, I generally ate at a picnic table in a small park by the river. I almost always took a nap after lunch, either in my car or in the park on my notorious mattress.

One of the biggest events in the history of East Windsor occurred while we were tenants there. Walmart opened a Super Center a mile or so north of TSI’s headquarters. The first time that I went there I wondered how they had found so many people who looked like they were from Appalachia.

178 N. Maple: TSI left behind some furniture in the Enfield office. Sue continued to go there on occasion. At one point she obtained a great deal of fabric from someone that she knew. She tried to run a small business selling the fabric for a while.

The Slanetz Corporation made an effort to rent out the space at least once, but as of 2023 it is not in use.

1. When I researched this in 2023, I was surprised to discover that Building #7 was for sale as a “new listing”. All of the interior photos are of 7A, and the one exterior photo shows only the door to 7A. It was weird. It was obvious that something (the other door) had been excluded. I found the photo at right at this website.

2. Tours of Distinction has moved to Simsbury. Its website can be viewed here. When I looked there I could find no information about who owned or operated the agency.

1999 TSI: Mike Gets Certified

Posted on by
1

The AS/400 hardware, the OS/400 operating system, and the and DB2 database were introduced in 1988. The AdDept system that TSI developed for the administration of the advertising departments of large retailers was one of the very first systems developed … Continue reading →

The AS/400 hardware, the OS/400 operating system, and the and DB2 database were introduced in 1988. The AdDept system that TSI developed for the administration of the advertising departments of large retailers was one of the very first systems developed on and for the AS/400. At the time TSI was an IBM Business Partner for its GrandAd system on the System/36. Earlier TSI had been one of the first software companies to be recognized as an IBM Business Partner for the Datamaster.

Prior to the late nineties the only requirement for a company to become a Business Partner was to have some successful accounts that were using its software or services. At times it was a huge advantage to be an IBM Business Partner. At other times IBM employees treated the partners as competition.

At some point the concept of Value-Added Retailer (VAR) was introduced. VARs were at first allowed to order and sell systems for which their software or services had qualified as adding value to the sale of IBM equipment. Too many bad sales by VARs prompted IBM to take away the ability to take orders from smaller companies such as TSI. Instead they were assigned to a “Super-VAR” who vetted and placed the orders for them. In 1999 TSI was assigned to a company called BPS, which shortly thereafter renamed itself Savoir.

The next, but by no means last, set of restrictions imposed by IBM was to require any company involved in sales of IBM equipment to have at least one employee who had passed proficiency tests for the the equipment. At the outset there were two levels with separate tests, one for sales personnel and one for technical.

My partner Denise Bessette and I judged at the time that it was critical to the future marketing of AdDept and any other future product that we continue to participate in IBM’s partnership program. I knew more about the hardware offerings than she did, and so I was chosen to study up and take the technical test. It made little sense for a different person to study for the sales one, which was reportedly much easier.

I think that I must have taken the exams in the first half of 1999 or late 1998. I have a lot of notes from the second half of 1999, and there is no mention of them.

IBM still publishes Redbooks. I think that WAS was in version 1 in 1999.

IBM published study guides for both exams. One or two Redbooks may have also been on the syllabus. I remember that there was a considerable amount of technical material about several things with which I was not at all familiar. One was the cabling required to connect two AS/400s. The other was setting up partitions on a single AS/400 so that each partition had a separate file system. It was more complicated than it sounds because each device needed to be defined in each partition that used it. I remember practically nothing about either of these topics, but we did encounter partitioning at Dick’s Sporting Goods (introduced here).

I spent as much time as I could bear going over the course material. Hardware and operating systems have never really been my thing. It took a lot of discipline to force myself to understand the details of things that we would never use.

The day arrived on which I was scheduled to take the tests. I drove to an office in Farmington that specialized in administering exams for corporations. I had already consumed one 20-ounce bottle of Diet Coke before I arrived, and I brought another with me.

I gave my registration document to the receptionist. She asked me which test I wanted to take first. I selected the sales test. I seem to recall that each test lasted for about ninety minutes. All questions were multiple choice. I was required to enter my answers on a PC.

The sales test was not too difficult; I reported back to the receptionist ten or fifteen minutes before the deadline. She told me that I had passed.

I told her that I wanted to take a break before taking the technical test. I went to the men’s room and sat in the lobby. I drank my second Diet and tried to clear my mind. Then I took the second test.

It was much more difficult than the first. A few questions were beyond my ken. I skipped them. I read all of the others carefully and only answered after I was fairly certain. I used up nearly all of the allotted time. I was pretty relieved when the receptionist assured me that I had passed both tests.

It doesn’t look familiar.

So, I was certified by IBM as knowledgeable about both the sales and technical aspects of the AS/400. If I ever had physical certificates, I certainly have not seen them for a decade. TSI’s Sales Manager Doug Pease told me that his contact at Savoir had told him that almost nobody ever passed the technical exam on the first try.

I am not sure how much good my success did us. I am not sure that TSI sold any new hardware at all in the rest of the time that we were in business. We might have ordered an upgrade or two through our Super-Var.

On the other hand, we did get to go to the PartnerWorld convention in San Diego. That adventure has been described here.

1988 TSI: The First Crisis

Posted on by
3

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:

  1. I was healthy. Sue was reasonably healthy. She had recently quit smoking, and that was very difficult for her.
  2. Sue and I had a nice new house.
  3. We had two nice pets.
  4. TSI had a real office that was smoke-free.
  5. 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.
  6. For the first time ever TSI had a salesman who was aggressive and appeared to be competent.
Interest rates in 1988 were very high.

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.

Not bloody likely.

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 Beginnings

Posted on by
Reply

Anything for a Buck: Getting started. Continue reading →

We never turned down a project.

I have pretty clear memories of most of the clients1 from the very early days of TSI in Rockville, but I did not remember how we managed to develop the software for the first few. All of them except one either bought a new Datamaster or already had one at their offices.

The only computer to which TSI had access was a 5120. Both the 5110/5120 and the Datamaster used the BASIC programming language, but there was no easy way to convert code from one system to the other. If we did not develop the systems for new customers on the 5120, how did we write the code? I was pretty sure that we did not park ourselve in the client’s offices for weeks on end. For one thing, that would inhibit cursing, and it is not really possible to write good code without giving vent to a great deal of foul language. For another, we would have had to meet the client’s dress code every day. I would have certainly remembered that.

Sue reminded me that IBM in those days endorsed the policy of having the software developer take delivery on the customer’s hardware. The system would then presumably arrive at the customer’s location a short time configured and ready to use. Needless to say, this approach lasted only a few years, but it definitely gave struggling developers like us the opportunity to write a lot of software and simultaneously to put aside enough money to buy a system of our own.

This was accounting in 1980. By 1990 the columnar pads were an endangered species.

TSI’s first Datamaster client1 was our accounting firm, Massa and Hensley. Looking for a system to do time and material billing, they had purchased the tabletop model of the Datamaster. We met with them and designed a system that used three diskettes: JCPROG, which held all the programs, JCDATA for the keyed tables, and JCDET, to hold the transactions. The system had the following tables:

  • A table of client-related data that was keyed by a three-digit client number.
  • A table for each job opened for a client. The key was a concatenation of the client number and a five-digit job number.
  • Two job cost tables. One had every transaction; the other had the summary of costs by category. This arrangement violated the rules of normalization, but it facilitated some requirements. By the standards of the day the detail file was gigantic.
  • An employee table that was keyed by a three-character code.
  • A table of cost categories that also had three digit keys. The categories were of two principal types: time and materials. The entries in the time categories consisted of hours worked on a job. The entries in the materials categories were dollar amounts.
  • A rate table with a key consisting of the employee number and the category number. It might also have had a date so that they could increase rates to keep up with inflation.

The JCDATA diskette also had a table for a batch of transactions. This table might have been keyed by a letter so that more than one batch could be open at the same time.

My recollection is that there was only one menu on the JCPROG diskette. The user would place the program diskette in drive 1 and key in GO JCMENU. GO was a system command (ass opposed to a BASIC command) and JCMENU was the name of the program that displayed the menu of options.

Employees at both Massa and Hensley and Harland-Tine filled out forms like this every day. The category numbers were printed on the form. The employees knew by heart the client numbers and job numbers on which they worked.

Every day the operator keyed in a batch of transactions. The source documents were time sheets from the employees and other forms for billable materials. The program checked to see if the JCDATA diskette was in drive 2. If not, a message was displayed on line 24 of the screen to put it in. The entry and editing programs validated each field (client number, job number, employee number, category number) as it was entered. It printed a record of the transactions as they were entered. Transactions could be edited or deleted. When everything seemed correct, the program to update was run. The user was told to remove the JCPROG diskette from drive 1 and to insert JCDET. The records were then written on the history file on JCDET. Summary records at the job level were also written.

There might have also been a program to produce invoices to send to clients. Mass and Hensley may have opted just to produce a cost sheet for the jobs that they wanted to bill. I don’t remember.

We finished this project pretty rapidly, and everyone liked what we had done. Previously they would have had to rewrite and calculate costs for the information from the time sheets onto cost forms for each job. So, this was an ideal project for an early eighties software system. The savings in time and the increase in accuracy of costing and billing were immediate and substantial.

The users must have called TSI for support a couple of times, but I cannot ever remember when we needed to “put out a fire” for them.

TSI’s standards fit on one page, but they were strictly enforced.

Since I was doing the bulk of the programming, I implemented a set of standards for all of the programs. The goal was to make it as easy as possible to understand and debug them.

  • Many BASIC programmers eschewed the GOTO statement and use the RENUM command when they have changed their programs. I never renumbered the programs. Instead ,certain types of statements ALWAYS were in the same range of line numbers:
    • Line 1 was always OPTION BASE 1, LPREC. That meant that all counting started with 1, not 0, and all numbers had as much precision as the system could handle.
    • Line 250 always opened the specs table, and subsequent lines read in whatever specs were used by the program.
    • Lines 10000-10999 opened the tables used by the program.
    • The main loop of the program started on line 15000.
    • The exiting routine started at 60000.
    • Program-specific subroutines and functions were located on lines in the 70000-89999 range.
    • Headings for reports were subroutines that started at 90000.
    • Detail lines on reports were subroutines that started at 90000.
    • Reusable functions were 95000-99998.
    • Sections of code were separated by comment lines consisting of asterisks or dashes.
  • Every program had a meaningful number.
    • 1-99 was for programs to insert new records into tables or to work on existing records.
    • 100-199 was for lists of items in tables on the screen.
    • 200-299 for transactions.
    • 300-399 for printed lists of items in tables.
    • 400+ for reports.
    • The program number was in the upper right corner of every screen and every report.
    • Program listings and variable cross-references were placed in accordion files by client and program number.
  • Variable names were consistent and meaningful. CLNUM was used for client number in every program. Looping variables were always I or J. Counting variables started with N. NEE=NEE+1 would be used to count the number of employees selected.
  • In this version of BASIC all files were accessed by a number between 1 and 255. We consistently used the same number for a file. The printer was always #255.
  • Although BASIC allowed reading in all of fields at once, thereby assigning values to all of the variables with the corresponding field name, we never did this. If we had, we would have not been able to use the same field names for the same concept in different files. Instead, we read in only the fields that we needed by their position in the file. The disadvantage was that if we decided to change a field, e.g., to make it bigger, every program that referenced that file needed to be changed.
  • Disk space was precious. If a customer ran out of space on a diskette, it was a catastrophe. To save space all numbers except codes were “packed” to fit nine-digit numbers in five bytes in every layout. Dates were stored as six-digit numbers in the form YYMMDD. This all worked fine until the late nineties when we, as well as everyone else, needed to address the Y2K problem.
  • The screen layouts were consistent, and the behavior of Cmd keys2 was also consistent.
    • F2=Online help for every screen.
    • F3=Orderly exit.
    • F4=List of items in a table.
    • F12=Cancel and return.
  • The screens validated every field as soon as it was entered. If it was not accepted, the reason for the problem appeared in bold print on line 24, the alarm sounded, and the cursor remained at the field. This worked very well for the 5120 and the Datamaster, but when a single computer had many terminals attached, it became important to minimize traffic going to and from the server. Our programs on the System/36 and AS/400 therefore validated the entire screen at once. Problems were still reported on line 24 of the screen, the alarm still sounded, and the cursor was positioned at the source of the problem.

By and large these standards serve us well. We never really abandoned any of them.

This rather simple project was memorable not so much for what we did but for what it led to. Our accountant, Dan Marra, had a client named Harland-Tine, a new advertising agency in downtown Hartford. The two principals were Dave Tine3 and Susan Harland4.

I have dozens of vivid memories of this installation. At our first meeting Dave introduced himself as the president of the agency. He did not say what his partner did, and, in all honesty I never saw her do anything but cook. I think that they might have attracted clients by wowing them with her culinary skills.

A complicated business.

Dave said that the agency desperately needed to become more organized and efficient. He said that he turned to IBM for help, and both the IBM rep and his accountant had told him that he should talk to us. He envisioned using the computer for all of the administrative tasks of the agency. We spent a couple of days talking with people there. A large part of what the agency did was analogous to what Massa and Hensley did, but there was a whole other side to their business. They also purchased media (newspaper and magazine ads and radio and television commercials), which they marked up and billed their clients. Sometimes they created and produced these projects in-house, but most of the time some or all of the work was done by other companies or freelancers. There were a lot of other miscellaneous things that they also billed—public relations consulting, billboards (always called “outdoor” even if it wasn’t), direct mail campaigns, and “collateral”, which covered virtually anything else that promoted products or services.

They also wanted a billing system that could handle every type of work that they did. They wanted fairly standard accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger systems. Their payroll was handled by an outside service.

In the early 1980’s Hitchcock not only manufactured chairs, but also had several retail locations.

The agency’s ultimate objective was to analyze the profitability of each client. Producing the reports for this was a very complicated assignment. Each client had negotiated a separate agreement with the agency. Harland-Tine billed some clients for items that others got free. For example, the agency’s largest client, Hitchcock Chair, was billed a monthly fee but did not pay anything extra for media expenses. They only paid what the publication or station charged the agency. So, if Hitchcock ordered a lot of media in a month, Harland-Tine did a lot of work with no reimbursement at all.

In addition, some jobs were billed in advance, some when the job was completed, and some in stages. So the profitablity reports, which we called “cost accounting”, needed to match the period in which income was counted with the period in which expenses were incurred.

We did not have the wherewithal to put together a detailed proposal. Instead we outlined in fairly broad terms what we would do for them. We broke it out by module, but we knew that it was really all or nothing. Their most important objective required all of the pieces. Our proposal was a great deal for them. We were desperate, and we did not want them to start looking around.

We saw ourselves in half of what agencies did.

Sue and I immediately noticed the resemblance of this agency to TSI. They were another company that would do anything for a buck! We decided that when we designed the system for Harland-Tine, we would also make sure that it could be used by TSI as well. We did not purchase media on behalf of clients, but pretty much everything else that the agency did had an analog in the way our company did business. For example, we did not advise about public relations, but we did consult about connectivity and hardware decisions.

I did a little research and discovered that there was a paucity of computer software for advertising agencies. Moreover, there were many agencies within driving distance, especially if New York and Boston were included in our sphere of influence. I figured that the best way to make TSI profitable was to sell a base package with customization to a lot of agencies. We had to start with one or two happy and successful clients. We resolved to make Harland-Tine the first.

Detailed recollections of the installation itself can be found here.

1. We never called the people who paid us money customers. We thought of our business as more service than product. We never installed a system that did not include at least a modicum of customization.

2. There were no function keys on the Datamaster keyboard. Instead there were 24 active Cmd keys in BASIC programs. The user held down the Cmd key in the panel on the left and the appropriate numeric key on the QWERTY portion of the keyboard for the 1-12 Cmd keys. For 13-24 (seldom used by TSI) the user held shift and Cmd and pressed the appropriate key (less 12). Shift Cmd 1 was 13, Shift Cmd 2 was 14, etc.

3. Dave Tine’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Susan Harland died in 2000. She and Dave Tine opened the Connecticut Culinary Institute in 1987.Her obituary is here.