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.
IBM’s Datamaster was widely disparaged in the technical press. PC’s and Macs were the rage. The reasons for this evaluation were persuasive, if a little superficial.
A Datamaster cost a lot more than a PC.
The Datamaster’s programs only ran on Datamasters. Many hardware vendors were offering PC’s that were “IBM compatible”.
The Datamaster could in no way run PC programs.
The Datamaster’s peripherals—displays, printers, keyboards, and hard drive—were very limited.
The Datamaster’s specs were inferior. The processor looked very slow.
Nevertheless, the Datamaster was a very good computer for TSI. It was extremely easy to program, and it was very good at the two tasks for which it was designed—data processing and word processing. It was also quite reliable. PC’s crashed all the time. Some of our clients used their Datamaster’s for years without ever making a service call to IBM. Those who did were uniformly satisfied with the attention that they received.
For the ad agency application there was one other overriding advantage. Up to four Datamasters could use the same hard drive. This allowed the media department and the accounting department to have access to the same data. In the early eighties personal computers were totally personal. Reliable networks were many years away.
Yes, the Datamaster was horrible at other tasks such as spreadsheet, and it had absolutely no capacity for graphics. However, most of the people who owned and ran small businesses in the early eighties were interested in addressing business problems. They did not care much about system specs, and the fact that IBM sold and supported the system was of paramount importance to them.
I am almost positive that our third ad agency client was Communication & Design (C&D)1 in Latham, NY, just north of Albany. The principals were Fran (a guy) and Theresa Lipari2. The agency purchased two Datamasters and a hard drive. I am pretty sure that by this time TSI was in IBM’s Business Partner program as a Value-added Remarketer (VAR), and C&D bought the hardware through us. We only needed to make minor adjustments to the software system that we installed at Potter Hazlehurst, Inc. (PHI).
It was a long drive, but unless there was snow on the highway, it was never stressful. Best of all, the sun was never in my eyes.
Nevertheless, I made the drive to Albany quite a few times. There was no avoiding personal involvement at several stages in these installations. The transition from manual ledgers to computerized accounting systems was never trivial. The first few monthly closing processes never went completely smoothly.
For several years I worked very closely with the woman most involved with C&D’s system. She was definitely the bookkeeper. She might have also been the office manager. I found her to be intelligent and very easy to work with. I am therefore embarrassed that I cannot remember her name. I recall clearly, however, that she was a big fan of the New York Giants football team. She had even bought vanity license plates for her car that said “NYGIANTS”.
When she left the agency, she was replaced by a woman who was as tall as I was. I don’t remember her name either, but I think that it was French, maybe Bissonet.
I also dealt with the media director when they implemented the media system. I don’t remember her name either, but she was, I am pretty sure, also a principal in the business. She explained to me about inserts3—the advertising pieces that were stuffed into the middle of a newspaper, usually on Sundays and Thursdays. From a database perspective they had pages like direct mail pieces but schedules (lists of newspapers and dates) like newspaper ads. Since we were already using the same set of files for direct mail and newspaper ads, it was not too difficult to set up ad types for inserts.
I remember meeting with Fran after the whole system had been in place for a while. He told me that the media director had started her own agency, and she had taken some of his best clients with her. I never encountered any business that was as “dog-eat-dog” as the ad agency business.
I generally drove up to C&D early in the morning and back at night. I sometimes stopped for supper at a restaurant in East Greenbush. I generally listened to WAMC, the powerful NPR station in Albany. Once I heard—for the first time—the entire recording of The Phantom of the Opera. On another occasion I listened to Lt. Col. Oliver North defending his actions in the Iran-Contra hearing.
A couple of times I stayed overnight. A Howard Johnson’s hotel was right across the street.
Perhaps our easiest installation ever was at The Edward Owen Co. in Canton, CT. The owner was Ken Owen, who was a few years younger than I was. We had (and still have) similar interests. He majored in the classics at Harvard, which prepared him well both to teach Latin and/or Greek somewhere or to take over the family business after he graduated. He chose the road more taken.
The company was named after Ken’s grandfather, who had built the business up to be one of the most successful in the Hartford area. Ken’s father had apparently undone most of that. When we worked with the company Ken had only a part-time assistant and a resident artist who was not on the payroll. His father, who taught Latin at Avon Old Farms school, stopped by occasionally.
It was an easy installation because Ken was the ideal client. He understood and could explain exactly what he wanted. Furthermore, no one else had their fingers in the pie.
Ken and I initiated a lifelong habit of greeting each other on Exelauno Day4 (March 4). Sue and I also went to visit him, his wife Patti, and their two sons a few times. He drove to our house for one of our Murder Mystery parties, too.
This requirement alone would leave me out.
Ken was a serious runner. The advertising agencies in New England sponsored a mile run for CEO’s every year. He easily won whenever he entered. I often asked him for advice about running, although what I did he would probably call strolling. I was never close to being in his league.
I don’t remember the name of the artist who worked there, but I vividly recall the nice drawing that he executed for us. It showed three people in choir robes singing from three different hymnbooks labeled “accounting hymns”, “media hymns”, and “production hymns”.
We also asked Ken to help us with the one and only advertisement that we ran. It appeared in one issue of AdWeek New England. That experience is described here.
We created one new module for Yellow Pages advertising. The unique thing about Yellow Page advertising was that the agency only ordered it once. It then ran year after year until someone canceled or revised the ad. Ken’s father said that it was the best kind of advertising. All you had to do was open the envelope every year and endorse the check. Unfortunately, none of our other clients ever had a used for this module.
Ken’s business near Route 44 was next to a strip mall that contained a Marshall’s. We did not have stores like that east of the river. I often popped in there to see if they had anything cheap in my size.
Ken’s company is still in business. He moved the company to Sheffield, MA, which is south of Great Barrington. He also changed the focus of his efforts to, of all things, custom programming. The company’s web page is here.
As you can probably guess, Group 4 Design, which had offices on Route 10 in Avon, CT, was not a full-service advertising agency. They did not place any ads, and, in order to avoid charging sales tax, they were careful not to deliver anything tangible to their clients.
In other ways, however, they were like an ad agency. They billed the time spent by employees, and they could use the job costing and accounting functions designed for ad agencies. So, we treated them as an advertising agency without a media department, an approach that seemed to work well.
This was Group 4’s headquarters. Google says it was permanently closed, but Frank still lists himself as president..
I am not sure who the other three members of the “Group” were, but when we worked with them the firm was definitely run by Frank von Holhausen5. Once the system was up and running he seemed satisfied with it. The only thing that I can remember about him is that he was in a dispute with the state because his company had not been charging its clients tax on Group 4’s services. At the time the state had a tax on services6 and the only services exempted from the tax were legal and accounting. Frank complained, “They want to tax my brain!”
I worked almost exclusively with Joan Healey, the bookkeeper. She had difficulty with the first few monthly closings, but after she understood the process, Group 4 was a good reference account for TSI.
Adams, Rickard & Mason (ARM), an ad agency in Glastonbury, CT, used the GrandAd system until it merged with another agency in 1988. I never met any of the principals. In the negotiations and the initial installation we dealt with the head of finance for the agency. His name was Dave Garaventa7.
We met at the house in Rockville. Debbie Priola and Denise Bessette were in the office working. Sue and David and I sat around a table in the office. We were going over some reports that he wanted included in the system. Four of the five people in the room were smoking. After about an hour of this I felt horrible. I excused myself and walked outside to get some air.
At the time of the installation ARM was in the process of moving into offices that someone at the agency had designed specifically for them. Visually, they were quite striking. However, half of the building was on stilts. the area beneath it was used for parking, However, in the winter that half of the building was always cold because it was surrounded by cold air on all sides.
All of the employees were forced asked to take a pencil-and-paper multiple-choice test to determine whether they were “left-brained” or “right-brained”. The results were interpreted as a multi-colored strip that was displayed beneath names on offices and desks. I am not sure why the agency did this. I researched hemispheric specialization pretty thoroughly in college. This was bogus.
Our software maintenance contract with ARM was the same one that we had with every other client. We offered free telephone support during business hours, which were clearly explicated in the contract.
My fingertips were on the keyboard, not each other.
Weekends were sacred to me. I had virtually no time available during the week to program. I spent those days driving around to clients and prospects, training Denise, setting up her work, and writing proposals and documentation. On Saturdays and Sundays I worked on the custom programming that I had promised our clients from before dawn until I got very sleepy in the evening.
On one Sunday morning the phone rang. It was Dot Kurachik (or something like that), the bookkeeper at ARM. I worked with her for almost an hour and solved her problem. I sent her a bill for $75, our minimum charge at the time. She refused to pay. I talked with her boss, and he overruled her.
Cronin and Company of Glastonbury, CT, might be TSI’s only Datamaster client that is still functioning as an ad agency in 2021. Our primary contact was Mike Wheeler, who was, I think, the head of finance. He seemed very level-headed. We did only a little custom work for them.
Cronin did not have this door when I spent time there.
The main computer operator’s name was Jeannine Bradley8. After using the GrandAd system for several years, Cronin was persuaded to convert to a different software system. We did not get an opportunity to bid on this. We would have proposed a System/36 or an AS/400.
Jeannine called our office about something (I don’t remember what), and she confided to me that they now thought that they had made a mistake when they bought the new system.
I don’t recall any strange or funny stories about this account. The employees always seemed straightforward and competent to me.
The strangest of all of our installations was at Donahue, Inc., an ad agency in Hartford. We did not sell them a Datamaster. They somehow obtained one that had been purchased by Harland-Tine back in the early eighties. The installation at Donahue began in the first months of 1988. It was TSI’s last Datamaster installation.
You could say that Donahue Inc. was “old school”.
Donahue’s building did not look like it housed an ad agency or any other business. It looked like an old school, which is close to what it was originally used for. It was the custom-built home of the Cathedral Lyceum9. That designation was clearly etched above the front door.
I don’t remember ever talking to a principal there about what they hoped to accomplish with their system. Their goals, which were explained to me by a woman whom I hardly saw again, were relatively modest. They just wanted to automate their billing and accounting.
The only person whom I dealt with after that was the bookkeeper, a young inexperienced guy. He knew nothing about computers and very little about either bookkeeping or advertising. He and the Datamaster and the printer shared office space with the agency’s kitchen, which was on the ground floor of the building. The first few monthly closings were a nightmare.
Did I mention that there was no heat in the kitchen? The two of us sat there wearing overcoats and stocking caps. The person not operating the Datamaster wore gloves. People wandered in, got a cup of coffee, and quickly retreated to the area of the building that was heated.
The young man who did their books and operated their Datamaster confided to me that his goal in life was to become a real estate agent for Century 21. He really thought that their trademark blazers were cool.
Darby O’Brien.
Darby O’Brien Advertising (DOB), a full-service ad agency in downtown Springfield, MA, was not actually a Datamaster client, but I included them is this blog because they used the version of the software designed for the Datamaster. Darby10 insisted on using a Wang PC sold by one of his clients, a store that sold and repaired computers. We grumbled about this plan, but supporting their system this way turned out not to be too difficult for us.
A Wang PC.
They needed to purchase a license to use Work Station Basic11, a DOS-based product that supported all of the syntax used by the Datamaster’s version of BASIC. We also charged them for converting our code to a format that the Wang12 PC could use, but that took less than a day. In the end they probably paid more for a demonstrably inferior product. Unlike the Datamaster, a Wang PC could run other applications such as Lotus 123, but to my knowledge it was never used for that purpose.
When we installed the system, the accounting person was Caroline Harrington. For some reason Caroline resigned her position at DOB and came to work for us. Sue must have arranged this. I certainly did not recruit her.
In the eighties DOB’s offices were behind one of these two doors.
The agency’s building was in a rough part of town. It was less than a block away from the stripper bars. I was still relatively bullet-proof then, but I did not like to be there after dark. We did go there at night once, and we had a great time. The agency threw a party, and they invited all of their clients and vendors.
A very good live band played oldies from the fifties and sixties. The highlight of the evening was when they played the Isley Brothers’ hit, “Shout!” Everybody (except for me and my monkey) knew when to get down low, when to raise up, and when to shout. I hate rituals, but this one sort of made me wish that I had gone to at least one mixer.
The restrooms in the DOB offices were easy to find. The door to the men’s room was decorated with a three-foot high picture of Elvis Presley. The ladies’ room had a similarly sized portrait of Marilyn Monroe.
1. The ampersand was important. It was emphasized strongly in the agency’s logo.
2 .The Liparis’ last name was pronounced Lih PAIR ee, unlike the island just off the coast of Sicily, which is pronounced LEE pah ree with a trilled r. I am pretty sure that Fran and Theresa reside in Plymouth, MA, in 2021.
3. I later toyed with the idea of using inserts as the basis of a new business for TSI. Details are here.
4. Ken told me that “Exelauno!” is the Greek word for “March forth!” Google translate does not agree. I sold my ancient Greek dictionary at the end of my senior year. So, I can’t look it up. The origin of this custom is documented here.
5. Frank von Holhausen is now listed as the founder and Chief Design Officer at Forge Design & Engineering of Oxford, CT. His LinkedIn page is here.
6. Frank’s lament and the difficulty that TSI confronted in determining how much of what we did was service and how much was product acted as a key plot element in the short story that I wrote in 1988. The details are here.
7. Dave Garaventa died a year or so after we installed the system.
8. In 2021 Jeannine Bradley lives in Cromwell. She might still work at Cronin. She was promoted to accounting manager in 2012.
9. The Lyceum was built in 1895. You can read about it here.
10. Darby’s agency is still in business, but it has changed locations a few times. The latest headquarters is in South Hadley. He tells his own story here. I can’t believe he let them photograph him wearing a Yankees hat in Massachusetts.
11. Workstation Basic is described in some detail here.
In July of 1981 IBM announced a new system for small businesses. It replaced the system that we were familiar with, the IBM 5110/5120. Outside of the people who programmed software for small businesses, the unveiling of the System/23 Datamaster was greeted with very little enthusiasm. For one thing the model that IBM was promoting looked very much like the 5120. The cost was half as much as the 5120, but it was still a lot more than what people were paying for “personal computers” that were marketed by competitors. Most people eagerly awaited IBM’s approach in that market.
That answer would come in a few months. To us at TSI the Datamaster was just what the doctor ordered. The information about this system on the Internet is shamefully incomplete and, in a few places, erroneous. Here are details of the original announcement.
The 5322 took up much of a desk. The printed documentation shown here was uniformlyexcellent.
The processor was an eight-bit 8085 chip from Intel, which was a little bit surprising. IBM did not usually outsource processors, and the 5110/5120 used a sixteen-bit processor. The 256K of memory seemed more than adequate.
The only programming language supported was BASIC. Nevertheless, IBM offered no method of converting programs from the 5110/5120. This did not bother us much, but software companies that had put a lot of effort into systems for those computers were not happy.
There were two models. The 5322 looked a lot like a 5120. The 5324 came in three pieces. Its processor and diskette drives were housed in a standing steel box the height of a two-drawer file cabinet. The display and keyboard for the 5324 were separate.
The displays for both models used green letters on a dark background. Research had shown that this was slightly easier on the eyes than other combinations. This was somewhat important.
Two CPU’s could be connected to a box that held two additional diskette drives. We never saw anyone who purchased this box, which was benerally called a “toaster”.
IBM supplied several business applications, including accounts payable, general ledger, and payroll. We worked with several customers that had bought these packages. In general they found them extremely cumbersome and painfully slow.
A word processing program was also available from IBM. Unlike the business applications, the word processor was extremely good.
At first only two printers1 were available. Both were dot matrix printers. One printed at 80 characters per inch, the other at 120 characters per inch. Only idiots bought the 80 cps one, but it allowed IBM to quote a lower base price.
The most important change as far as TSI was concerned was that the BASIC interpreter allowed variable names of up to eight characters. This was a huge improvement over the 5110/5120, which only allowed one character and an optional digit.
The BASIC interpreter was also changed to allow up to five digit line numbers. There were a few other improvements as well. I don’t remember all of them, but I remember being very impressed with what we would now be able to do.
The system came with a set of templates that fit at the top of the keyboard. Each template displayed what it meant to use the key labeled “Cmd” and one of the keys. Every system command, every BASIC command, and every operation of the word processing program could be accessed by pressing two keys. This feature made it possible even for people who were not good typists to key in long BASIC programs very rapidly.
The components of the system were of very high quality. Many of our customers used the systems for years without ever encountering problems with hardware or the system software.
The 5324 was called “ergonomic”. It took up less desk space, and the tilt of the display could be adjusted.
I don’t know the date of the additional features, but they came within a year or so
A letter-quality printer that used a daisy-wheel. In my opinion, the addition of this printer made the Datamaster the best stand-alone word processor available. It was certainly superior to the Displaywriter that IBM sold for that purpose. When we got one, we used it for all of our word processing (and everything else) for many years.
A hard drive unit that could hold up to 30 megabytes. Up to four Datamasters could be attached to it. The software for record-locking had already been delivered in order to make the toaster usable by two Datamasters. So, the delivery of the hard drive made the Datamaster a true multi-user system. Also, access to the hard drive was much faster than to diskettes. Reliable PC networks were still years in the future, and the PC’s themselves were notoriously subject to the dreaded “blue screen of death” and other catastrophic failures.
The brains of the 5324 was in this stand-alone box designed to fit under a desk. The hard drive was the same shape minus the two diskette slots.
There were, of course, some severe limitations. Most of them were similar to limitations that the users of the 5120 also faced.
All of the hardware interfaces were unique and strange. This made it difficult, if not impossible, for third-party hardware vendors to develop printers or anything else that could attach to the computer. IBM had done this for years, but Datamaster prospects were not accustomed to this approach.
There was still no way to communicate with the system remotely. This meant that it was very difficult to market a software system to customers outside of driving distance.
There were no subprograms that could be called repeatedly as routines. Programs could be linked together, but all the needed data also had to be passed. The first program was erased from memory when the second was called. So, commonly used routines—such as date functions—needed to be built into every program that needed them.
There was no text editor with a search function.
The system had no graphical capability at all.
Calculation-intensive applications were so slow that no one could possibly use them. One company developed and tried to market a spreadsheet program through other software vendors. The instructions for showing the software to a potential client highlighted the places in which the person doing the demo should have some patter ready to distract the prospect from watching the screen. I would not have been able to keep a straight face.
The only backup medium was diskettes. We dreaded when users backed up because they sometimes designated the wrong drive as the target.
The system came with several “templates” that showed what the various keys did when used in combination with the Cmd key. One template was for system commands, one for BASIC, and one for the word processor.
From TSI’s perspective one of the best things about the Datamaster was that the IBM sales reps were suddenly eager to work with software companies. They could sell Datamasters to many diverse businesses, and the starting price had been cut in half. They brought us in to meet with prospects, but only when the IBM software packages were not applicable. Therefore, we ended up creating systems with little chance of being appropriate for more than one customer. It was enjoyable and satisfying work, but not very profitable.
Eventually IBM started a Value-Added Remarketer (VAR) program that allowed software companies with qualifying products to sell Datamasters. When that happened, the IBM reps treated us as competitors even though they got some credit for our sales.
1.There was really only one printer. The slow one could be “field upgraded” by an IBM customer engineer who made a slight adjustment to speed the printing.
