02-IBM_Inside.gmi (in Amiga)

2020-09-06

Still back in the late 80's here. I had just quit school and gone to work after first year sciences to let my wife get her degree first. Guess how well that worked out for me? Yes. I am an idiot.

Anyhow, back in the day, IBM meant 'computer'. They were a goliath and dominated the popular imagination for what a computer was and where it came from - 'IBM' - that's where! Microsoft was nearly a nobody. A bit of icing on a small platform cake that IBM had decided to mostly ignore and gift to Bill Gates. Data General and DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) got a look in. While Commodore had sold more personal computers than any other company, 'real' computers were 'IBM Compatible'. It would be a few more years yet before 'Microsoft Compatible' stickers could sell computers better than using the IBM name. I stand to be corrected, but I think that happened around the same time as the OS/2-MS divorce, when Gate's decided he could get away with screwing over IBM by taking his ball and going home. And changing the rules of the game in order to break compatibility with IBM's copy of OS/2...

In any case, I was now in the workforce at a retail flooring shop. 1988? I knew this business from my early teens. Crawling around on floors was how I paid my rent and ate when I was about 15 or so. I took off blueprints and made bids. Cut material. Went out and did measures.

The owner of this shop was also a half owner of those apartments I was still doing books for. He expected me to do the same for the flooring business. They didn't have a computer. A mac was a grey-scale toy with a one button mouse and no serious business software. Just artsy/DTP or edu stuff. I wanted to buy another Amiga 2000, but I was brainwashed by all the years of dominance by IBM, so I bought one with a 'Sidecar' thinking I could simply buy some 'IBM Compatible' business software to go with it. On the A2000 this option was actually known as a 'Bridgeboard'. It was an 8088 PC-XT at 4.77 MHz. Oh - and you could hang the el cheapo IDE hard drives off of it. Amigas used the much faster (and more expensive) SCSII drives.

So. I spent a bunch of my boss's money and bought an A2000, Bridgeboard, 1084 monitor and... a copy of 'IBM Compatible' business software! There were only two choices really. 'Bedford' accounting and AccPac accounting. One cost a couple of hundred bucks (I forget exactly), the other cost about $5,000 for all the 'modules'. I bought a copy of Bedford and set to it! Yay! :-)

No. No. NO. There were a zero number of "yays" involved. Bedford was a piece of shit that did hardly anything. No purchase orders. No decent point of sale. No payroll (what kind of company has no payroll ffs?). It was just wholly inadequate. It's so long ago now that I forget all of its many shortcomings. Junk.

So. OK. AccPac it is right?

NO! After the sticker shock you get to learn that all those 'modules' don't talk to each other in real time! Wut? No. You have to run 'batch jobs' to integrate the information from each module in order to get a current report of any damn thing. Fucking ridiculous!

At this point I've spent thousands of dollars of company money and have... well, exactly sweet fuck-all to show for it. Except an Amiga WB screen that can show a bouncing 3D ball in glorious HAM mode and 4,096 colours and 4 channel stereo sound... I felt stupid and my little 20 year old ego was well bruised. Well, another component of a male 20 year old ego is hubris. We're not *only* about stupidity and testosterone at that age; we can multitask.

Fuck it! I'll just write my own! How hard can it be? I know everything there is to know right?

Yeah... about that last bit...

They say that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, all I had was a synoptic. That knowledge was the sum and total of my accounting education. I knew what an invoice looked like. A receipt. An estimate, purchase order... I did NOT know a programming language - that would have been handy; I was a hardware guy - soldering iron and oscope. I did NOT know SQL - or, indeed anything to do with a database. That would have been handy too...

And there was internet. I even had access via a friend I had in government. He had no use for it, so I could actually log into the internet and gopher stuff from around the planet over my little modem at home on my A2000. However, it was very limited and no way to 'just look up shit' as we can today. I spent thousands of hours over several years writing that thing. I wrote in REXX (arexx actually) and used SBase4 (superbase - not posix sql). I just learned as I went. I reinvented things I *should* have known if I'd been to school. I once rang up the Sbase guys to find out how to do something. "Oh, you want 'indirection'. It doesn't do that. Leave it with me..."

So. Nearly 3 years later, what did I get? Oh, and bear in mind that the 'work in progress' was useful during this time, if not feature complete.

Well, Amiga came with built-in text2speech, which was a big deal in the early 90's. I used a program called 'Nag' from 'Grandma Software' out of Seattle. It was a calendaring program that could run cron jobs and use the speech output. It was VERY impressive at the time and quite cheap to purchase. I had the volume cranked and reminders to file VAT/GST or take a kid to gymnastics could be heard throughout the store. It also ran backups and other cronjobs (I don't think amiga had a real cron?).

The program did estimates. One click of a button turned an estimate into an editable invoice - or another editable estimate. It did receipts. Purchase orders that went straight to fax via a vox/data/fax modem. It rx'd faxes the same way - print or don't, attach to a customer or vendor. It had a kind of CRM (although I'd never heard that term) - every vendor, customer or employee had a note. It occupied part of the screen, but was invisible unless you clicked a button (maybe they were shoulder surfing you? IDK?) and could read it. If you went to edit, it would move the text down a line and insert a date-time stamp: and place the cursor to add a new note. It did payroll. I updated the payroll algorithms twice a year, same as the federal and provincial governments. It did bank deposits. WTF should someone have to write out 60-80 lines of cheques over a couple of pages of 'deposit book' from the bank when the computer knew how much was on hand and not deposited? I had a local print shop perf some paper vertically down the middle and had the impact printer simply print out a deposit slip. Just add the cash and sign... The bank balked! I explained sweetly to the bank that perhaps one of their competitors would like all our deposits and loans instead? Suddenly our deposit slips were acceptable ;-)

Anyhow, if you can think of another business function an SMB might need, I probably wrote it. Government forms, taxes, calculations peculiar to a type of business, I wrote it. I got up early and, instead of studying calc and calc-based phys, I did coding instead now. I did it at night after work. I worked six days a week, but I wrote on sunday's too (my poor kids!) Finally, it seemed done! :-) Yay!

How to charge for it though? The computer was 'special' (amiga right?) and cost thousands. The database was a few hundred bucks. It would need customizing (not everywhere is a flooring store or a set of apartment blocks...). And how could I charge for like over ten thousand hours of work? My good mate, and a fellow amigoid was an HD mechanic for AlCan (aluminum company of canada, now rio tinto alcan in kitimat). He said do the same thing that IBM did with 'Uncle Al': charge by the month! Rent it to them. Give them w/e changes and if they don't pay, turn it off! Well. I did that, but didn't put in self-destruct code.

Here's what I learned. Word of mouth went a LOONG way to get new customers. The trivial text-to-speech thing impressed the heck out of them. Payroll. All else was boring except the CRM stuff I'd bolted on to the tombstone stuff in the db. And the first couple of months were some work with each new customer, but after that... coasting and collecting monthly fees for always being available (and I was!).

Just at first, despite me 'badging' their install and doing some customization, they didn't quite understand just how 'custom' it was. After a few days of taking notes, I'd do the most obvious things. I'd add or remove buttons and menu items from the main screens. Change colour, font sizes - whatever. Wow! Then they got the idea! :-) And the changes would come thick and fast for a month or so before slowing to a trickle. Often they would ask for crazy aggregate data reports. I would have to gently point out that either them or one of their employees would have to enter all that detail in the first place before I could pull it out... ?? Yeah :-) That ended a lot of discussions!

So. Companies buy the hardware (I had by then licensed the database for redistribution by me) and pay me $150/mo with nothing up front and I customize it, maintain it, back it up and keep up with payroll. Oh. The backups. I'm such a lazy bastardo. Everyone had a fax line back in the day. And even if they didn't, I'd make it really late at night. I paired them together. A cronjob on one box would run a BBS program that would only accept one phone call before exiting. A cronjob on another box would run that same bbs and dial the first box. Each uploaded their backup to the other box and hung up. Program exited. Done. (no, I didn't deal with crypto, but it was a prop. db format...).

Sweet right? :-) Within 6 mos I had enough monthly income to pay my mortgage plus a little. I became the local Amiga dealer and opened a shop downtown. I had the world by the ass with a downhill pull! :-) Yay me! :-)

No.

That is NOT how the world works. Y'all know that. First off Medi Ali and Irving Gould finished destroying Commodore Amiga. It fell off the stock market within about 2mos. From the company that sold the most pc's to being worth less than 50 cents a share. They fled offshore to wait out the statute of limitations on either their criminality or their incompetence. During this time, my loving wife had been 'going to karaoke' up to 3 nights a week. Yeah. She emptied the bank accounts, took the registered retirement plan, and, worst of all, the KIDS and effed off with some guy and the truck (the second victim of at least 7 (still counting to this date) ) So now I have wasted all that time coding, because it only runs on amiga and that platform is dead. I'm without my kids (she moved 100's of km away). My little retail biz is dead. My marriage is dead. So, I'm now depressed - and with good reason I think no? So, naturally, I am fired from my part-time day job for being depressed and useless. This next bit is quite good: my neighbour a few acres away, leaves his prize something-or-other bitch out while she's in heat. Well. What does my dog do? What does my neighbour do? Right: he shoots my dog. I never liked country and western music in the first place, but now I'm trapped inside a particularly sadistic c&w record :-(

And then, things go kind of downhill from there. Oh well. Glad I got that off my chest. Next time I'll write about some actual interesting things I did with amigas. It will involve genlocks, toasters and vox recognition. Really! :-) I won't moan once. Promise.