The Electronic Document & Me

"You Don’t Really Appreciate It Until You Need it"

After eighteen very successful months at MICOM things began to get weird. For whatever reason – changing technology, poor management decisions, or something else – the company decided they weren’t getting the sort of productivity they needed from the sales force.

Accordingly the decision came down that every sales person would be put on probation. Yep – every, single one – regardless of performance. And we were all ordered to sign probation letters. This immediately struck me as a) unfair, b) arbitrary and c) really stupid. As I said in a previous installment, I had continually exceeded my quota. In fact, I had been given ‘Sales Person of the Month’ wall plaques for the past five or six months. So, the idea of being forced to sign an acknowledgement that I should be placed on probation rubbed me entirely the wrong way. Consequently, I refused to sign. This resulted in ever-increasing pressure from upper management. They didn’t have the requisite stupidity to fire me outright; they had just enough of that commodity to think it made sense to piss off one of their most productive sales people in the Chicago area.

Parenthetically I’d tossed each plaque in the trash immediately after receiving it. Not because I didn’t feel I’d earned it but because my last name was misspelled on each of them even after several requests that it be corrected. This may have been my first encounter with the negative effects of inaccurate data used in personalization.

In an example of ‘right time, right place’, while all this nonsense was ramping up I got a call from my friend and former boss, Pat Raftery. He told me he was with a company called Racal-Telesystems, that he was looking for a new sales person and needed someone with knowledge of the word processing market and the experience of having managed a large, regional territory. He’d remembered that before I went into word processing sales I’d been a rep for a large publishing house and called on accounts throughout the Midwest. He was curious if I’d be interested in talking about the job. 

Considering the idiocy that was taking over MICOM I immediately said “yes”. We set up a time to meet.

At the end of our meeting Pat made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. The only thing that gave me pause was the fact that my wife and I were expecting the imminent arrival of our first child. Working through the ins & outs of the insurance implications took a few weeks – we couldn’t afford to risk not being covered.

But at the end of it all I pulled the string, resigned from MICOM and joined Racal-Telesystems. Strangely on one of my last days in the MICOM office we got a visit from the company’s founder. I won’t use his name here – if you’re at all curious I’m sure you can find it somewhere on the web.

He asked me why I was leaving and where I was going. I told him. He said, “I think you’re making a mistake – I know for a fact that the Telesystems technology doesn’t work”. I told him a bit about my history with Pat Raftery and that anything that was good enough for Pat was good enough for me. He shrugged – and that was it. This conversation made a lot more sense to me some months later – I’ll explain somewhere in the future.

Let me step back here and provide some background on the state of the word processing industry as it then existed. In 1982 there were 132 different types of word processing systems on the market. It seemed that just about every large company had decided to jump in – either by acquiring a word processing company as was the case with Exxon and Vydec, or through their own internal development. There were also several independent vendors. Gartner had predicted the word processing market would be $10 billion by 1990. I guess that explains all the interest.

The market leaders were WANG (founded by Dr. An Wang the inventor of magnetic memory while he worked for IBM), IBM (they had a number of systems – the OS/6, Displaywriter, 5520 and probably some others I’ve forgotten) and of course, Xerox with their 850 and 860 systems.

Some of the more notable independents were Lanier, NBI (there’s a great story about how they got their name that maybe I’ll tell later) and CPT (‘Cassette Powered Typewriters’) – no kidding.

Among others were Raytheon Lexitron, 3M (yep even they got into it), and DEC (who’s founder famously said that he couldn’t see the day when the average American home would have a computer in it).

You can see that it was a pretty congested market. The important point is that all of these systems – even in some cases ones sold by the same company – were mutually incompatible in the ways they structured saved documents.

For example, (and I’m going from memory so this may not be entirely accurate) WANG saved ‘normal’ ASCII characters – A through Z – as different bytes depending on whether they were underscored or not. Other systems embedded ‘underscore-on’ codes at the beginning and ‘underscore-off’ codes at the end of underscored sections of text.

Additionally, each system saved special characters such as quotes, commas, colons, semi colons, etc. completely differently. So, the byte that represented a period on one system might actually represent a dash or ampersand on another. This partially explained why a floppy disk from one system wouldn’t work on another (even if they were the same size – another issue altogether) and totally explained why documents sent from one system to another via telecommunications (more on this later) would appear on the screen of the receiving system as complete (although really interesting looking) garbage.

I should also note that word processors of that day – with few exceptions – supported text only. The idea of including photos, charts, graphics or any other higher-level content was still a few years away.

None of this was an issue if an organization had managed to standardize on one type of word processing system or if they never had to share documents with other organizations. This was completely unrealistic. For example, (and I’m not making this up) every ship in the US fleet had a word processing system on it. And of course, they were all different depending on what vendor had submitted the lowest bid for each ship.

But it wasn’t just governments. Large corporations (I’ll get into this too) struggled to standardize on one system.

Telesystems had been founded to develop technology to address this ‘Tower of Babel’. After a few years in operation Telesystems was acquired by a Florida-based company, Racal-Milgo. I won’t go into the history of Racal-Milgo or their parent company, Racal Group, Ltd. of the UK other than to say Racal-Milgo (formerly Miller-Gordon Electronics) was an early if not the first, developer of modems. This helps explain to some extent why Milgo acquired Telesystems.

Unfortunately, after acquiring Telesystems Milgo discovered that the technology involved as I had been told, did not work. So, they made the investment to make it work. They hired developers and managers, gave them marching orders and went back to Florida. My friend Pat had been hired to run the sales effort and that’s how I got involved.

Before proceeding let me explain a little bit how Telesystems addressed the issues of incompatibility among the various word processing systems. In addition to saving text and special characters differently each system also had its own ‘native’ communications protocol that preserved the attributes of saved documents when they were communicated. So WANGs could communicate with other WANGs, MICOMs with other MICOMS, NBIs with other NBIs and so on.

Telesystems developed support for each of these native protocols. The Racal-Telesystems Protocol and Code Converter (first the Model 303 and later the 404) would accept a system’s native protocol, convert it into an internal format – a superset that eventually became known as RNF – ‘Racal Normal Form’ – and then converted it again to the native protocol for the receiving system and finally, delivered it.

At Vydec I’d learned a valuable lesson. When you’re selling an uncompetitive product it’s best to know as much or if possible, even more about competitive products as the folks selling them know. It’s the only way to survive. Clearly, this competitive knowledge put me in good stead at Telesystems since we had to deal with every system on the market and had on the tenth floor of the Wrigley Building, one of each of them – truly quite something to see.

One day we had a visitor from Florida. He had just joined Milgo in a sales and marketing management role and was told he should come to Chicago to get an understanding of what Telesystems was doing.

First, we explained the word processing market and how we were addressing the compatibility issue. Then we took him to our lab, showed him all the various systems, showed him a piece of Telesystems technology being tested. It was connected between two systems via an RS232 (you can google it) with some lights flashing. Not a very impressive demo. We showed him how a document typed on one system could be edited using an incompatible system after conversion.

While all this was going on he did a lot of frowning, chin rubbing and muttering things like, “Very interesting” and “Yes, I see”.

At the end of the day he left and Pat and I sat down to talk about it. I said, “Well what do you think?” Pat said, “Not a freaking clue!” Only as always, he didn’t say “freaking”.

A few months later – and I’m not making this up – we got a call from the guy. He had left Milgo and joined another company. He said, “We’ve moved our company from Canada to Boston. In Canada all of our documents are stored on a DEC system. We don’t want to pay to have that system moved to Boston so we bought a Xerox system for this office. But when we tried to use the DEC disks on the Xerox all the documents look like garbage. Do you know anyone who can convert the documents?”

Pat said, “Uh – that’s what we do.” This guy said, “Oh! Is that what you were talking about! You know, you don’t really appreciate it until you need it”.

And on it goes.

To be continued…