About My Profession

Computer Programming / Systems Analysis

 

Background

When I was growing up, computers already existed, but like almost everyone really didn't know anything about them. They were these magical brains that could calculate and solve problems. What I only learned years later was computers were like the Wizard of Oz - not the all-telling all-knowing machines I thought (i.e., a humbug. Consequently, there was no thought of going into computers as a profession. I knew from an early age that I wanted to go into science, and when I caught the astronomy bug suddenly I thought I wanted to be an astronomer. But I was more than a little disillusioned when I discovered the low pay especially when you need a lot of education (Ph.D.) and most who go into astronomy end up professors of either physics or math. And there was the reality you wouldn't be working on a telescope very much. It was common that an astronomer only gets maybe 3 nights a year! No thank you, I'd rather be an amateur.

I finally decided on a pre-med program with an engineering backup. Though I initially did okay in college, I would be thwarted because I have dyslexia. I just thought I couldn't read very well. It was easy to make it through high school and the first semesters of college without reading much, but eventually this handicap would cost me a lot of grade points and you need a big number for any chance of making it to medical school. But because I was also taking some engineering classes I got my first exposure to computer programming (a chance to see what was behind the curtain) and I was immediately hooked. I would decide on computers, but felt it would be better to take classes in the school of business and I got a Bachelor of Business Administration in MIS (Management Information Systems) from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. If you're wondering, I still struggled in a lot of classes, but not the computer classes, all of them I aced.

While in college I dreamed of affording a personal computer which were only just appearing in the market. I thought I wanted a Tandy (Radio Shack) computer and it utilized a Z80 processor. I bought a book showing how to program in assembly language and began to learn, but it was tough when you didn't have a computer to actually try real coding. I found the language difficult, but I felt I could manage.

Computer Programming Job in Phoenix

Between my junior and senior years I got an offer from my uncle who owned a computer service bureau in Phoenix, Arizona, Computer Graphics (CG). and I would spend the summer doing computer programming. I was asked if I knew BASIC and I gleefully answered yes. I learned BASIC as it was an easy programming language. But when I got to Phoenix it wasn't what I thought. He was talking about Basic Assembly Language and I'd be doing it on an IBM System/360 computer! I would spend the first week learning it and I found it incredibly easy, especially compared to the assembly language of the Z80. They did not yet have a single terminal and all programming was done with 80-column punch cards.

By mainframe standards at the time (1981), they had a small and fairly out of date computer system. The System/360 mainframe had only 128k of RAM and the had a DOS system that offered only 3 paritions, only one of which could be used for compiling programs. They had IBM 2304 disk drives and 6 STC 9-trace tape units. But they had 3 IBM 1403 line printers and all three were in use most of the time. Their big client was the March of Dimes and they did all the printing for their mailings.

By the end of that summer I was pretty proficient and knew I chosen my career wisely. I was actually sad I had to return to Wisconsin to complete my last 6 credits for my MIS degree. During this time I started to look for programming positions, but there were few openings as we were in the middle of a bad recession. I thought I had an edge on other students because I had a resume with actual computer experience, but I got just one interview and no offer after sending out 30 resumes. Then in early January of 1982 I got a phone call from my uncle's partner (who was the computer programmer whereas my uncle was a systems analyst) asking if I'd be interested in working full-time for him. I didn't need to think about it all. I had no other offer and I'd be going to a place where I would be productive on day one.

Gene in the Computer Graphics computer room.

Though I was very good programmer, I would actually distinguish myself as a systems analyst. They secured a couple of big bank accounts (First Interstate and Wells Fargo), but they messed things up because it was a job like no other they'd encountered in their careers. These clients didn't have firm specs. They only had a general idea of what they needed and we needed to figure it out. And figuring it out meant starting the job and then making adjustments according to what the data dictated. I was brought into a job for Wells Fargo that was already 3 weeks in and they had some 20 versions of a mailing population and they wanted to know where all the deleted records went and why they were purged. To answer that question meant going through all the steps over again (a lot of computer time) and there were 18 versions of the output file! I eventually decided that the fast approach was just matching each file to its successor to count which records were purged and could then back into the numbers.

Gene's home office.

They secured another bank (First Deposit) and I needed to work on it. From what I learned from the Wells Fargo experience I created an whole new system where the processing was done with tags. No records would be deleted and just tagged. I didn't matter if they changed their minds later about what was actually a genuine delete because I always had all the records. We then got another bank client, First Deposit, and they had someone to interface with the client and gather specs, but that person wasn't a systems analyst and I would need to talk to them directly. I would immediately get all the calls because I could answer their questions with the added benefit that I could offer suggestions. The client became mine. The computer grew out of their small facility and they built a brand new building. I would do this client with one helper plus the computer operators and we'd bill over 3 million dollars a year. It was definitely a cash cow.

I went on quite a few sales calls even though I never thought of myself as a sales person. But it turns out that sales is incredibly easy when you truly believe in your product and have the confidence you can answer any question thrown at you.

But it was all exhausting. I was working 7 days a week and on most days 12 hours. I would eventually get a computer terminal and a modem (just 4800 baud) so I would work at home so I didn't have to be at work more than 9 hours a day. Of course it didn't minimize my hours working, but it was far more tolerable when I didn't have to be at work all the time.

The Ad.

I worked for Computer Graphics for almost exactly 10 years when I decided I was going as far as I could. It was made clear I wouldn't be inheriting the company even though I thought I had demonstrated I had the ability. So I had two choices: (1) Find another programming / analyst job or start my own company. I went with the later and started my own company in 1992. At the left you see the ad we responded to which got our starter equipment. Then a suite was rented that had the prerequite 3-phase electric. It was a nice little setup as I had just 1650 sq. feet of space and roughly 1000 sq. feet of it was the computer room. It wasn't the proverbial "working out of my garage" but it really felt that way. It was nerve racking for the first couple of months when there was only a little work. I worked on refining my system for the banks and wrote a bunch of new subroutines, the most important of which was a fuzzy logic routine to match names and addresses. But now those business administrator classes paid off.

I got my first break from a friend at First Deposit who was at one time the head of their marketing program that I had developed for them. He was now the head of the internal computer processing department. They were doing a check letter campaign for the marketing department and it was going badly. The problem was they didn't know how to efficiently do a marketing program where you don't have firm specs and things change all the time. It had taken them 3 weeks to get this done which is way too long. They would have never given this work to a small firm, but they knew me and knew I could do it. When I got the info and the input files, it took me one day to give them their final report on how many names they could mail. The analyst was amazed and said, "It took our guys 3 weeks to do that!" This instantly became a monthly job and enough revenue for my business to breakeven.

I then got a partner who would bring laser printing capability. This allowed to do bank and credit union processing, another good monthly revenue stream.

But it exploded immediately and we didn't have enough room for a second printer so the business was split because we couldn't get either of the suites to either side of us. And additional growth meant that both sites needed expansion. I needed more computer space and we needed to add an inserter which came with more warehousing. We were now separated by nearly 15 miles. Sadly, I don't have a single picture of either of the facilities and probably because we weren't in these spaces for very long. The growth coninued and again both locations were running out of room.

In 1997 as we now needed more space, we were able to get the facilities under one roof. We found a 13,000 sq. foot suite on West Desert Cove Avenue and got an allowance to be able to make some rudimentary modifications. I now had 2000 sq. feet of computer room space and a tape vault. Our warehouse and lettershop had 7,000 sq. feet.

As nice as the new space was, I still didn't have a raised floor. The equipment needed large power cables and large bus cables which were run through the ceiling. But the new facility made us look like a relatively large company, something we wouldn't be ashamed to show a bank client.

As the business continued to grow, I upgraded the mainframe twice and then went to having two mainframes! We needed a lot more disk storage, but The disk technology was advancing and we got ones with Raid-5 technology with hot spares. These RAMAC drives became the first perpherials with ESCON cabling which was a single thin fiber optics. From then on until I was no longer in business, though we still regularly offloaded, we never lost a single byte of data due to an equipment failure! As the equipment space grew, it took a strain on the air-conditioning. We ended up putting two A/C units directly on the floor, but sitting upside down so the air would dump right on the floor.

By late 1999 the handwriting was on the wall that we'd have to get a larger facility again. But this time we were making enough money when we learned that we could afford to buy a brand new building. And because we were buying it we couldn't easily just get up and move if we needed more space so we needed to go big. And going big meant we had a much better chance of landing large accounts. I got to design my dream computer room which had a trenched raised floor (therefore, no ramps needed) and a completely secure computer data center with a large command center which could be viewed through a window for one purpose only: impress clients.

The floor plan for the new facility located on West Parkside Lane near the Deer Valley Airport. It features a 6500 sq. foot data processing center with a 90,000 cartridge capacity library and 14,000 sq. feet of warehouse space. The total sq. footage was 33,500. The two computer areas would be "raised" floors, 18 inches, enabling both cabling and A/C (mainframe equipment are designed to be best cooled from beneath. But they were trenched 18 inches deep so they would be level with the rest of the building so no ramps needed! Why such a large data processing center when the equipment was getting smaller over time? It's because in the years of having the business we were growing faster than the equipment was getting smaller.

Tilt Construction

The building type is known as tilt construction. It was more cost effective than masonry because most of the building height was 32 feet with the warehouse section just 24. The reason for the extra height was that when we were at first going to build a second floor with 10,000 additional sq. feet, but we decided we would add it later. They call it "tilt" because the walls of the building are poured onto the concrete pad, a process that took 2 months to complete. These concrete reinforced walls are 8 inches thick! They are then tilted into position with a giant crane, a process that took two days for my building.

Construction started in August of 2020 and was finished in December of 2001. I didn't go to the construction site everyday, but it was most days as I wanted to keep up on what was going on and to take pictures. When it got to the inside construction it was a advantage for the superintendent because there would be questions about the plan that wasn't clear on the blue prints. I could answer everything immediately so it wouldn't slow things.

In case it escaped your notice, during the late stages of the construction 9/11 occurred. I saw my life flash before my eyes as we might lose all our business. But as the weeks went by and construction continued, it seemed like it wouldn't make any substantial difference. The building was completed and we moved in by the end of 2001.

Completed Building

Building Interior

Command Center close-up.

The pictures above show the "view room" and hopefully it's obvious why. It was used as a secondary conference room, but it's primary purpose was marketing. We were doing data processing for several large banks and security (or at least the appearance of security) was extremely important. The other purpose was to make a statement that we are a large processor and, of course, we can do your jobs.

In truth we didn't need a command center nearly this large. It was that large because when we were ordering it we were asked the size of the data center. They came back with a rendering and your only thought was, "Wow!" It didn't matter that it was too big, I wanted the wow factor.

As you can see in the picture to the left it had a slot for a 36 inch Toshiba CRT that must have weighed 250 pounds. We were comedians and would often put the big screen actual working games of Space Invaders or Missile Command. At other times we'd put the security camera images. The clocks other than the one designating MST were just eye-candy. But not exactly cheap because you wanted the minutes to all change at the same time so there was a synchronizing mechanism.

You may have noticed that in a couple of the data center pictures various Tiki dolls sitting on top of network racks and computers. The cartoon at the left is the reason why. Now I myself don't think our servers necessarily ran any faster than they otherwise would, but our equipment was unbelievably reliable. But this is not exception in the IBM mainframe world because their equipment is both well made and designed with redundancy.

Our only requirement for the Tiki dolls is that they are bought as part of vacation. Every time I went to Hawaii I brought one back to add to the collection.

With so much space we needed wall hangings and we quickly decided on motivational posters which, of course, everyone despises. No, we would put up a series called demotivational posters, essentially making fun of the real ones. Everyone liked them, but there was one employee that didn't. They came to me one day and said, "Did you know they have these demotivational posters?" They had never actually looked at our posters, just assuming they were the real time and therefore completely ignored what was printed. We had more than a little fun taking them to a couple of posters to show the demotivation.

Laser Printing Center

Warehouse and Lettershop

Tradeshow Booths

My Office

As you can see in the pictures above my office walls and cabinet were much like my website: a nod to my hobbies. What you don't see are any windows. Sure, a window would be nice but I preferred that my employees have windows when it was possible. Besides, it was a good size office and had a conference table. But as you could see in the floor layout (and the pictures to the left) it was designed to have 6 Pods that would all have two windows. However, I'm not really being too altruistic. First, it's not my productivity that needs to be maximized, it was my employees. Keeping employees happy has inherent benefits. But, second, I really preferred working in the Pods and I did so whenever possible.

The butterfly wall was a custom piece I commissioned from a lady that mostly did butterfly art. She uses genuine butterflies because no replica is still no where near what a real butterfly looks like. She was particularly happy with the commission because my big specification was that I wanted variety. She said she got to use butterflies she'd never used before. The final display has 6 cases and contains 100 specimens, 99 of them unique. The duplicate was a Madagascan Sunset Moth which is shown from the top and then again later from the bottom.

Miscellaneous Pictures

Notes on the above items. First, the break room: You see a pool table. Frankly, it didn't get very much use, but it looked great. The other is the keyboard. That is my Rhodes Mark I Stage Piano which is an electric piano I bought back in Wisconsin in 1978. It would remain my main piano until I bought a house in 1984 and that Christmas bought a 5'6" Grand Piano. Second, the conference room. Note that it says room(s) and that's because it was such a large space, it had a movable curtain divider. You can see it at the left of the picture in the closed position.