Pugsly’s Response
Received from David Roth, alias Pugsly:
I was a music student at Indiana University School of Music in the late 70s and early 1980s. My interest in computers was sparked by using software that ran on the CDC 6600/Cyber 172 to provide music notation.
While using TELEX, which is what ran the online terminals, I discovered there was a notesfile system on the mainframe, NOTE, very much like web-based forums. While in Bloomington, I took a job as a programmer (with a puffed up title of Software Division Manager) at Data Domain, one of the first computer stores in the US. This is before the PC was available for sale or an Apple Macintosh. What was sold were Apple IIs and CP/M based systems which ran WordStar, a screen word processor.
The majority of my job, besides doing custom software programming, was to fix the salesman’s mistakes after a system was sold. My attempts to prevent this from reoccurring were largely ignored. For me to claim it was merely a poorly run business doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what a mess the place was. The place was open on Saturdays which was my day off. However, I couldn’t get any real work done during the week, and like a fool I came in on Saturday to get a few things done. I was in the office for only a moment when there was a phone call for me. It was our salesman, Mike, who was referred to in-house as our super salesman by myself and the hardware staff. Mike got it in his head that he must install the software for a new computer system he sold to a customer onsite, and in front of the customer. I did my best to explain to him that this wasn’t a good idea, that it should be done in the office like it always is. He said that he would install it onsite himself. He ignored the fact that he never installed software ever and doing so by himself onsite was only going to embarrass himself and our company.
This phone call was from Mike, informing me that he was onsite and needed help installing the software. Mike’s former job was not selling computers, but selling cameras in a camera store. I realized that the only way to prove my point that this was not how things were going to be done, was to torture him. I instructed him to place the new software disks into the computer drives and issue the CP/M command ERA which is used to erase files. This forced me to leave, bring the computer back to the office; it was installed properly on my regular working day. He never suggested installing anything onsite again, and neither did anyone else.
While this might appear that I was not a “team player,” I would argue that what I was doing was not just for my own workload and sanity but for the good of the company — even though the company itself was far from being good. Because in the early wild pioneering days of the micro computing industry almost nothing worked “out of the box” and it required installing patches by hand, which included entering in machine code (hex) into a binary program file to make it work. The expression I have heard since of “airing our dirty laundry” in front of the customer was what I was trying to avoid. Data Domain shortly after this sold its controlling interest to a customer who owned a construction company and shortly after that sold it to another company which resulted in Data Domain finally closes its doors.
The person credited as Original Contributor in Text 1, “Mark Vonderschmitt,” was a frequent member also of NOTE. I’m sure that Mark saw my original posting.