East Coast Video - Communications Breakdown

Our friend James Foster had found us some contract work. A video rental store in Brockton, Massachusetts wanted to get out of their 3x5 index card system and into a computerized one. The software was going to run on an IBM PC clone with two floppy drives. This was to be a pretty big project worth thousands of dollars. I went with James to meet the owner of the store. He began to explain what he wanted. I would ask him questions to try and clarify the details and I took notes. He was very enthusiastic about our designs.

I went back to Mr. Alessi's house and with great energy proceeded to build this system. We wrote and debugged it using the BASICA interpreter and then created binaries with the IBM BASIC Compiler. It had to manage a catalog of customers, and catalog of video tapes, and also keep track of who rented what, and for how long, and how much that cost depending on what category of movie it was. It also had to calculate total charges including taxes, and of course the cashier had to be able to override the price.

One month later we were ready and we took the system to Brockton. Wouldn't you know it, the system was not anything like the way our customer was expecting even with the long design session together. So, now equipped with the knowledge of what they didn't want we sat down for another design session.

The software needed to be rewritten from scratch, and this time they wanted in a week! I spent the next week working late into the night to create the new system. When we were done and showed it to the customer we were relieved that he was happy with the result. We just needed to deal with some minor tweaks and some performance optimizations.

In retrospect this would have gone a lot better if I had developed the software there in the store. That way we would have learned very quickly if we were straying from the customer's needs.

Continental Cablevision and the Apple IIc

The first real paid contract software job that Mr. Alessi and I did was for a local cable company called Continental Cablevision. I guess with a name like that they must have had grand ambitions, but I'm sure they don't exist anymore. We got this work through a fellow named James Foster, who was an associate of Mr. Alessi's.

The business model for cable TV was different back then. They actually had real sales reps, and they would call people up and try to sell cable TV service. The packages would have different options and depending on how successful the rep was at selling these to the customer, commission was paid appropriately. This is what our Apple II application was for, computing sales commissions and payroll.

I was new to this, and quite naive. When we went to the customer site (one in Needham, Massachusetts and one in nearby Natick), I found myself making mistakes in the way I disclosed information. The people who worked there were pretty good at getting my to talk about things that I should have been more discreet about; For example, how easy or hard it would be add certain features. I was a member of a team, and needed to act appropriately. This was a good lesson for me, and it sticks with me.

In the Natick office for Continental Cablevision they had the miniaturized version of the Apple II, called the Apple IIc. These machines were really small, about the size of a laptop computer, but of course the screen was separate. Apple sold very small screens that looked appropriate for the size of the Apple IIc. It was a complete Apple II, and it was cute. Brains and beauty in one package.