The Silicon Jungle

Zzzzzz. I doze off reading lists of the right software for, say, beekeepers or chiropractors. So sorry; I won’t cover everyone’s programs. Besides, software is evolving. I hate Select now; I may love its future editions. And what about WordStar? Although 2000 offers many improvements over my beloved WordStar 3.3—and I may eventually convert to it—I don’t like all the changes.

So don’t think specific programs here. Think concepts.

In fact, if possible, don’t even think computer concepts. Instead, think business. Just how could the lessons of the three people in this chapter apply to yours?

Ed Boland: Accounting

Ed Boland helps run a motorcycle shop, but you’ll never find him roaring off on a bike, dodging myopic drivers. “I’ve got a wife and three kids,” he joked. “Scares the hell out of me.” It doesn’t matter. Boland, a graying, middle-aged accountant, is just as useful to Clinton Cycles as a top mechanic or a crack Suzuki salesman.

Above all, a good controller obviously knows where the money is. He helps his employer avoid unneeded trips to the bank to borrow more. Clinton Cycles, in fact, borrows rarely.

That’s one reason why, when U.S. motorcycle sales suffered the economic equivalent of a head-on crash, Clinton survived. The firm even expanded during the early 1980s. Also, years before, owner Don Smolinski had wisely diversified. Clinton Cycles was actually Clinton Cycle and Salvage, Inc., a miniconglomerate with three motorcycle stores and dealings in scrap metal. Sales exceeded several million a year.

But size and complexity weren’t pure joy. Boland’s accounting software just couldn’t handle a holding company and five subsidiaries, not without costly customizing, and nearly a year after computerization, his feelings were still mixed.

“I don’t regret the decision,” Boland said. But at the time he had spent thousands of dollars more than planned, and he told me, “There’s been a few times I would have thrown this computer out the door in a second.”

His horror story—even if it eventually turns into a success tale, as it probably will—is instructive. He’s good. And he bought his software from a good store. Clinton Computers, in the same Maryland suburb, won top ratings in a consumer guide in the Washington, D.C., area. A software executive, moreover, an outspoken one critical of some other D.C. dealers, praised Clinton.

So a bothersome issue arises. If a $3,800 accounting program doesn’t work out easily with good people selling and using it, what happens among mediocre people?

And there is a second point here. Don’t expect even the best computer store to serve as your private consultant, intimately familiar with your business; not, at least, unless you’re buying a big mini or mainframe from the likes of IBM.

A third point, too, comes through. Don’t computerize a multi-million-dollar business without a consultant—at least not if you’re running an extra-hairy program like an accounting one—unless you’re willing to talk and think computerese or at least take a training course. Accounting software, anyway, just isn’t simple and reliable enough yet. Any idiot can flick on a computer and stuff a floppy disk into a drive or crank up a hard disk; most of the time his hardware will work fine, but even the brightest of businessmen may need a consultant to unravel the mysteries of many programs—even “canned,” off-the-shelf accounting packages like the one that bedeviled Ed Boland.

A blunt, tough-talking man, Boland himself is no moron. He holds a bachelors degree in accounting, and he’s worked for employers ranging from hospitals to restaurant chains, including one where he caught a chef on the take from a supplier.

“Accounting is accounting,” he said. “I don’t care if it’s food or motorcycles. Life exists the same way.” Moreover, life is a series of ratios, of intertwining figures. That’s how Boland caught the chef. He knew that food costs were normally 20 percent of the company’s expenses; two months after the chef’s hiring, they were 23 percent, creeping up toward 27 percent, finally. The incident perhaps colored his attitude toward computerization. He would computerize, but not overdo it, not lose himself in tangential statistics, not hire extra clerks to key in data.

“We carry more than seventy thousand new parts numbers alone,” he said. “Seventy thousand different kinds of screws, bolts, nuts, fenders, rims.” But if he couldn’t track every single bolt, he at least could work with major numbers like sales figures for various categories.

Normally, for instance, new bike sales and accessories sales went up and down together, and if one of the two had fallen off alone, you could bet that Boland would demand a reason. If nothing else, computers, by making past information available more quickly, could help him sniff out trouble.

Computerizing, he saw a micro as one way to avoid greedy consultants and their expensive recommendations.

“I’ve seen too many instances,” said Boland, “where businesses paid out $50,000, $60,000 to a consultant who spent six or seven months analyzing computer requirements. Then he’d recommend $50,000 or $150,000 worth of computer equipment.” Boland wanted the benefits of the bigger machines without the costs. His goal was to reach the point that a somewhat larger competitor in the D.C. area already had; the rival owned an IBM 34 system with a six-digit price.

“He used to work for IBM fifteen or twenty years ago, before he went into the motorcycle business,” Boland said. “He now has just about every one of his salespeople on commission, and he knows exactly what they sell every day. He can tell you where each motorcycle, each piece of inventory, is.

“He can tell you whether it’s in a truck, what color it is, where it is, what stage of preparation it’s in for delivery. He puts his purchases in the computer with an inventory program. The moment a salesman sells a cycle, the register itself deducts it from inventory. It’s a point-of-sales system. So theoretically, at the end of the day he knows exactly what he started the day with, what he sold, what he added to it, and what the bottom-line figure is. We’d love to get to that point.

“The likelihood of this happening with us, though, is very low. I don’t know if all this detail is necessary. And our business is seasonal, and I don’t want too much cash tied up in the system. And what’s the sense of keeping instant track of every nut and bolt sold? But we’d love to get the major items in on computer. The motorcycles, for instance. They can easily sell for up to $6,000 apiece, so it’s worth it.

“It’s a question of software. This competitor has spent more than $100,000 to develop specific software to get what he wants. Now if you’ve got $100,000 to throw away and want to hire a programmer full time at, say, 0,000 a year, that’s fine. Most companies like us can’t afford that.”

So Boland bought several programs off the shelf from Clinton Computers, including Accounting Plus, which he began trying to use as an electronic general ledger. He ran it on a North Star computer with a 5-megabyte hard disk—a memory device capable of stashing away the equivalent of maybe 2,500 typed pages of information. The North Star system was just a way for him to get his feet wet in computing with a general-ledger program. Boland, though, would switch computers even sooner than expected. The system’s memory space wouldn’t suffice for the records of his miniconglomerate, and it wasn’t easily expandable. And he would have trouble getting the machine repaired as quickly as he needed. Clinton Computers, however good its service department, just could not respond fast enough to suit his requirements.

And the software seemed just as major a disappointment, what with the need for complicated customization.

“The biggest problem I ran into at the store,” he said of the hardware and software, “was ‘We’re going to sell you a system that we think will do the job, but not necessarily so.’”

Both the buyer and the seller, in this case, apparently lost the software gamble; they apparently came out on the wrong side of “necessarily.” Clinton Computers did not win, because it isn’t a fly-by-night operation. Boland’s name had come to me from none other than Sue Grothoff, who’d sold him the software. She had enough confidence in herself and her store to offer Boland as the source of a “candid” story, and my respect remains, especially after having talked to another business customer, raving happy about her ability to understand his company’s software needs.

Boland emphasized that Clinton wasn’t out to cheat him. “Sue is a very nice person.” And he liked the software expert there, too. “He knows how to change software, but you have one person trying to meet the needs of too many customers. He’s spread too thin. Clinton never gave him enough time to get the program running at my business. And we never could seem to get together to get the twelve hours of training they’ve promised me. To be frank, I think we spent the twelve hours trying to correct the problem I had rather than on training.”

Giving Clinton Computer’s side, Grothoff said, “Because of changes that Ed wanted in the software, it took longer to adapt the program to meet his needs. And that used up the twelve hours.” Evidently, Boland and Grothoff stayed on good terms, because she later sold him a new Kaypro portable for home use.

But with his big computer system at work, Boland—for one reason or another—seems to have suffered more than his share of woes.

“Accounting Plus,” said Boland of the software he bought there, “is a very good program, but it was designed for one single company to be subdivided into departments. You could have six departments, everything from sales to used parts, and it will work beautifully. But it wouldn’t for what I wanted. It would not treat a motorcycle store, for instance, as a subdivision of a holding company. I could not pull off separate profit and loss statements or separate balance sheets.”

Clinton Computers, to its credit, referred Boland to a consultant familiar with the source code of Accounting Plus—a part of the program that would enable it to be customized. The consultant took in Boland’s North Star computer system as a trade-in. He sold him a Delta microcomputer and TeleVideo terminal in return, along with a hard-disk system upgradable to 70 megabytes. With the software customization included, the cost came to $20,000, minus the $12,000 trade-in. The consultant, like Clinton Computers, didn’t know as much about accounting as Boland had hoped. But through sheer tenacity Boland at least got himself a halfway usable program.

“I had the software changed,” he said, “so that instead of one company with departments in it, it now reads a holding company with subsidiary companies. The software was changed to print out separate balance sheets and separate income statements for me.

“On the income-statement side this machine will ask me if I want a consolidated or individual by-page income statement. It will print out a holding company and then, in successive order, on each page, the income statement for each company. When I go to the balance sheet, it will ask me that same question.

“If I tell it I want individuals and a consolidated by page, it won’t do it. I must ask it individually each time for company one, then company two, right down the line. I have to give the computer individual instructions to do that.

“And that was the best my consultant could do to change the software. It got the job done, but not all the way.

“I’ve since found out that for $400, not ,800, I could have bought an accounting package that would do exactly the same thing I wanted.”

So why didn’t he buy it?

“Why spend another $400 to delve into it further and then find out it isn’t what you wanted?” Boland asked. “I think it’s stupid to spend money at this point. I have a system I know I can make work within certain limits. I’m still in the learning phase, and I’ll probably still be there for another year, for all I know.” I thought he was too patient. If his software system was a dog—perhaps not for everyone but for him—he should change it. Four hundred dollars was a pittance compared to Boland’s total investment of $20,000.

Ideally, too, as he said himself, he would have gone to a consultant in the first place, not just any consultant but one familiar with accounting. And yet it’s understandable why he acted as he did. Why repeat the mistakes he’d seen at other companies? Why not frugality? Better to be out $20,000 than $50,000 or $100,000 after paying for a mini, a consultant, and the other trimmings. His computer wasn’t making or saving buckets of money for Clinton Cycle and Salvage as of early 1983; but it might in the future as he got his software under control and could, for instance, easily put salesmen on commission.

He told me, moreover, that he would soon stop farming out the company payroll—up to seventy people—to a computer firm. He also was mastering an electronic spreadsheet. He did not plan an accounts receivable program, because Clinton Cycle collected quickly through checks and credit cards, but an accounts payable one was in the offing.

“It’s going to give me the companies’ names, the payment terms, the volume I deal with them each month,” Boland said. “It will flag when the bills are due, and it will also generate checks.”

He was also going to crank up a mailing-list program, using a list of all buyers of new bikes within the last three years—a sensible project, considering the market for accessories and repeat sales. Obviously, here, as in other applications, the more information built up on his hard disk, the more his machines would justify the $20,000 investment. The benefits of computerization for Edward Boland might not be immediately dramatic, but with his stick-to-itiveness, sooner or later they’d almost surely come. Boland’s battles with computers were to continue. When I caught up with him in spring 1984, he said he’d bought yet another computer system.

Charlie Bowie: Data Base and Spreadsheet

Remember the customer who was raving happy about his software—also bought from Sue Grothoff at Clinton Computers?

That’s Charlie Bowie, who, when we first talked, was a vice-president of Washington Homes and manager of its Southern Division. He told me he expected two Zenith micros to save his company perhaps as much as $50,000 a year, maybe more.

In just one month, in fact, his $5,000 computer had already saved the equivalent of thousands of dollars in executive man-hours.

Even before he and I met, his assistant, behind his back, was singing praises of her boss and their new machine. “I wanted to learn word processing,” said Julie Grimes, a young, blond woman who could have been the secretary in the IBM commercials saying the advertised product was “a piece of cake” to master.

Gazing at the Zenith—which she and Bowie use for data-base work, spreadsheets, and some word processing—she said: “It really comes in handy.... We were both worried. Charlie told me, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll teach each other.’”

Bowie by now was in the room, and it was immediately clear he’d won her respect through his brains and dedication, not through the normal trappings of executivedom. He was bearded. He wore a sweater and heavy boots and wire-rimmed glasses. He plainly was the construction industry’s version of the proverbial shirt-sleeves manager. He must loathe paperwork, prefer the field to the executive suite, even if he was a vice-president of a publicly owned real estate company with twelve hundred stockholders. He was in his mid-thirties. That wasn’t so much younger than Ed Boland, who himself, interviewed on a Saturday, had worn casual clothes. And yet the two somehow came across as being on opposite sides of the generation gap that all the pundits were babbling about during Vietnam. I could imagine Boland watching M*A*S*H; I could imagine Bowie, in the right setting, being a mild version of Hawkeye. He wouldn’t necessarily do things the traditional way, but in the end no one would care, because whatever it was, he’d succeed. Ed Boland was a man with a fondness for constants—a characteristic that in his profession had served him well. Charlie Bowie, I sensed, enjoyed surprises and change.

Bowie’s company, like Boland’s, had to be good to have survived so long in a boom-and-bust industry. Everyone needs transportation, everyone needs housing; everyone does not need recreational motorcycles or new homes. Across the country, home sales had plummeted at the start of the 1980s. Washington Homes’ sales had been almost $30 million in 1980 but just half that two years later.

Yet Bowie’s company had survived the ups and downs since 1965. The management philosophy struck me as the same as Clinton Cycles—the lean, mean school. It was early 1983 when we first talked. Another housing boom seemed ready to explode, and Bowie was working a sixty-five-hour week, “because we’ve gotten very busy, very quickly, and we haven’t built up our staff rapidly. It’s hard to find qualified people, and we don’t know whether the recovery’s here to stay.” Small wonder that he welcomed his computer as a sort of financial radar—an early warning system that would buzz before the bombs fell.

Washington Homes was a general contractor. In other words, it was just as much in the management and budget business as the building business.

Bowie and his company didn’t hire laborers, didn’t buy every nail and brick. Rather, they farmed out the construction to subcontractors, some of whom, if not policed, could wreak havoc on Washington Homes by, say, finishing work late.

You can’t do plumbing and the electrical wiring, normally, if the walls aren’t up yet. You’ve got to keep your invisible assembly line moving. The sixty phases on Bowie’s “House budget summary” started with items like “Engineering” and “Water Sewer Charge,” continued through “Brick Veneer” and “Siding” and went on to such details as “Fences” and “Trash Removal.” If Bowie was late in submitting bids or getting what he paid for, it wasn’t a bureaucratic abstraction. It meant a late house, an unhappy customer, perhaps, and above all, more interest to pay the bank on Washington Homes’ construction loans.

Bowie, moreover, had to keep track of his customer’s own financing arrangements. The company’s houses sold for anywhere from $55,000 to $135,000, but most customers were first timers who had never before wended their ways through the mortgage maze. Bowie could reduce his company’s carrying charges if he didn’t rush homes to completion before the customers were ready for them.

“We don’t make any money until we deliver the house,” he said, “so we need to keep track of the time between when people contract and make application with a lender and how long it takes for them to win loan approval.

“When our company had ninety or a hundred houses and was backlogged, it was fairly easy to do manually. But now we have almost five hundred houses in our backlog.”

Shopping around for a system to handle all those grubby details, Bowie found that computer stores didn’t treat their first-time buyers as well as he wanted to treat his. “I looked at computers for a year,” he said, “and the biggest thing I found was the condescending attitude of the people in the sales centers to someone who knows nothing about it.

“I’d walk into a store and give them a written list of my requirements, and the first thing they’d tell me was ‘Your requirements are wrong.’ And that was the case until I got to Clinton Computers.”

Bowie showed Sue Grothoff, the sales rep, his sixty-phase budget sheet—a basic common-sense rule of software and hardware shopping. If you’re working with documents, at least nonconfidential ones, then show them! Do so to a store. Do so to a consultant if you have one. Explain as clearly as you can just what kind of paperwork you’re computerizing. Here, incidentally, you can’t compare Bowie and Boland in an apple-to-apple way. Accounting programs can be much trickier than data bases and spreadsheets, especially for companies with unusual circumstances like Boland’s—that is, all those subsidiaries in a small-to-medium business. It’s clear, though, that whatever happened, Grothoff and Bowie communicated much better than she and Boland.

“At this point,” said Bowie, “I was only interested in loan processing and budgets, and the main thing I was interested in was budgets.”

He thought he needed above all an electronic spreadsheet. Here, however, for once, a computer sales rep knew his needs better than he did. Grothoff persuaded him that most of all he needed a data-base program—one that would help him track loans on hundreds of houses. It would store information and rearrange it in patterns he needed. He might not want full copies of all loan-processing reports, for example. Instead, he might want just the names of the home buyers, say, or just the foundation costs of each house. Or he might want the program to tote up all the foundation costs or perform other arithmetic, including complicated multiplication and division or calculation of ratios and percentages. And with a program like dBASE II that’s possible. Like many of its rivals, it will do some complex calculations, not just shuffle facts around. There are many books on dBASE II—yet another advantage and indication of its popularity. (Two good choices are dBASE II User’s Guide by Adam B. Green and Everyman’s Database Primer featuring dBASE II by Robert Byers.)

Here are some ways in which dBASE II might organize your records if you’re an executive like Bowie:

1. The CREATE command lets you begin a file.

2. A file in a data base is the electronic version of a file drawer or cabinet. It’s just the space on the disks holding records—say, the house-budget summaries for your homes.

3. A field is a category of fact like the amount of money spent on each air-conditioning system for each house.

4. Structure is simply the way a record is set up. There are three big considerations—the field names, the field width, and the field type. The field name is simply a field’s title. The field width is the number of spaces required for the information in each field. The field type can be one of these categories:

a. A numeric field—just numbers

b. A character field or alphanumeric field—numbers, letters, question marks, miscellaneous symbols like “@,” or spaces between letters or numbers

c. A logical field—one with just two choices, like “Y” for “Yes” and “N” for “No”

5. The EDIT command changes the contents of a data field. You can type in modifications after putting your cursor in the right place.

6. A command to APPEND can add new records to your electronic filing cabinet.

7. Sorting lets you reshuffle records alphabetically, by date or other ways, just as you would index cards.

8. The LIST command tells dBASE II to flash across the screen the records that you specify.

9. .AND. helps you narrow down the information you’re looking for or changing. Consider this hypothetical example: LIST FOR SALE:PERSN = ‘BABBITT’ .AND. LOAN:AMT = ‘$70,000’ would guide you to all houses that a sales rep named Babbitt sold to a customer borrowing exactly $70,000.

10. .OR. is another way to describe the desired facts. LIST FOR SALE:PERSN = ‘BABBITT’ .OR. LOAN:AMT = ‘$70,000’ would indicate you wanted to see records involving either Babbitt or a loan of $70,000.

11. LIST FOR .NOT. SALE:PERSN = ‘BABBITT’ could help weed from view, or the files, all records involving Babbitt.

12. Command files are programs that tell the machine how to manipulate the data so you needn’t repeat complicated procedures one by one. You might work out these files to simplify your secretary’s work—or he or she might do the same for you.

Bowie and Grimes mastered dBASE II basics in eight hours of classes at Clinton Computer. “dBASE II was real easy,” he said. “The manual is in plain English. Even without all our records in the computer now, it saves me and Julie probably five or six hours a week. We were doing it manually before, and we’re on the verge of saving other people in the company lots of time with the loan processing by using dBASE II. I think we’d have to say with five hundred houses in our backlog there is the potential for this to save us $50,000 a year in carrying charges that may have accrued under the old system of keeping loan-processing records.

“We are going to buy another machine,” Bowie said, “for the Northern Division.”

The potential $50,000 annual savings from the two machines, by the way, would include just reductions in carrying charges—not in executive time or tasks besides loan processing. Consider the economies that would result simply from less paperwork.

“When we first set up the computer,” Bowie said, “we set it up exactly like we were doing things manually. As a division manager, I’m in charge of marketing and production. And earlier we had (1) marketing reports, (2) production reports, and (3) reports combining highlights of each for me to determine whether to start houses and things like that. But now all three categories appear on one loan-processing form.”

dBASE II (or the new dBASE III) may not work for you. But for Bowie it was a dream program through which he could store and retrieve records quickly and conveniently for any one of many purposes. He might set up his records mainly for loan processing. But the “SALE:PERSN” field, combined with the “SALE:PRICE” one, could tell him which outside sales reps were selling the most expensive homes. In other words, the loan-processing data base was one good way to keep track of the salesmen catering most successfully to the $135,000 buyers. For who cared what Bowie called his data base—“Loan Processing” or “Sales”? The point is, he could follow the salesmen’s performance, too, through cross-references between fields. dBASE II was a treasure trove of information about trends, sales, or otherwise.

“The problem,” said Bowie, “is that dBASE II would work fine with my budget summaries for my houses, except they require sixty fields and dBASE II is limited to thirty-two. So Sue suggested the Multiplan spreadsheet program. Multiplan is easy to use, even easier than dBASE II. Julie got started with Multiplan with just fifteen minutes of instruction.”

Multiplan works on the same idea as the better-known VisiCalc program, which, like WordStar, has sold hundreds and hundreds of thousands of copies.

The true origins of these spreadsheets go back to 1978. A Harvard MBA student disliked the tedium of using a calculator to tote up columns and rows of interrelated numbers; it was boring even with a pocket calculator. A change in just one number could throw off dozens of other entries, so imagine the brain-numbing effect of making an error and then having to recalculate an entire spreadsheet. Why not write a computer program to alter all the other variables if one changed?

And so was born the electronic spreadsheet; it and word processing are the single most popular uses of microcomputers—the real justifications for their existence. A VisiCalc-type spreadsheet can add, subtract, multiply, average, do partial sums, find minimums, maximums, simplify your life in a number of ways.

A description of VisiCalc in CPA Micro Report ticks off an awesome number of applications: “sales forecasts, profit and loss statements, rate-of-return calculations, project scheduling, tax calculation, pricing strategies, financial planning, loan amortization, league standings and report generation.” An electronic spreadsheet can help do your checkbook; or it can assist in the preparation of a small country’s budget—which, in fact, has happened.

Some even say that spreadsheets are contributing to the paperwork deluging American business. VisiCalc coauthor Dan Bricklin disagrees. “A lot of calculations,” he said of the pre-VisiCalc days, “were being done on the backs of envelopes or corners of envelopes or the corners of newspapers. VisiCalc isn’t causing people to produce more numbers and reports. Those numbers were always there, but they weren’t always being identified.”^[28]

“Multiplan is incredible,” Bowie said of his VisiCalc-style software. “I have generated budgets to see if they’ll do all I want them to, to consider all the what ifs.

“And it’s a big help in scheduling production. We have a factory producing cabinets for our homes, and our scheduling system is critical, since at most it can produce cabinets for only fifteen units a week.” The cabinet plant manager, caught between the demands of Washington Homes’ northern and southern divisions, had scheduled production according to his own whims.

“It was costing us a lot of money in missed settlements,” said Bowie, “and cabinets were not delivered, or they were the wrong color and size.” He was talking in late February, telling how, the other day, he had loaded in thirty-five more cabinet orders and instantly learned “we were out to April 15 on cabinet deliveries. That’s the soonest we could get them based on the plant’s production capabilities. I’m meeting with the manager this morning to see if in the future he can up his output. I’ve found that everybody’s got to live with lead times. Everybody’s got to give us the right lead time on orders, which means we are now ordering cabinets for delivery at the end of April and May, where we generally in the past would not have ordered May delivery until April. If I miss five house deliveries in a month because of cabinets not being there on time, then that’s ,000 to $5,000 in carrying charges over the next three to five months.”

Similarly, Multiplan was probably saving Bowie several thousand dollars more over the same period by “identifying houses not started because building permits have not been issued. And it will help identify the reasons why they haven’t been.

“To get a building permit, all sorts of things must fall into place. And now we can look at any particular job at any particular time, and if we see it isn’t started, find out why the permit hasn’t been issued.

“We can determine if we’re waiting for site plans or a plumbing permit or electrical permit or whatever it happened to be and instantly target and solve that problem.

“Before, the record keeping was ‘Go get a permit. Have you got it yet?’ There were no details, no backup. We relied on our field people to get the permits, and they would get the permits in a way that was timely for them and their production schemes but not in a way that was timely for us in bottom-line deliveries. So we are now able to target all the permit process and make it happen at our rate.” Not only was Bowie using Multiplan as a spreadsheet to plug in all the what ifs; he was also using it as a data base, even if it wasn’t as nimble in manipulating nonnumeric data as dBASE II could be.

Whatever chore Bowie was using Multiplan for, he loved the “Help” screens. He could turn them on to guide himself through the commands he wasn’t familiar with; besides, all of Multiplan’s basic commands were normally at the bottom of the screen, anyway.

Multiplan, by the time you’re reading this, may not be the best spreadsheet on the market, at least not for you. But at one point CPA Micro Report was pronouncing it the “new Empress of Spreadsheets” for accountants using a wide range of computers. Multiplan even worked with VisiCalc files so that users of the older program could easily convert.

“Multiplan,” said Micro Report, “... can sort a line-by-line record of events by account number or name—a frequent requirement in CPA applications.” Keepers of expense accounts, presumably, could cherish such a capability. Also, Multiplan, as the newsletter pointed out, lets you name your variables; you could refer more easily to the cells or the exact locations in the columns and rows. Instead of saying cells “A26” or “R38P,” you could refer to “Sales” and “Total Costs.”

With programs like Multiplan, software designers are more successfully catering to the needs of businesspeople who want computers to adjust to them rather than the other way around. That’s how it should be. Bowie is a construction executive, not a computer expert, and Boland’s an accountant rather than a hacker.

Bowie, however, plainly seemed more willing to live with the complexities of existing software. Many in his place would have used a consultant—and wisely, I think, for Washington Homes was a multimillion-dollar operation—yet Bowie had the background and patience to computerize just with guidance from a store. He might not have been a computer expert. But he loved the new. He loved complexity if he could logically unravel it. He didn’t mind mistakes. He felt in control because he had backups on disk and on paper. The manuals didn’t scare him. Instead of soaking up every word there, Bowie, like Seymour Rubinstein, had a gift for knowing which page to flip to if he had trouble. Bowie was a born micro user. However serious about his job, he might as well have been a child relaxing after school with a few rounds of Pac-Man. He loved seeing instant cause-and-effect relationships. He took as much delight in learning where his division could be six months hence as a child might take in winning an arcade game. He considered his computer “the greatest therapy in the world,” an opportunity to “sit down and feel really good” in “a fairly high tension business.”

Edward Boland, too, however, in a different, more structured way, was curious about numbers and life, and in the end, I suspect, the two men’s learning styles didn’t entirely explain their opinions of their programs. Bolands’ general-ledger software just wasn’t right for his needs. It straitjacketed him. Bowie’s programs, on the other hand, helped him do just about anything he wanted.

“Anything,” incidentally, included advancing his career. When I next caught up with him, in May 1984, he was president of another construction firm and owned one-third of that company and was taking home a paycheck thirty-five percent bigger. Bowie said his computer skills “had a great deal to do with it. I had management tools that not very many other people had.”

Alan Scharf: Integrated Program, Including Graphics

Alan Scharf, a forty-three-year-old New York executive, also has a nice touch with software—a good-enough one, in fact, to have helped win him a job at a blue-chip firm at triple his old salary.

“It’s done wonders for my earning power,” he said from his offices at Merrill Lynch Leasing, Inc., where he was a $75,000-a-year assistant vice-president. “I got this job because I walked in and told them I could do a better job on an Apple.

“I didn’t own one at home at the time. But you can be sure that I bought one promptly and boned up on it for the next three weeks, and of course I’d done a lot of research on the Apple before then to make sure I could deliver on my promise.

“My previous company had refused to let me get one to improve operations there and do estate taxes. I had to do them by hand on a calculator. It took hours per client. And I got mad. Most people my age are afraid of computers, but I’d worked with word processors. And what are word processors but another kind of computer?”

So Scharf left his job as an estate tax planner with a staid old brokerage firm and set up shop at Merrill Lynch’s division dealing with real estate and equipment leasing.

It was a VisiCalc devotee’s dream job, one calling for quick, repetitive, accurate math in deals as big as $150 million. Merrill Lynch Leasing made bids to companies hungry for better cash flow. The leasing company (and rivals) offered to buy their headquarters buildings or other real estate, freeing the money for bigger factories or research and development. It was a series of leaseback arrangements. Merrill Lynch organized syndicates for the ultimate buyers—people or companies eager for tax shelters. And that meant more than a little numbers crunching.

Imagine the variables. The deals had to be sexy enough to the selling companies for Merrill Lynch to win the bids. At the same time, the tax shelters couldn’t leak. The deals must provide the buyers with the write-offs that the prospectuses from the leasing company promised. Ideally, too, they would yield maximum tax advantages on minimum investments. And for investments of different sizes and at different tax rates, just what would the various benefits be?

When Scharf reported for work, he found that the real estate department of the leasing company was on the verge of spending $200,000 a year tapping into an outside firm’s computer to come up with the right numbers. The big machine would have been able to do simple debt-amortization calculations. Scharf could have told a company, for instance, how long it would take to pay off a mortgage on a building for which Merrill Lynch proposed a leaseback. But that was only a small part of what the job needed. And what about the costs?

So Scharf instead used an Apple system costing less than $7,000, a one-time investment. The Apple couldn’t do all the calculations needed, but it could actually outperform the time-sharing system in some ways.

Consider simultaneous equations. The software on big machines—at least by way of the terminals at Merrill Lynch Leasing—just didn’t include them. But the Apple could simulate this capability. With the VisiCalc spreadsheet it could juggle around dozens of interrelated statistics, using nightmarishly elaborate algebra with Catch-22-like mathematical spirals. In other words, you wanted to know the value of x, and it depended on the value of y and z, and you couldn’t solve for y until you solved z, and you couldn’t solve for z until you knew x. That’s how it worked, except, quite possibly, Scharf and his staff would be wrestling with, say, a through k instead of just x through z.

Struggling with these Catch-22s, the Apple was a slowpoke by computer standards. It still took half an hour. That might seem like the Indy 500 to someone accustomed to hand calculations. But Scharf must have felt the same way I did about inferior word-processing software. However faster than without a computer, it still limited your possibilities. You didn’t have as much time to experiment with all your choices. And the more time Scharf had, the more closely he could consider all the variables and the more attractive could be Merrill Lynch’s leaseback bids. The Apple did its job. “We used it to compete successfully for work with a number of well-known clients,” Scharf said. “Anheuser Busch—we did their office building in St. Louis. We worked with Beneficial Corporation. We’ve done a number of K mart stores.”

Scharf, never smug, still tinkered with the Apple and its software. An observant computer dealer noticed he would keep asking for larger RAM boards to allow him to do bigger, fancier spreadsheets.

And so it was that the dealer nominated Scharf a tester for Lotus 1-2-3 in late summer 1982. 1-2-3 was the new integrated software from Lotus Development Corporation, a Massachusetts firm started by a former rock disk jockey rich with $500,000 in royalties from programs sold to the makers of VisiCalc.

1-2-3 combined a spreadsheet, graphics, and data base. You could, for instance, pump figures from the spreadsheet program directly into the data base with a few simple keystrokes. You didn’t have to go through unwieldyunwieldy computer rigamarole to transfer facts from one kind of electronic file to another. More important, however, Lotus, at least for Scharf’s use, was a more powerful numbers cruncher than the VisiCalc he ran on his Apple. Lotus was for the 16-bit IBM PC. Sixteen-bit machines were speed demons for numbers crunchers, especially with powerful programs like 1-2-3. An Apple-VisiCalc duo handled worksheets with 254 rows and about 65 columns. But an IBM and 1-2-3 duo could take on 2,048 rows and 256 columns.

Scharf’s first test version of 1-2-3 cracked simultaneous equations in four minutes, one-tenth the time that the Apple-VisiCalc combination took. Income and cash-flow statements came out calculated to the nearest penny.