Suddenly I had been at Tandy 5 years and one day. This meant I could cash in my superannuation and go and explore the big, bad world outside the Tandy ecosphere, which as mentioned was started to fail.
But where to start? Again fate stepped in, in a way I could not have imagined. One of the programs that was available for the Tandy Model 2000 was “Open Access”, and for its time, it was a real breakthrough, combining a word processor, database and spreadsheet into a single integrated package, with each module “talking” to the other.
Importantly, it also had a 3D graphics module that really showed off the capabilities of the Model 2000’s graphics.
The downside was it ran really, really slowly.
ACP
Anyway, the Australian Distributor for Open Access, a company called Multisoft, was based just down the road in West Perth, and the software sales representative, Julieanne, paid our store a courtesy visit. Like many, they thought I had autonomous buying power for the Computer Centre, which of course I didn’t as everything was centralised at the Tandy warehouse in Mt Druitt in Sydney.
Multisoft had a sister company, Australian Computer Products (ACP) based in the same building, and about a week after the initial visit, I was again approached by Julieanne and sounded out about possibly going to work for them, as they had just moved into the PC business, selling NEC and Olivetti ‘boxes’ as they were called.
The offered salary and the commission were attractive, and as luck would have it, I was having a row with my immediate superior over stock levels, so was caught at a time when I was pretty pissed off with the whole Tandy thing.
So I agreed, and a month later walked through the front door of their Hay Street building and into pretty much the unknown.
It was an entirely different world than I was used to. The Olivetti computer, called an M24, was a desktop box and keyboard with a choice of monochrome or colour monitor and was fully “IBM compatible”. The only option was an 8087 co-processor to speed up mathematical computations.
At this time, the 640K memory barrier was still well and truly in place of course, with computers still being only 8 bit.
The NEC was a different beast altogether as it was not IBM compatible, but more like the Tandy Model 2000 in that it was a hybrid of the IBM; technically better, but this caused it to suffer as it had its own version of the MS-DOS operating system and also needed programs specifically designed for it.
But it was cheap (ish) in comparison to the Olivetti and certainly the IBM PC.
The other thing that was markedly different to what I had been doing for nearly 5 years was I had no client base to work from, and there was no “walk-in” traffic. I had to generate it all myself from cold calling or referral. It was like being back at my original days at Subiaco!
I had one major stroke of luck, however.
You may remember I had a lot of success at Tandy with a piece of software called Profile Plus. Well, I discovered the publishers, New York based The Small Computer Company, had released an IBM PC specific version of the program (which therefore ran on the Olivetti M24) renamed as filePro 16, as well as a generic DOS version (which ran on the NEC PC).
Additionally, they had ported the original Xenix version (for the Tandy Model 16) to generic UNIX, and Olivetti had one of the best UNIX ‘boxes’ around at that time called a 3B2.
(By the way, Olivetti computers in the United States were marketed under the AT&T brand name).
I still had all the original source code from my Tandy Profile Plus sales for couriers, service stations, rubbish removal companies and others, and it was an easy matter to reconstitute these under the MS-DOS versions, and so I had access to a potential steady stream of customers. It wasn’t going to set the world on fire, but it was a start.
I was also lucky enough to be offered an Autocad training course and ACP picked up a dealership, which gave me another market to approach, and one that I loved and did quite well with.
If you aren’t aware, Autocad was one of the very first computer aided drafting programs that worked on a PC, taking advantage of the Olivetti’s superior graphics to the IBM PC, and with the addition of the 8087 co-processor, by the measurements at the time, was “blazingly fast” (Today we’d be weeping at the lack of speed!)
An Autocad sale was a good sale too, with the additions of things like colour plotters and stylus pads upping the $ value to around $10K, and I managed to move a few out of the door.
But my crowning glory sale involved my beloved filePro 16. Olivetti themselves had been negotiating with a major local WAFL Australian Rules football club to computerise them with something like a 5 terminal UNIX system and database for memberships etc. Of course, back at Tandy, this stuff was my bread and butter with the Xenix based Model 16, so I muscled my way in, setup a demo on a single user computer and scored the deal, with a 5 station Olivetti 3B2, worth a nice $30K or so.
Suffice to say Olivetti were very happy as this was the very first 3B2 to be sold in Australia (I believe), and word got around.
Microcare
Just a few hundred metres up the road in West Perth, a fledgling Olivetti dealership was being set up called Microcare. It was born from an existing software development company which had specialised in vertical marketing of custom applications created using the Ashton Tate DBase 2 database system.
This was similar to filePro in a way but needed a lot more coding for things that filePro did visually such as building input screens and reports.
Microcare had been very successful in this area with a suite of dedicated packages for the medical, dental and veterinary professions if my memory serves me. But the company was small – husband and wife owner Kieran and Jan and a couple of contract programmers.
Enter one Michael K., part of a major Perth dynasty that owned or had owned one of the local TV networks, a large trucking fleet and a major law firm to name just a few.
Michael was the youngest son, and the general consensus was he wished to make his own mark on business. Together with Kieran and Jan, he aimed to turn Microcare into a successful stock exchange listed business.
They had moved to brand-new purpose-built premises right in the middle of the West Perth business district, hired a bookkeeper, secretaries, and sales and technical service staff in addition to the existing programmers, and through an Olivetti intermediary, I was asked if I’d like to join them as Sales Manager.
To me, it offered far more scope than ACP could – and the base money was better – so I agreed.
To say ACP were furious would be an understatement; they were livid, as not only did they feel Olivetti had undermined them, but Autocad also offered to make Microcare a dealer and take advantage of the training they had given me.
For a few months things hummed along quite nicely. Everyone understood we were very much in the setup and building stage until the stock exchange listing came through.
One major thing that did happen was I convinced the powers-that-be it would be worth head-hunting Julieanne from Microcare to setup a software distribution business inside Microcare. In parallel, I contacted The Small Computer Company to start things rolling with Microcare then getting exclusive Australasian rights to the package.
But after about 6 months, it all started to unravel.
Michael had a foul temper, often lashing out at people and more than once he brought the very young receptionist to tears.
Similarly, Elsa, the woman hired to spruik software and systems to GPs and other medical folk, who had never sold anything in her life and sole claim to fame in this area was having been a doctor’s receptionist, just couldn’t cope with the pressure.
The almost final straw revolved around a batch of Olivetti M24s that were brought into stock – about a dozen of them as I recall.
Michael had hired a German chap – the husband of the bookkeeper as it turned out – to be in charge of hardware service and preparation. Back in those days, with a new hard disk, you had to run a procedure to “lock out” any bad sectors otherwise a catastrophic failure could occur.
It turns out this fellow wasn’t aware of this, and consequently a whole bunch of machines went out to doctors before it was discovered, resulting in a costly recall, the necessity to potentially replace all the data, trash the faulty hard drives and start from scratch.
I was in Michael’s office when he found all this out, and the telephone on his desk, aimed at the service chap, luckily missed him but went clean through the wall.
It was then found that a whole pile of word processing packages, imported from Sweden to bypass the Australian distributor, were sold illegally and these also had to be recalled and trashed.
At this point, Michael brought in his son-in-law (I think it was) as Sales Manager, relegating me to menial tasks including deliveries. That is, I was the fall guy. For stuff I was not even involved in.
So I quit.
I don’t think the stock exchange listing ever went through. To this day I feel sorry for Kieran and Jan as none of the collapse was of their doing. Simply, Michael was out of his depth and in an area he knew nothing about. The last I heard he had lost everything despite his very wealthy family.