My major sales success years were 1982 / 1983, and there were very good reasons for it. I am keeping the names somewhat obscure because I do not have permission to use them, but THE biggest influence without question was Jack, an extremely significant businessman in Western Australia with numerous and deep contacts within the Western Australian Government under the Premiership of Brian Burke, and into the Bond Corporation of some call, the “infamous” Alan Bond. These contacts then linked automatically to one, Laurie Connell¸ the man behind Rothwell’s merchant bank.

Jack

Regularly, Jack, along with his son who was the personal assistant and chauffer, would come through the front doors of our little showroom in Subiaco and either place an order for a new Tandy Model 2 or Model 3, each fully kitted out with all extras such as disk drives, printers and software. But also, as he was an avid devourer of new technology, he would include any new gadget, gizmo or piece of software that had been released since his last visit, that was or could be of potential use in his business.

Generally. each of these sales was for a specific project that Jack had negotiated.

After one visit to buy a Model 2 (with a resultant $8000+ invoice), I was sounded out to see if I could go into the Rothwell’s offices to assist setting up a Profile Plus database. Laurie Connell was a huge owner of thoroughbred racehorses and wanted a system to keep track of all the information required to document these clippety-clops.

As an incentive, it was suggested I might take a weeks’ holiday – which I was due – and be paid for my services.

My wife Pam was pregnant at the time and due any moment, so it seemed opportune, and the extra money would prove useful of course, so I accepted.

On the third day as I recall, in an office adjacent to the Boardroom, I heard a raised voice I knew well from many TV interviews. When Jack came back into where I was setting up the bones of the database and showing his PA how it was done, I asked him, “Is that Alan Bond I just heard?”

“It is”, he replied, “why”?

“Because I want to sell him computers of course!”.

In hindsight, it seemed a bit brazen, but I had nothing to lose, did I?

The following week, back at the Computer Centre a young guy came in, asked Maria our receptionist for me, and informed me he was from Bond Corporation and had been instructed to make investigations about our computers, the software available and where they might fit into the organisation.

That was the start of a beautiful friendship!

Bond went on to win the America’s Cup, business was booming for him (and along with it of course Rothwell’s and the State Government), and I collectively sold them a LOT of computers.

A particularly memorable sale, organised by Jack, was a pair of what were colloquially called “CoCo’s” – Tandy Colour Computers.

These were a strange beast in that while you could program them, for what they were mainly intended, that is entertainment-based computers with an integrated keyboard to compete against gaming consoles, the dominant way of loading programs was from a cartridge inserted into the side of the unit.

There were cartridges for many standard games such as Chess, Draughts (Checkers), Space Invader knockoffs, a downhill skiing simulator and the like, and a bunch of educational titles also on cartridge as well as tape. But a major, major flaw was that the CoCo needed a TV set to act as a monitor, and the video output was the US NTSC system not the PAL one we used in Australia. This mean the colour output from these cartridges was in the main, rubbish.

Base colours ended up as grey on dark grey lines for example, and everything had a green tinge to it. Despite this, the CoCo garnered a huge audience in Australia, and at one point had its own monthly published magazine called Rainbow^[1]

But, as I said it was a strange beast and this wasn’t the only reason; It used the Motorola 6809 processor as its “brain”; until this point, all Tandy computers has used the Zilog “Z” chips – Z80A and Z80B specifically (although the later Model 16 used Motorola 68000 chips and the Tandy Model 2000 had Intel 80186 processors).

The 6809 was a VERY powerful processor as it turned out, and the little ol’ Tandy CoCo, correctly configured with the right operating system, called OS/9, a UNIX derivative like XENIX used later on Tandy’s Model 16 line of computers, could run multiple disk drives AND separate terminals!

I personally witnessed aboard a US navy ship in Fremantle Harbour a setup from a US navy enthusiast, a CoCo system with a 10MB hard disk and 5 terminals, which at the time was huge!

Anyway, Jack had ordered these two CoCos and requested I personally deliver them to a location about an hour and a half south of Perth in Byford, which doubled as Laurie Connell’s home and horse stud. They were a present for Connell’s twin children and had to be gift wrapped.

When I arrived, I was ushered into a lounge area with an open fire and sumptuous leather three-piece lounge suite, obviously worth a year of my salary if not more. I was requested to place the gift wrapped CoCos on a table and wait. I went to sit on the lounge suite and was quickly directed to one of the single seats instead “as the settee was for the dogs”.

Nice to have money hey?

Mrs Connell came out after a few minutes, was utterly charming and thanked me, and I was graciously sent on my way.

Looking back, it was a somewhat surreal experience.

A few weeks later, my son Alan was born. Just after arriving home from the hospital and settling in, a big black car turned up outside our house and two men in dark suits got out. They brought the biggest bunches of flowers I have ever seen to the front door addressed to Pam, myself and “your newborn”.

It was signed “Congratulations from Jack”. THAT I will never forget. He was an amazing man.

Sadly, some weeks later, I got a phone call whilst at work, from James, Jack’s son.

“The old man has just died” was all he said.

And soon after the entire House of Cards of Bond Corporation, Rothwells, and indeed the WA State Government including its Premier Brian Burke collapsed.

I only found afterwards that Jack also owned a major menswear chain in Perth and had a policy of supplying free clothing to blokes who had come out of prison in order to assist in their rehabilitation and to get a worthwhile job.

Many people say that the whole WA Inc thing as it became known, primarily involving the government via Brian Burke, Alan Bond and Laurie Connell (who himself died in jail not long after) was a nest of corruption, deceit, under-the-counter-deals and downright lawbreaking for personal gain.

I have no inside knowledge of any of that, despite setting up many of the computer systems used.

All I saw, was that Alan Bond particularly, performed a huge service to this state of Western Australia and Australia as a whole, in terms of infrastructure and tourism generation at the very least, and Jack was the architect of a lot of it.

Bond may have been foolish in business in the later days, but who knows what underlying issues there may have been? I will be howled down by many, but to me, you cannot say a bad word about Alan Bond.

I suspect many, many secrets died with Jack that support my stance and feelings and now will never be known.

Connell and Burke, I have little comment on, or even time for. I met both over the years a number of times, and from my point of view, in public they were both utterly charming – and entirely dislikeable – individuals. In private, a whole new scenario came into play.

You checked the number of fingers you had left after shaking hands. You get the idea?

Memorable Moments

A little later in the year I was announced as Computer Centre Manager of the Year. At the annual convention in Sydney, when being presented with the Award, it was a weird moment being introduced to all the other retail and Computer Centre managers by the Tandy Australian MD not as David Hague, but instead as Stephen Hague’s little brother!

But there were many other memorable moments whilst at Tandy Subiaco that have stuck with me.

When the Model 3 was released, for example, in order to quit out the remaining Model 1 – ostensibly a computer in a keyboard – Tandy released it with an adaptor allowing you to use a normal TV set as the monitor.

One person who bought one was an elderly lady from a nursing home in South Perth. She came into the shop in the mid-morning, and in mid-afternoon rang and asked where the ‘ENTER’ key was as per the instructions, as her model didn’t seem to have one! Try as we might over the phone, we could not get her to see the big white key on the right marked ‘ENTER’. In the end, she said she would come back into the Computer Centre, bringing the computer with her and we could show her face to face.

About an hour later, she stepped off the bus that had a stop outside our shop and walked into the Centre. I lifted the lid of the box, pointed out to her where the ‘ENTER’ key was, she thanked us, and it all happened so fast, she managed to get back on the same bus! And we never heard from her again …

Another person came into the shop bitching and moaning that the CoCo cheated at Chess. This was the very first we had had THAT accusation and so did some investigating. It turned out they were partially right; whoever had developed the program (it was on a cartridge) had the chess board the wrong way around!

Down the road from the Computer Centre was a small local watering hole called the Cock and Bull Tavern – colloquially the C & B. Sadly it is no longer there.

Of course we frequented it – for lunches they did a brilliant steak and kidney pie in a pot, and for drinkies after work.

One day we really celebrated, and it was in recognition of a really momentous sale. Some months earlier, a chap called Phil had come in as he had heard about VisiCalc, and could I show it to him? He had some sample data to try out that related to the building of some investment home units he was planning.

I knew VisiCalc as well, if not better as anyone, but even his needs tested me. It was complicated financial stuff using functions such as Nett Present Value. Depreciation, Future Value and Security Yields etc.

Every day for weeks Phil came in with more and more data, and changes to the stuff we had already entered. Now VisiCalc, because of memory constraints, was limited to 254 rows and 63 columns – unlike today with Excel having over a million rows and 16,000 + columns not to mention the ability to link separate spreadsheets – and we soon started to run up against these limitations.

Just for the fun of it, the staff started to log the amount of time we – mainly me – spent on Phil’s blasted ‘demo’ spreadsheet. Then one day, he said, “Right. I’ll buy the computer, VisiCalc, Scripsit (word processing) Profile (database), a daisy wheel printer, desk and covers”. The whole sale came to around $7K.

When he left, and I had the cheque in my hot little hand, we realised the total time we had clocked up demo-ing to get that sale was over 40 hours! That’s why we went to the pub! We’d earned it.

As it turned out, over the next months, Phil referred a LOT of business my way, so that was time well spent.

One regular customer was an undertaker, and he looked the stereotypical part. He used to pop into the shop every couple of months to see what was new, and would always start the conversation with whoever served him with “And how are we today?”

Invariably of course the answer was always a variation of “I’m fine thanks” to which he always replied “Oh well, never mind” in a totally deadpan voice. He bought a lot of kit over the years too.

While I was at Beaufort Street, I took a phone call one day from a person with a very Irish brogue, telling me his name was Sean. I suspected Tony having a prank, especially when he asked if I could meet him at the bar of the very swanky Sheraton Hotel in an hour.

Anyway, I dutifully turned up, and indeed Sean was a real person, and he owned an aircraft business in the Kimberley – primarily helicopters – and needed two computers for his accounting processes and other needs.

It was an easy $6K sale, I admit. But things took a definite weird turn when he insisted I had to go to Halls Creek, around 2000Km north of Perth with him in order to show his wife how to operate them – we’d fly up there in one of his planes and he’d pay for my time. Flying time would be around 7 hours he informed me and I was to meet him at Jandakot, Perth’s secondary airport the next morning at 6am.

Tony volunteered to drive me there as Pam, my wife, didn’t drive, and so at around 5:45am as the sun was just rising, we drove into Jandakot airport and there was Sean waiting, standing beside what seemed to be the smallest plane I had ever seen!

Yesterday, he had explained that the plane had entertainment on board and a fridge; what I didn’t expect was a cassette player and an esky! I am also a tad claustrophobic, and when that horrible feeling of panic started to set in, I whispered to Tony that I couldn’t go through with it, sale or no sale.

What I didn’t expect was Tony jumped at the chance to take my place. He lived reasonably close by, so within 45 minutes was back with a small case of clothes and whatever and off they went!

Originally it had been planned I’d be away only a couple of days, but Tony was gone nearly 2 weeks as I recall – and by all accounts enjoyed every second of it. He even managed to fit in some scary gorge fly throughs and get to see a lot of pristine Kimberley scenery as during his time there, Sean was chartered to assist in the filming of the TV series, “Wonders of Western Australia.”

Sadly, I understand Sean was later killed when mustering a particularly cranky bull with bloody big horns, and it got tangled in the skids of his chopper causing it to crash.

Another memorable “sale” was to a local AM radio station just down the road. They wanted a basic Model 3 to do some equipment monitoring., but being a part of the Packer empire, were not allowed to buy any “capital” equipment. Nor could they pay cash or cheque, which is all that Tandy would accept. 30 day accounts or credit just wasn’t on the radar with Tandy. Until…

This spawned two novel ideas we used to great effect.

In Tandy, discounting to anyone was absolutely forbidden and a sackable offence. Even corporates such as say Packer, Shell, BHP or even government departments did not get a cent off anything.

The Computer Centre Managers particularly collectively thought this put us in a difficult position and lobbied head office for some sort of system to be brought in that enabled us to do so if needed, with a maximum 10% allowed (Tandy‘s average MARGIN was 53%).

And so the F101 was born, a form that could be used to create an invoice for a government department, or for one of the top 100 companies in Australia.

For us, this was used for the first time with this radio station, but because they were not allowed to buy a computer, it was invoiced out as a “Z80B processor complete” and made out to be a spare part!

The F101 became a useful tool, but of course, as happens, it started to get abused a bit! If a customer requested a discount, we would ask if they were a government department or a Top 100 company. If the answer was ‘no’, and the sale absolutely depended on that discount, we’d ask if they knew anyone in either of those positions, and you might get an answer like “well my next door neighbour works for BP”.

That’ll do! And we’d write up the sale.

Of course, eventually this slightly devious practice got back to the ear of the bean counters in Sydney Head Office, and at the next annual Manager’s Convention where both retail and computer centre managers alike got together with relevant head office staff to reveal new products, protocols and the like, this was brought up by Laurie, the group accountant.

On stage in front of over 350 managers, he started by saying “the definition of a sale is the transfer of goods or services in return for money in the form of currency, cheque or by 30 day account”. (Or words to that effect).

The 12 or so computer centre managers didn’t take these conferences too seriously as 95% of the content was retail oriented and didn’t have anything to do with us, so we were all chatting together down the back of the room and taking little notice.

Over the PA, Laurie sternly called out Tony, who by then was running Camberwell in Victoria, who looked up a little stunned, and said “Mr (Tony), what is a sale”?

And Tony replied, a little bemused, “The triangular thing on the front of a yacht. Why? Is that relevant?”

The place erupted with laughter. But that was Tony through and through.

I was with him driving through Melbourne on day, when while stopped at a Stop sign, someone drove into the back of him. Without losing any composure, Tony got out of his car, walked up to the driver’s window of the car that hit him, and when the driver wound it down, casually asked “Madam, how do you stop when I’m not here?”.

Finally, another memorable radio station “moment” happened with the local FM station, 96fm#. When I was doing my stint as a record company PR manager, I of course met a lot of radio station “personalities” and they became good friends over the years. 96fm# was having a “Top 96 albums of all time” competition, where listeners could vote for their favourite album of all time, and perhaps, if lucky, win the complete set.

On the day of the big reveal, it was a Sunday, the station played the final list as voted, down from 96 to number 1, with the number 1 album being played in its entirety. It was a special “1/2 speed master” of the original record which made it desirable and valuable for “audiophiles” and part of the prize.

No prizes for guessing it was Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”.

Anyway, I got to thinking; I wonder if people would like a printed copy of the list. They could pick it up at the station or go into one of the Tandy stores to get it. We could type the list into Scripsit (the word processor) and print them off on a high-speed dot matrix printer (high speed then being 220 characters per second).

I rang the State Manager at home who okayed the concept, got in touch with the station manager who loved the idea, and on the Monday, Maria, our receptionist / secretary typed it up, printed off a few hundred and I took them down to the station in East Perth.

When it was announced over air, the station was swamped, the retails stores had dozens of people asking every hour, and we ended up having 3 printers going flat out to keep up with the demand for over 2 weeks!

The real beauty was that the majority of people who went into a retail Tandy store to pick up a copy had never been in a Tandy shop in their life, and most spent $10 or more on products.

The IBM PC

In 1981 the IBM PC arrived, turning the whole personal computer business on its head, despite the obvious technical inferiority IBM had chosen with the Intel 8088 processor.

But of course, history has proven them right.

Over the next few years, it seemed everyone wanted an IBM, no other brand counted; sales at Tandy started to stutter.

Tandy tried, but it was too little, too late. The Model 2000 was technically far, far superior to the IBM PC, had all the right software such as Lotus 1-2-3 especially, but the Top 100 companies wanted those three letters I-B-M on their desktop.

There was a saying around at the time, “No-one ever got fired for buying IBM”.

Even the addition of a Tandy 1000 IBM PC clone didn’t help, and so the computer market for Tandy was doomed.

There was one model that Tandy did release, and although not unique as it was based on another computer from NEC, the Tandy Model 100 was simply, to use a very hackneyed term, a game changer.

I still have one that works perfectly.

A4 in physical size and about 3cm thick (1.5 inches) the Model 100 has, still to my mind, one of the best keyboards available (perhaps barring the Tandy Model 2000). The screen, at the time was the largest LCD panel available I believe, with an 80 character by 16 line capability.  True!

There was a ‘massive’ 16K RAM, expandable to 32K, and built into ROM (Read Only Memory) were a calendar system, simple word processor, the BASIC language for writing your own programs, and in later versions, a subset of the Multiplan spreadsheet.

Via a RS232 comms port and an inbuilt COM program, you could connect the Model 100 to other devices or a modem, there was a cassette interface for loading and saving data and even a bar code port.

The Model 100 spawned a whole cottage industry of software from business applications to games.

It was released at the same convention I received my Manager of the Year award, and Computer Centre Managers were all given a unit to take back with them. On that flight back to Perth from Sydney, playing with it and learning its ins and outs I could have sold dozens of them on the spot!

(This was well before the days of what we now know as the “laptop”.)

A favourite memory was on a flight a few years later when a fellow passenger in a seat next to me on another flight to Sydney cursed as his Compaq laptop battery died an hour into the flight. So did my Model 100. But I simply had to add another pair of Eveready C cells to get yet another 6 months usage! And keep writing my story in the word processor.

He was as impressed as he was pissed off!

[1] You can still get archive copies from

https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Magazines/Australian%20Coco%20Magazine/

You can read other chapters by clicking the links below:

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3

Please leave this field empty

Keep up to date on all things video, photography, action cameras (GoPro), drones (DJI) and even 3D.

By registering, you'll get my free weekly newsletter emailed to you, but also my monthly e-magazine!

You'll also be able to get access to my free 60+ page GoPro and 32 page drone e-magazines

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.