The Tandy retail Maddington store I was working at was transferred to what was called a JV, or Joint Venture store, effectively making the manager a part owner of the business in conjunction with Tandy Corporation itself. It was a favoured approach by higher management such as regional managers to take over one of these stores as it was a very sound business model, backed by one of the largest retail companies (at the time) in the world, and with minimal outlay. As a JV, in simple terms, you paid all the nonfixed expenses such as power, wages and insurances and Tandy Corporation paid the rest including the cost of stock, and then you split the profits each month.
Win-win all around.
What was common though was that the JV operator would bring his own staff in, usually family and friends, so company staff like me were no longer needed and were transferred to another company owned store.
Tandy 4K Level 1s and John Lennon
This was how I ended up at Carousel Shopping Centre in Cannington, 15 minutes up the road and a much bigger centre than Maddington. The manager at Carousel was an amiable, likeable and very competent Texan called Ricky, and he and his assistant Trevor and I became firm friends though our common love of Prog Rock music.
That Christmas shopping period I remember for two major reasons.
Apart from it being super busy, I was selling a transistor radio to, as coincidence would have it, an ex-boss from my chemical selling days and as I showed him how it operated, I turned it on, and it was exactly 11 o’clock. Being tuned to the ABC, the news came on with the horrible, horrible story that John Lennon had just been shot and killed in New York by Mark Chapman. It was December 8th, 1980.
Now Carousel was a VERY busy and large shopping centre, but within minutes, that news had flashed through the entire complex, and the whole place went silent. I’ll never forget that 2 or 3 minutes when everyone, and it must have been thousands of people, just seemed to be utterly gobsmacked.
The second thing that happened was that I sold a LOT of Tandy 4K Model 1 4K computers leading up to that Christmas. Dozens of them in fact.
It was also at this time I met Tony, who becomes a major part of my story further down the track. Tony was the State Manager at Charge Card Services, which administered the combined banking system’s credit card system at the time, known as Bankcard.
Anyway. just into the New Year, the store had a visit from our State Manager, and I was called into the back office for a chat.
Fearing I had done something wrong, I expected the worst, but instead, it seemed that one of Stephen’s staff at the Computer Centre, Mike, had slipped and hurt his back and would be off work for a period, and therefore I had been chain ganged to fill in.
Subiaco Computer Centre
Within two days, I was at the Subiaco (“Subi” to the locals) branch sitting at a desk in the Computer Centre with a phone, and half a dozen different computer models and configurations in the showroom around me, on neat white computer tables.
And I hated it.
In the Carousel retail store, I had customers come to me and I could try and sell them a computer, instead of them going next door to buy a console game unit. But this was 1980, and computers in small business were as rare as hen’s teeth. So you had to find potential buyers to become customers, and this meant telephone cold calling and making appointments to see them, either in the Computer Centre or in their own office.
This was not what I had signed up for as I saw it. And definitely not my thing.
Then one day, someone DID walk in, an owner of a Duty Free Store who wanted to computerise his stock control. A couple of days later, I took an order worth over $12,000 for a “full blown” Tandy Model II, with 4 disk drives, high speed printer, desk and all the accessories I could write on the order form.
I calculated the commission I was going to make on this sale, and it was then I suddenly LOVED working at the Computer Centre. And took to it with gusto.
The only downside was having your elder brother as your immediate boss. I was not overly surprised when I found out he actually knew very little about computers and certainly had no interest like I did. But he was a damn good manager, very skilled at getting the best from people.
Consequently, Stephen soon received a step up to Head Office in Sydney as the Australian Manager for all the Tandy Computer Centres.
Just before he left, though, he gave me a brown leatherette folder, the retail packaging computer program disks and manuals came in, and asked me to have a look at it. This was a brand-new program he didn’t think was much chop and had little use as far as he could see, but what did I think?
That program was called VisiCalc, the precursor to Multiplan, and copycats and variations on the theme such as, Lotus 1-23, SuperCalc, PFS: Calc, Wingz, Open Access and many, many others that are now long gone. And of course, eventually Microsoft Excel.
I will go as far as to say that I believe more than any other factor, VisiCalc was the major reason the personal computer took off in the small business arena.
After Stephen had left for Sydney, my new manager was Kim, Stephen’s previous second in charge who let me have pretty much a free reign. For example, I was allowed to take computers home to learn different programs.
The Big 3
There were two other applications I liked, called Scripsit and Profile respectively. Scripsit was Tandy’s word processing program, and Profile was a database system, and very quickly, I knew them backwards. There were versions for both the Tandy models, the Model 1 and Model 2, but when the Model 3 was announced, these applications came out in brand new, very updated versions. These applications becamew the Big 3.
The Model 3 was a departure from standard Tandy design too, as it was a single box with screen, disk drives and keyboard all in the one unit. It was basically a combination of the modular Model 1 and the bigger Model 2 in a compact form factor, selling for A$3299 with 48K RAM (its maximum).
I couldn’t get enough of them. The three software packages of VisiCalc, Scripsit and Profile made a combination suitable to automate many office tasks. Profile – now Profile Plus, as well as being a database application also had a powerful “4th Generation” programming language behind it, letting you create full applications designed for specific circumstances.
In my spare time I wrote systems for couriers and transport companies, service stations, video rental stores and others, and selling these was like shooting ducks in a barrel. It was almost too easy.
For around five grand a small business could completely computerise their systems, and the federal government’s very generous investment allowance tax write off at that time made it a no brainer.
That particular year I made the national Tandy CMR (Computer Marketing Rep) of the Month in sales 7 times. The next year, Kim decided to go JV in a new store in Fremantle, and I was sent there to set up a sort of “mini” computer centre in the shop. This only lasted a few months thankfully, as I lived at the other end of Perth (northwards) and travelling time was over an hour each way, which whilst by Sydney standards is not long, in Perth that is almost a day trip!
I then ended up at the other WA computer centre in Beaufort Street next to the Perth CBD for a period and it was also here that Tony, the person I mentioned back when I had just started at Tandy Carousel re-entered the scene. He had applied for a job as a CMR (Computer Marketing Rep) like me and had been accepted.
Tony later ended up in Victoria running the Camberwell Computer Centre and our paths again crossed a few years later.
And then, out of the blue, I was promoted to the Manager of the Subiaco Computer Centre.
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