GBS – Joining the Fray

Joining the Fray

My first programming job out of college was with General Business Systems (GBS) located in Burlingame. Burlingame is just south of San Francisco on the north side of Silicon Valley. It was the fall of 1978 and this was my first professional/career job. I had lots of jobs before this one of course. My first job was working on a farm stand. I'd worked retail, worked on the stock market, drove a delivery truck, worked in a bakery factory and in an electrical warehouse. I also worked at an elementary school and a bike shop while in college. And oh yeah, I also did a little over 3 years in the Air Force repairing navigation systems. But this was my first real career type job. I was always a hard worker, even in the Air Force, but this was the first time I was in what I considered a professional job. I was about to step into a place where I had never pictured myself. In the movies newly hired staff with little or, in my case, no real experience started out doing small helper type tasks. They had to prove themselves and had to wait for an opportunity to get any significant assignments or attain any sort of position of responsibility. I was about to enter the mainstream business world coming from a counter culture one. I was not sure what to expect but I hoped to fit in and at least like the job.

GBS sold vertical applications on a Xerox developed micro-computer, a precursor to the personal computer. It was Xerox's second foray into micro-computers after their infamous Alto computer creation circa 1973. The Alto was the first micro/personal computer and the first computer designed to use a “graphical user interface” (GUI). It was used within Xerox but was largely a commercial failure. Being the first of its kind, it influenced people like Steve Jobs who subsequently created the first Apple computer in 1976. Xerox then developed a second micro-computer and it hit the market about the same time as the first Apple computer. Xerox decided not to put their name on it and sort of OEM'd it to GBS. Well Xerox still made the computer but GBS sold and supported it so maybe they really ODM'd it. Anyway, GBS developed a suite of vertical business applications to run on it. The business applications included accounting, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and payroll. The computer's base model had just 24K of memory. To give you an idea how small that is, a single post on my blog is well over 30K sans the pictures. The screen displays were in monochrome, for those of you old enough to remember, think of Atari's Pong. I was hired to program modifications as required by clients.

We were not in cubes. We were all in one room with rows of two desks side by side. We had a phone but did not have a computer on our desks. There was a separate computer room that had maybe 4 computers for us to work on. In other words we couldn't all be using a computer at the same time. My desk was next to another programmer named Rich. Rich was younger than me, but then so were they all. I was the oldest programmer in the group. I was 29 and in silicon valley 29 was getting on the old side. (I would spend 10 years working in high tech firms and I was always one of the oldest. I was often closer to the age of the company's president.) Rich was one of the top programmers in the group and a good worker. That worked out well as I initially measured my work against his. I found throughout my career that for me it was motivating to sit by a top performer.

GBS gave me some training on the computer and the one of a kind programming language it used. I was first assigned a couple of small changes and then I was thrust into the fray. I was given clients that needed program changes. I was sent out to do installations. I was asked to fix client problems over the phone. I thought that I would need to prove myself to get real assignments. Not at GBS. At GBS there was no waiting to prove yourself. The more you did, the more you were assigned. I quickly proved to be capable and I got as much work as I could handle. The more I took on the more I got assigned. Many of the small businesses that purchased computers from GBS required significant modifications. Some needed an entire custom application. There were maybe 8 programmers who did these things but just a few who did large modifications and I quickly became one of the few.

The Diablo 3200 Micro Computer circa 1978

Warning: Technical zone ahead – all speed reading fines will be doubled...

The computer's programming language was called DACL (Diablo Applications Compiler Language). The language had a very basic set of instructions and no functions to speak of. The editor, while full screen, only scrolled one way, down. If you needed to go to the top or even just back to the previous page of code you had to close the program and reopen it back at the top and scroll back down. This encouraged programmers to write what was disparagingly referred to as “spaghetti” code. Something a good programmer should never do but good programmers are, or at least were, few and far between. There was only 10.5K of memory to run a program which greatly limited the size of any single program. Opening a file would take .5K of that 10.5 so you had to be careful and keep track of the number of files you opened. Opening more that two files at a time could severely limit how much code you could run. It was common to close one file before opening another. Opening and closing files slows down any program so there's a balance there. There were no data structures so building and maintaining indexes had be coded within each program and guess what? Indexes are another file. So if an index is needed to speed up accessing data from a file to make a program run faster, that would require opening two open files costing a full K of memory. Maintaining indexes also meant doing two writes for each record, one row for the main file and one for the index file. We also wrote some of our own searches. So it behooved coders to make programs clean and concise. Coding (writing a program) could get out of control quickly. There were many messy out of control programs being written. For me, this job was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. The only problem was the language was one of a kind and was not very helpful in making us marketable. It did pay dividends later. It gave me data manipulation experience that not a lot of programmers had. Later in my career when I was working on systems that had data structures and databases I understood how they worked at the core level because at GBS I had to write many of my own routines to build them. DBAs would find me helpful because I understood their world better than most programmers but also frustrating for the same reason. They couldn't bullshit me.

End of technical zone

GBS sold the computers with the applications to small businesses. The major part of the sale was the computer itself and the sales people often discounted any software (programming) customizations to make the sale. They were supposed to call one of us for an estimate before a sale was finalized and they generally did, but there were problems. One being we were estimating on very loosely defined enhancements, the scope of which had yet to be determined. Another being the sales force would frequently cut back the modification estimate we gave them in order to make the sale. By the time a modification came back to us as an assignment the time allotted to complete the task would be grossly underestimated. This often resulted in us working overtime. We were salaried employees so there was no extra pay for the effort. I started inflating my estimates by 50% but even that wasn't enough as I learned that adding 50% to my estimate turned out to be a pretty accurate estimate. The inexperienced estimator looks at the task and calculates the time required based on not encountering problems. It's natural to think everything will go as planned. Don't we generally plan our lives that way? This turns out to be totally inaccurate. Any sizable modification will invariably encounter some problems along the way. Problems, since they are unseen, almost always take more time than expected. Estimating on the fly is always very iffy and the sales people always tried to pressure you to reduce your estimate. At GBS if you refused they often did it anyway, a classic lose-lose.

I 'd been a child of the “60's”. I'd been able to hold out until almost 30 but I was now one of “them”, a working professional in a “white collar” job. Like so many of my generation I finally gave in, “sold out” (in the “60's” sense) and joined the dreaded “rat race”.