Life after IBM

 

Those of us who remember IBM in the good old days (™, ® U.S.Pat.Off.) will shed the occasional virtual tear for the old girl, knowing full well that her glory days are gone forever.  There will never be an IBM like the one we knew.  For the benefit and illumination of those who never had the experience, we tell our tales.  Some of them reflect well on IBM;  others...  not so much.

STSS

In the mid-70s, somebody, perhaps Roy Turnbull, the manager of the Endicott Suggestions Department, got the idea that the process of logging suggestions in, routing them, tracking them, and awarding the ingenious and lucky suggesters should become more automated.  'Suggestions' was a corporate function although the individual Suggestions Departments were administered locally by the plants that housed them, or FE (Field Engineering) for the non-plant employees.  As a result, it was Armonk that mandated the Suggestions Tracking and Statistical System (STSS) and FEHQ Information Systems (White Plains) that got the task of building it.  It was unclear for a long time why FEHQ management named me, the new kid on the block with only 4 years experience, as lead programmer for FE's first IMS DB/DC application consisting, finally, of 9 HISAM clusters, 40+ MID/MODs, and 27 PL/I application programs.

Dave Boyd, an analyst with many years experience in systems design, was lead analyst and he produced a brilliant design that has stood the test of time.  He also demanded that STSS's code be rigidly structured and peer-reviewed.  By the end of 1978, the entire system had been running in parallel-test-mode for 6 months and the team felt comfortable with calling it 'done'.  The team dispersed and I set to work collecting and categorizing the fragments of documentation that we had generated over the past few years.  The first submission was rejected as 'incomplete' and I spent a month building the missing parts.  Then it was rejected for a different reason and another month went by.  Then another rejection.  And another.  I asked my manager for political help to overcome the nit-picking from Production that was denying STSS final approval.  He politely declined.

In May of '79, I was directed to demo STSS at the FE Awards Conference in Miami.  I thought then it might be a ploy to get me where I could be given a surprise award for what I considered a great achievement.  It wasn't;  it was just a work assignment.  My appraisal in June was disappointing, the raise following was insulting, and an expected promotion to Staff Programmer did not appear, nor did the one thing that might have kept me happy enough to grin and bear it: a transfer to Tampa.  I considered it 'the handwriting on the wall'.  I updated my resume, soon had a job offer, handed in my resignation, and left to do some contract programming, eventually winding up in Houston.

After I left IBM, all hell seems to have broken loose.  Endicott complained to Corporate that their beautiful, fully-functional system wasn't yet in production.  Corporate told FE to solve that problem pronto and — voila! — it was suddenly accepted for production.  When Armonk finally saw it in operation, they mandated it for all Suggestions Departments world-wide, and Dave Boyd got to tour Europe (the parts with IBM plants, anyway) installing it here, there, and everywhere.

It turns out that FE management didn't like the idea of bean-counters in Armonk deciding what projects FE's programmers would work on, so they handed STSS to someone they thought would probably screw it up.  They wanted STSS to fail but never bothered to tell me, so I made that bumblebee fly.

P.s.:  when we loaded the tracking database with historical data, the oldest suggestion we could find was from September of 1929, so all the code in STSS understood that a year smaller than '29' was, perforce, 2000-something.  STSS was the first Y2K-compliant application in IBM's history.  In 1978.

1984

Houston had been riding on this huge bubble of oil, and the housing market was on fire.  When the bubble burst, oil companies started laying people off and the housing market collapsed.  Preferring to set my own course, I had started looking elsewhere.  One recruiter asked if he might send my papers to IBM-Clear Lake and I agreed.  A week later I had an interview, but when I got to IBM that day, nobody seemed to know who I was or why I was there.  They had me (re)fill out the 6-page IBM application, then spun me through the canonical four interviews before sending me on my way.  Two weeks later, I received a letter:  'thank you for spending time with us, etc., etc., unfortunately...'.  The letter was dated the day of my interviews, but it was mailed much later.  I assumed they had finally seen my historical personnel jacket and realized their error.

A former colleague at IBM happened to be talking to me in 1984 and casually asked: "How's the job?"  I admitted that I was looking and he offered that IBM-Tampa might be interested in my skillset.  I recited the above tale and suggested that if Tampa were still interested in me after reviewing my jacket, they could call.  On December 4th as I was sitting down to dinner, my phone rang.  Whatever had happened at IBM-Clear Lake remains unexplained.  One thing led to another, and by year-end, I was an IBMer once again.  I often suspected that institutional-IBM later came to regret it.

I had been 'over the wall' and had discovered that there is breathable air there.  There was life outside IBM!  Further, I also knew that IBM was not The Emerald City whence originated all the really good ideas.  My presence contaminated innumerable otherwise-faithful IBMers.  By the time I pre-retired in 1992, there were managers in Tampa who wanted to see me dead.  Not 'gone';  dead.  It goes without saying that I never made it past 'Staff Programmer'.

Life on the outside

For two dozen years, contracts have kept bread on the table, put kids through college, paid the mortgage (off), and sent us on European vacations.  As much as we might miss the familiarity of the IBM we once knew, we realize that the nature of modern employment is such that no company can ever again hope to have a workforce that thinks of itself as 'family' and expects to work for the same company for an entire career.  The pace of life is itself enough to prohibit that, and the ability to seek out more optimal situations with ease means that job hunting is no longer reserved for times when 'the handwriting is on the wall'.

 

Print-On-Demand

 

In the old days, an author had to rely on traditional publishers to see their book made available to the public.  An author would submit a manuscript to several publishers in hopes that one, at least, would find it attractive enough to spend money editing, proof-reading, typesetting, and printing in order to produce the first edition.  This cost could be several thousand dollars.  The publisher would typically call for a first print run of 10,000 copies as a bare minimum, and it would be the publisher's task to get them sold as a way to recoup the initial cost that sometimes included an advance-on-royalties made to the author.  As a result, publishers were very picky about which books they would publish.  Aspiring authors from that era all had tales of 'papering their walls with rejection letters'.

Within the past half-century or so, 'vanity presses' have appeared on the scene.  These are businesses that will publish your work for a fee — sometimes an exorbitant fee.  As a rule, they care not whether your work is good or bad because you are paying the up-front costs and handling the job of selling your work.  In the early days of vanity presses, a contract might deliver 1,000 copies of the first edition — usually the only edition — and what the author did with them was the author's business — literally.

Since the computer revolution the entire face of publishing has undergone a sea change.  Word processing has made it possible for very many people who would not otherwise have gone to the effort to produce a text and to have it published by either a vanity press or a new arrival on the scene, the independent publisher.

Both 'vanities' and 'indies' are able to print-on-demand (as are the traditional publishing houses), and this has reduced the cost of getting a book to market so substantially that the number of published works has exploded due to the drastic lessening of the financial risk.  The same thing happened when Gutenberg introduced the printing press to Europe in the 1500s.

"Print-on-demand" means that a largely-computerized publisher has the ability to access the formatted text of a book along with its cover, among other things.  When a buyer orders a copy of the book, a transaction is sent electronically to the printer that causes the production of a fully-formed book.  The inside text (usually black-ink-on-white-paper) is printed on one printer, the cover (usually color and on a heavier stock) on another, and the shipping label on a third.  At the end of the production line, automated binding equipment gathers the pages, wraps them in the cover, slips the finished product into a shipping box, and affixes the shipping label.  The completed package is handed over to the local postal service or an overnight shipper and is in the hands of the buyer in a few days.

The era of having 10,000 copies of a book printed and held in storage pending the arrival of orders from retailers or wholesalers has largely ended.  Only ink, paper, and cardboard shipping boxes are kept in inventory and can be reordered as needed.  When a retailer such as Barnes & Noble decides they want 200 copies of a work in stock, the only difference in the processing is that only a single shipping label is printed.

Ingram, headquartered in La Vergne TN, is probably the world's largest printer-on-demand and can have a book printed — right now — in any of several countries on several continents.  They are not alone.

As a result, any aspiring author who wishes to put in the effort can become a published author for what would have been considered 'peanuts' in an earlier age.  Amazon, for instance, will convert your Microsoft Word document or Adobe PDF to a Kindle-formatted version free.  You just have to agree to sell it via Amazon.

 

Sippenhaftung

 

In old Germanic law (pre-Roman) there was a concept known as "Sippenhaftung", 'kin responsibility'.  Certain crimes were serious enough that the criminal's family or clan was considered to be as responsible for the crime as was the actual criminal.  It even survives today in (especially) classrooms where, as one example, one student's misbehavior can cause the class outing to be cancelled.  In operation, it effectively outsources law enforcement by giving people an incentive to enforce proper behavior among their family.

We generally shy away from such collective punishment because it offends our modern sense of justice, but there may be situations where Sippenhaftung is actually the only way to prevent certain crimes.  I refer, of course, to 'terrorism'.  Terrorists often commit their acts of terror fully expecting that they themselves will not survive to be arrested, tried, convicted, and punished.  Especially if their families applaud their deaths as some act of religious faith or political protest, the terrorists know that they will be honored in their deaths.  Our reaction to such things is to shake our heads in disbelief.  What if our reaction were something else?

What if our reaction to a terrorist incident is to immediately deport the parents, siblings, spouse and offspring of an identfied terrorist, whether those deportees were citizens or not?  What if our reaction is to order them gone in 10 days or 'wanted dead or alive'?

I have the feeling families would be much more likely to report a relative as soon as they are suspected of plotting terror rather than face the possibility of having to uproot the entire family and flee for their lives.  Terrorists themselves might become less enthralled with the whole notion because a family they (presumably) love would be put in danger — would, in fact, become the lawful targets of terrorism-in-return.

Further, it may be that some deportees may not be able to find a country that will take them in at all.  A mere one or two such families could spell the end of terrorist acts in our lifetime as potential terrorists contemplate making their families homeless, stateless refugees.