A Fortune at ComputerLand


Computerland of Anchorage, Alaska was a great first job in the burgeoning IT industry in the early 80's.   I was a sponge ready to soak up anything and everything I could learn after a couple of years of school. 

The store was owned by Wayne, a former North Slope worker who had invested his earnings into the franchise.  I got the opportunity to work in the store after a very brief interview process after responding to an ad.    While I'd worked with some small business computers at the National Weather Service for a while, I was a babe in the woods with a) sales and b) computer sales when I showed up for my first day.

A quick introduction of the crew at the store when I started working there:

Wayme - Owner.   Present but distracted, a reasonably good guy.

Roger - Store manager.    Roger smoked in the store - Benson and Hedges - and was famous for his ability to sit down at a system, light up, and never take a drag - the entire cigarette, converted to one long ash, would dangle for hours from his motionless lips.   Many's the time that the rest of us would wager on how long it would be before his ash hit the keyboard - and while I won my fair share, I was always astounded at how long it could take that ash to drop.

Jim the First - the hard-bitten, grizzled  tech in the back room.     Felt any problem could be solved on his oscilloscope.   Did not suffer fools gladly, and felt everyone was a fool.   SERIOUS case of eczema. 

Jim the Second - Jim the First's replacement tech.    As many in Alaska, was fleeing from family troubles on the east coast.   Terrific person; became a great friend and taught me a lot about music.

Debbie - Sales person.   Fountain of anecdotes.

Mark - senior salesperson.   Did not want to help the new guy but helped me tremendously with his questionable judgement on which customers were buyers and worth helping.

Kevin - Accounting and operations support.   Wayne's right hand and a solid team player.

Stuart - Go-to guy for whatever the team needed.

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There were a lot of reasons that this was a great first industry job.    One of them was that Wayne and Roger were kids in a candy store when they'd go off to the shows and Computerland franchise meetings, and would come back with a lot of new tech and systems for us to sell.  This was certainly reflected in the store floor lineup when I arrived, which included Apple, Atari, Vector Graphics, Osborne, and the IBM PC, which had just come out.

This lack of self control also extended to the software that you'd find on our shelves in every genra.   The big sellers of the time were titles like Visicalc, WordStar, Dbase II, and games such as Adventure, Choplifter, and Microsoft Decathalon (a team favorite for competition when things were slow).

Their inability to say "no" to new stuff meant that we got to work with the operating systems of the day beyond just Apple DOS and MS-DOS - CP/M, Unix, and derivatives were great to work with and learn as well.

One of the toys that I latched onto when Roger came back from a show was from Fortune Systems Inc., a California - based startup (not even a dot-com this was so early).   They had raised a couple of hundred million in an IPO, and had a product on the market that was far ahead of its time.   The Fortune system was Unix-based.   It ran on open architecture, well designed hardware but was also a closed system because of a chip they called the "momrom" that basically "had locked" the installed software to that particular system (a real headache when something went wrong with the hardware). 

The Fortune had excellent software for the day, especially their For:Word word processing system, which was a knockoff of Wang and far ahead of IBM and Apple PC's.   THeir spreadsheet was Multiplan, the forerunner of Excel.      IT was really a great system for business applications, but like all systems of the time had real memory and performance constraints.

(One of the most sincerely grateful customer moments I every experience was when I showed a customer how to turn automatic recalculation OFF in Multiplan.  His monster spreadsheet was literally taking 10-15 minutes to recalculate every time he changed a number.   Bill - the customer - almost started crying when he could enter his data at full speed again and recalculate on demand).

Fortune  also offered a fully integrated accounting software system.    This was a great and next-level offering in the small systems market - but it was also very buggy, and all fixes were provided old-school as manual updates - code you literally had to punch in.   This meant the coce (an early Business Basic) - was open and available to young hackers like myself.  I got into plenty of trouble with the accounting software, but also learned a lot in the real world of such systems in a very short period of time.

The Fortune was an impressive integrated business system, and I became the expert in that system and quickly built up a significant client list of Fortune users all over the state of Alaska.   This experience with a Unix-based system set the table for a very significant chunk of my career in advanced tech small systems as well.

In future blogs I'll relate a few of my learning experiences with this team (most of whome I have not seen since leaving Alaska 30 years ago) and some of these early systems we had a chance to work with and install across the Great Land (and some of the not-so-great land).

Happy New Year!