What Happens in Vegas Doesn't Always Stay In Vegas

Integrated sales manager ISM, the program I developed for my own personal use when I joined Ariel Computer Graphics in Toronto. At the time Ariel was the top computer graphics company in North America. NASA built a giant mainframe computer so they can process high resolution images from the Mars mission. My buddy Tom Graham, former bandleader of the the Big Town Boys, had to have one; 1 million bucks back then was expensive. That was the start of high-quality computer graphics in Canada. I have been about high resolution images all my life; I really had to have access to one. 8000 lines of resolution.

I left the AVX project at Globestock to join Ariel as a senior sales executive, I brought some of my top accounts over to Ariel, a few banks and ad agencies i.e., McCann Erickson. This was going to be fun but it had a down side, there was this old school bean counter office manager. I guess you could say ISM was one hundred percent his fault. 

All the account reps were required to generate paper reports weekly, I hated it. I looked into some of the contact management/time management packages; klutzy. I was still associating with Hagen K back at Globestock, possibly the best programer ever to come out of Canada. For the record Globestock had some pretty fancy programmers at the time. Avi Moshi ran the Cray at U of T, Tyler Ivanco ran the Centre of Excellence in Computer Studies at York. Bob Soper was one of the best out of Guelph. Bob created AVX animation software, much more elegant than the package used to make Jurassic Park. Then there was Hagen K, in a league of his own, none of those guys even came close.

  After the Globestock project went south everybody went in different directions. Hagen K needed a job. I asked him to create an app so I can get off the Cardex system and go digital. The commercially available programs that were available were a bunch of clunkers. Back to the software ISM, I need something slick and fast. I designed the menu system and how it integrated with all the modules. Hagan agreed, walked across Yonge St and bought the manual for “C” ; machine language. He read the two inch thick manual that night and punched out his first code for ISM.

Richard Ruiz, IT guy for Robin Hood Multifoods and our partner from California Justin Kim came down to Vegas for the show. Richard stayed up a bit late at the tables and missed the first day of the show. There we were the big time. 

Both of us had no idea what we had just done. it just worked; some pretty slick programming. Later that week I was visiting my buddy at Hewlett-Packard, I showed him my new application, he told me he knew a lot about contact management software, and this personal app was the best thing he had ever seen. No way. To make a long story short we compared it to all the other products and my app blew the doors off everything out there.  

It was a really big show, ISM was on every laptop at the show; all the manufactures used it to showcase their hardware to first time users. We had it made.

Back to my friend the office manager for a moment, he walked up to me minutes before the deadline for handing in the monthly reports, smiling, thinking he had me. He asked: “are your reports ready?” I said no, not yet, then I pressed enter and a two inch stack of the most beautiful reports you have ever seen came out of the printer; much to the astonishment of my friend. Ariel implemented the package for use in the rest of the company and paid for development for the next year. I left shortly after to make my fortune in software development. I was pretty good at it by now.

Suzanne's dad (my partner) Richard and Justin at our display in the Dell booth; we were everywhere.

Back then there was not a lot of RAM in our computers, everything was running off the hard drive; slow as molasses. In short if you wanted to query 2000 files and drill down with a couple of filters on it, it could take you 15 minutes. ISM took seven seconds to complete the task. Everybody was wondering what the hell was going on. A bunch of other companies saw the the program and wanted in. Reallocating RAM on the fly is how it was done.

My HP pal called up Anthony DeChriostofaro, Manager for NEC Canada. Next thing you know we are at Comdex in Las Vegas. ISM ended up on every laptop computer at the show. By some strange coincidence the computer industry got ahead of itself with new hardware, but no software for first time users. The millions of folks in sales were just getting into laptop computers. It was our big break. Our little program ended up getting written up by PC and Byte magazines, definitely in the top 10 in contact management software and possibly one of the best ones ever for a brief period of time

 I talked to thousands of people at Comdex over the next 3 years.

ISM was the fastest slickest thing on the market for about 3 years, until they bumped up RAM. Nobody was able to crack our code, IBM boasted they would figure it out but they never did. 

We were going to make a phenomenal amount of money; so what happened? What always happens when you've got humanoids involved. Like their egos take over and sense of entitlement kicks in. Somebody wanted blue pencils and somebody else wanted red pencils, yada yada yada and it was all over before you know it. One of the partners wanted to charge $500 for the package, I wanted to charge $39.95.  If they listened to me, they would have sold millions; $500 not so much for first time user's.

Suzanne's parents retired down to Rancho Santa Fe in California leaving her as President of Aselco. Associated Electronic Component Ltd. I had to commute down there to deal with her dad as he was one of the partners. Frode fancied himself as a high-tech guru having 27 Canadian distributorships for all kinds of a sophisticated electronic equipment from Europe and Korea. It got a bit cumbersome back and forth. If all the ego's didn't get in the way we stood to make a lot of doe ray me. 

The city of Las Vegas hated the Comdex convention, the teckies did not gamble. I did.  I alloted myself a $10 roll of quarters every night, I came home with about 8 grand on the slots.  My pals were not so lucky, one of them lost big.  I never went past losing $10 a night; free drinks.

More to this story later.