In November of 1981, after the software vendor Munson Management went backrupt. I switched to National Electronics Corporation and rescued their system. Marty Hart was the driving force behind NEC. The Inventory System and the Purchase Order System, which I had written, already worked. The first new program was called BOOKEM, as in 'book them sales'. A simple program wrote lines of orders to an ASCII file. A week later, I wrote SHIPEM, which handled shipments and relieved inventory.
By January, normal sales processing was running and we did a physical inventory. By February, the generic inventory lookup included milspec lookup. Links into the computer systems of manufactures increased the virtual inventory. By using just attributes of electronic components, sales people could research parts. NEC capabilities for sorting and re-manufacturing gave NEC electronic components that filled special niches.
Marty hussled continually and found more niches for NEC to fill, and more software for my employees and I to write.
The HP sales force used NEC as a show piece; Marty got deals and I got customers.
By 1999, our communication dwindled, and Marty was persuaded to switch to a PC network instead of an HP. I offered to help, but the PC guys rudely rejected my offers. They had possession of the all of the software, but they could not understand essential aspects. The categorization of characteristics of electronic parts baffled them. The subsequent General Sales reporting, that combined NEC sales, market trends, and research about many vendors also failed. The heart of the system was dead.
Mystical Binary Numbers
Marty had invented a concept for sifting thru electronic parts. A category started with two letters or a letter and a digit. Within each category, between eight up to twenty properties further ranked the parts. The patterns in one category did not imply or necessarily match the patterns in the next category. Each part had multiple keys according to which properties were desired. Many parts had multiple key patterns: A capacitor of a given type with voltage, style, farads, or other properties might generate nine major keys and more minor keys.
The original software converted the keys to unsigned binary strings as the program encountered the ASCII tokens for the string. On the original HP hardware in 1981, file sizes and CPU speeds were bottlenecks. Converting to binary saved Space and Time; the machine flew thru binary tables. Truncating ASCII letters saved two bits on the left. The third component of the key indicated the kind of key within the category. Mapping characteristics from ASCII to bit patterns saved more space. Today we laugh. Back then, the algorithm was a selling point for Munson and a trade secret for National. The resulting keys were 64 bits left justified. The nighttime bulk process took more than two hours. New parts, added during the day, went in at human data entry speeds.
Each key had a following 32 bit record pointer. Some record pointers actually pointed to more keys where more detailed filtering yielded a record pointer.
A good programmer should have been able to comb the literals for the several hundred categories into long ASCII strings, maybe 64 bytes followed by the record pointer. The PC guys could not understand the concept. Having several hundred categories and maybe ten times more kinds of keys obscured the process.
During runtime, a few library routines encoded requests from the sales reps and enabled inventory look-ups. More than once, an engineer calling National was surprised that a sales rep could recommend a part from the few characteristics given by the engineer. No part number needed.
By January, normal sales processing was running and we did a physical inventory. By February, the generic inventory lookup included milspec lookup. Links into the computer systems of manufactures increased the virtual inventory. By using just attributes of electronic components, sales people could research parts. NEC capabilities for sorting and re-manufacturing gave NEC electronic components that filled special niches.
Marty hussled continually and found more niches for NEC to fill, and more software for my employees and I to write.
The HP sales force used NEC as a show piece; Marty got deals and I got customers.
By 1999, our communication dwindled, and Marty was persuaded to switch to a PC network instead of an HP. I offered to help, but the PC guys rudely rejected my offers. They had possession of the all of the software, but they could not understand essential aspects. The categorization of characteristics of electronic parts baffled them. The subsequent General Sales reporting, that combined NEC sales, market trends, and research about many vendors also failed. The heart of the system was dead.
Mystical Binary Numbers
Marty had invented a concept for sifting thru electronic parts. A category started with two letters or a letter and a digit. Within each category, between eight up to twenty properties further ranked the parts. The patterns in one category did not imply or necessarily match the patterns in the next category. Each part had multiple keys according to which properties were desired. Many parts had multiple key patterns: A capacitor of a given type with voltage, style, farads, or other properties might generate nine major keys and more minor keys.
The original software converted the keys to unsigned binary strings as the program encountered the ASCII tokens for the string. On the original HP hardware in 1981, file sizes and CPU speeds were bottlenecks. Converting to binary saved Space and Time; the machine flew thru binary tables. Truncating ASCII letters saved two bits on the left. The third component of the key indicated the kind of key within the category. Mapping characteristics from ASCII to bit patterns saved more space. Today we laugh. Back then, the algorithm was a selling point for Munson and a trade secret for National. The resulting keys were 64 bits left justified. The nighttime bulk process took more than two hours. New parts, added during the day, went in at human data entry speeds.
Each key had a following 32 bit record pointer. Some record pointers actually pointed to more keys where more detailed filtering yielded a record pointer.
A good programmer should have been able to comb the literals for the several hundred categories into long ASCII strings, maybe 64 bytes followed by the record pointer. The PC guys could not understand the concept. Having several hundred categories and maybe ten times more kinds of keys obscured the process.
During runtime, a few library routines encoded requests from the sales reps and enabled inventory look-ups. More than once, an engineer calling National was surprised that a sales rep could recommend a part from the few characteristics given by the engineer. No part number needed.