Good Ol' Tandy Days

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, May 09, 2012, Scott Walker wrote:
...
>I opened and ran the computer center in Charlotte NC for 2 years before I
>could not stomach Tandy any longer.  They treated the Computer Center
>managers like store clerks (although very well paid clerks).  Previously I
>had been a salesman for Burroughs.  Burroughs had an excellent training
>program, but their small systems products at the time (B80/B800/B90/B900)
>were not very competitive in the marketplace.

Being treated like store clerks would have been an improvement as
most store clerks aren't required to clean bathrooms.  Gary
Galliardi (sp?), one of the founders of the company Softa, had a
front page article in one of the computer mags with a cartoon of
a RS store manager telling a customer to wait until he finished
mopping up.  I took a copy of that to my Regional Manager.

Burroughs was another company with some strange attitudes.  Their
top guy, Ray MacDonald, was quoted in a Forbes article as saying
that Burroughs wanted to keep their customers "surly, but not
rebellious".  Their pay for the support people was pretty bad as
well.  Most of the ones who I knew were retired Air Force as the
USAF had a lot of Burroughs mainframes.

I never had problems with Burroughs' service, particularly after
were were having problems with their Remote Job Entry (RJE)
system on the B-3500.  I convinced them to let me try to fix it
when they didn't have time to fix it for months.  They gave me
the source for the RJE server and for MCP which I used to debug
and fix it.  The RJE server was written in BPL, Burroughs
Programming Language, sort of a cross between ALGOL and C.  I had
to learn that to fix the RJE server, then create a binary patch
for MCP.  After I gave them the fixed RJE and the patch I never
had a problem when I asked for help :-).

>In defense of Tandy, the microcomputer market was a bloodbath once IBM hit
>the market.  Think about it...on one side you are competing against IBM, who
>can command a higher price for an inferior product based on their name
>alone, and a bunch of competitors who can assemble a competing product from
>industry standard parts.  You are kind of getting hit from both sides.  I've
>always said the middle is a dangerous place to be!

I never had a problem with IBM, and never lost a sale to them
before leaving RS in October 1983.  There was an IBM Product
Center about a block from my X-department on K Street that I
would send people to after showing them Scripsit on the Model II.
They would always come back with their office manager screaming
about the horrible PC Keyboard compared to the one on the Model II
which was very similar to the IBM Selectric.  Spreadsheet users
also hated the PC keyboard which didn't have arrow keys, but
required one to hit the NUMLOCK key to switch functions on the
keypad.

Then there was the time that the Montgomery County Maryland
schools put out an RFP for systems that would have been huge.
The RFP was written to exclude Apple and the Model III as it
required an 80x24 screen.  I talked to the V.P. in charge of
educational sales offering to help write the proposal as I had a
lot of experience when I worked for a Navy contractor (beltway
bandit) as an Operations Research Analyst, but they didn't want
my help.  When I saw the "proposal" that came out of Fort Worth,
it was a bad joke.  It didn't propose the Model IV because it
wasn't to be released until a day or so after the bid opening so
it didn't meet the requirements, and it was simply about a 3-page
price list with "supermarket of sound" at the bottom of each page.
I immediately called the V.P. in Fort Worth and blasted him for
blowing a great opportunity with a completely unprofessional and
shoddy piece of work.  This wasn't the first time I blew by my DM
and RM to go directly to Fort Worth which may have led to my
demotion to the X-department on L street :-).

>Think of the hundreds of companies who tried to compete in that market and
>how few survived.  Name the big players in the pc market of the early '80s
>who are still in it?  Not even IBM!  Don't forget, Apple was almost bankrupt
>at one point.  Tandy had a chance but not with their management's mentality.

Bill
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