Sam neatened the paperwork in his hands by dropping it through his fingers onto the desk.
“We want you to connect all the computers together, and make a database of all the customers, quotes, and orders so everybody can get at stuff quickly while they are on the phone”
He grinned.
“How does that sound?”
I wanted to say “Bloody impossible”. How best might I explain that the closest I had come to a network was the mysterious metal connectors on the back of the computers at college?
I knew the wires left t-shaped fittings, and dissappeared into plastic trunking around the perimeter of the room. Beyond that I had no clue. There could have been a room of telephony operators hidden somewhere in the college campus for all I know - beeping and screeching at each other in the same manner modems do.
A bizarre scene formed in my head of two telegraph receptionists sitting across from one another, both wearing thick glasses, and plaid skirts.
“eeeeeeee A”
“sssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
“bong bong bong bong”
“eeee A”
Only those who remember the era of modems and sub 56K connections to the internet will remember the tones made by V32bis while handshaking. Some will have blanked it from their memory.
“Okay - I’ll get started with ordering the kit to connect the computers”
“Yep - while you’re at it, we could probably do with an audit of exactly what we have around the place”
Great. You wear new clothes to work, and within days of starting you find yourself scrabbling around on the floor under people’s desks.
While the voyeuristic side of the more adventurous mind would find a world of possibility in peering underneath desks, I can assure you that the reality is in fact very, very different from any fantasy. For one, any girl with even two brain cells devotes one and a half of them to keeping anything that shouldn’t be seen away from prying eyes. For two, you’re far more likely to find yourself knee deep in encrusted pizza debris under 20 stone “fat Alan’s” desk while he attempts to bend down to watch - which of course he cannot without firing several buttons across the office like bullets.
So. What do they have around the office besides my new screaming machine? I set off on my mini adventure.
“Hi Sian”
“Oh hi John - how can I help you?”
“I just need to take a look at your computer - find out what it is.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re going to connect all the computers together”
“Does that mean you’ll be able to see my screen?” (a look of horror spread across her face)
“No. It means they computers will form their own intelligence and run the company while we are all electrocuted and used as biological batteries”
(I didn’t really say that, but I might have thought it)
“No. It’s so you’ll be able to get quick access to what other people have done - and make your job easier”
“Oh. Okay then. I’ll go and make a cup of tea. Hang on - I need to save this Doc… oh bugger!”
Somehow Sian had hit close instead of save. Goodbye document.
“Can you get it back?”
“Did you save it?”
“No”
A few moments later there were angry banging-about noises in the kitchen.
She had a 386. Oh dear. Just a few years previously this would have been a very fine computer to have. Something to be proud of. Now it was akin to comparing a roller skate with a Ford Mustang (not a bad analogy - the average PC of 1995 was built not unlike a Ford Mustang - i.e. it weighed about the same as an ocean liner).
So - if Sian was going to run Windows for Workgroups, she would probably need a new computer.
On to George - man about town Will Carling lookalike. When I arrived at his desk, he was miraculously not on the phone. My arrival seemed to spark a show of manlyness between George and Darren - for both mine and Anita’s benefit no doubt.
“Got a girlfriend then Jon?”
“No…”
George grinned and rolled away from his desk, leaning back with his hands behind his head.
“Don’t blame you - nothing but trouble, women”
“You would say that, if Sharon caught you with that barmaid from the Three Pigs”
I worked out Sharon must be his wife - the stunning woman stood with arms around great looking kids in a photo on his desk.
“Oh christ - you should have seen her on Friday night. She kept bending over in front of me to get peanuts for people in the bar”
“You’d have a heart attack if she said anything to you”
“Who says she hasn’t ?”
“Yeah right”
You could see that Darren was now searching for some impressive annecdote from his inflated past to impress me with in turn - something to outdo George.
Mr Lions arrived on cue
“You young lads haven’t got a clue. When I was a test pilot in Bankcok, I would have been straight in there”
Anita had had enough.
“Oy
It turned out the rest of the office had half-passable computers - a mixture of 486SX and DX machines. Given the arrival of the Pentium, they were now yesterday’s news, but quite capable of running Windows.
Hand written list in hand, I went back to my desk and set about typing it up. Of course we didn’t have Microsoft Office, because - well - frankly this was before it became ubiquitous in offices across the land, and everybody had a favourite application for a particilar job.
Part of the reason everybody had a favourite application was of course because Windows of the 1995 era was spectacularly shite at running more than one application at the same time. One or two blue screen of death (BSOD) lockups per day was considered quite lucky.
The spreadsheet of choice in the office - installed on every computer - was SuperCalc 3. Apparently the height of DOS spreadsheet cleverness (which I was advised of by Sam, despite my knowledge to the contrary), Supercalc was the application on which the production side of the business was run.
Programming Supercalc could perhaps best be described in terms of having only two commands in a hypothetical programming language - “PRINT” and “GOTO”.
So what might I use to write up my audit? Microsoft Write. The predecessor of Wordpad. After a couple of minutes of typing at a speed that raised eyebrows around the office (their first experience of anybody that could type), I had my audit written up. One problem. I had no printer - and with no network in existence yet, not way to connect a printer short of wiring one to my computer.
So the next problem to solve was networking.
It turned out (after some furious book buying and reading) that the mysterious metal connectors at college were for “10-Base T” ethernet, using BNC connectors. They looked very similar to the coaxial cables used for cable television - because they were the same damn thing.
Looking through a trade catalogue containing all manner of rocket scientist toys and gadgets to do with networking that I had no idea about, I determined there were two ways we could go - “Cat 45”, or “BNC”. The first option was the future, but the network cards and cables cost a couple of pounds more than BNC. Sam told me to buy BNC.
Of course it’s only with hindsight that you slap your forehead and call yourself a complete f*cking idiot. It would be three years until we audited the network, and found the run between our network terminators was over twice as long as the advised limit. Another story for another time.
The order form for the various computer hardware read like a wordsearch puzzle. Of course no spelling checkers complained, because Microsoft Write didn’t have one.
My final task, and the one that would consume me for perhaps the next year - was the invention and development of a database to run the company. A system to end all systems - to perform everything the company needed to, and to empower staff, create efficiencies, and reduce paperwork.
The system would be built upon the recently released Microsoft Access 2. Microsoft SQL Server existed, but was priced firmly in the realm of the enterprise - not the 30 employee small business with a geek in charge of IT.
Microsoft Access was fine - very impressive even. The trouble with things that seem impressive is that you tend to try and use them far beyond their intended application. A good analogy would be trying to use a clockwork cine camera to record everything made by the BBC.
Little would I know on this first day that the database would eventually become known throughout the comany as “Damon” - after Damon Hill. Apparently because it was slow and and crashed a lot (which Damon did that year. A lot).