© 2025 Rex Jaeschke. All rights reserved.
In Part 1, we covered my time in Australia. In this Part, we move to the US, in the middle of 1979.
Getting Started in the US; Lookout Chicago!
I stopped working in Australia several weeks before my wife, Jenny, and I left for the US, taking five weeks to get there, via numerous stopovers in Southeast Asia and Europe. Once we arrived in the Washington DC (DC) area, I had several interviews that my US-based recruiter had arranged. During our discussions more than a year previously, when he asked my geographical preference to live and work, I’d said, “The East or West coast; definitely not the Midwest!” However, when I arrived, by far the best job he had on offer was in Chicago, Illinois, right at the heart of the Midwest. C’est la vie! (I don’t even remember the lesser choices.) By then, I’d been away from work at least eight weeks, and, frankly, I was “chomping at the bit” to get started and to show what I could do. (It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to compete.)
The project was with the US Department of Labor’s (DOL) Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training (BAT). Now based on the competitive bidding process on federal government contracts, the vendor who could provide a computer system with all the required features at the lowest price won the contract, and the winning hardware and software was delivered. Then it sat, and it sat, and it sat some more. Never mind that the DOL computer center staff had zero experience with that hardware, its operating system, or the programming language and tools that were included.
At that time, many of the US government departments used contract workers for so-called temporary projects, and this was classified as one of those. Genasys Corporation, which was based in suburban Maryland (MD) near DC, had a contract with DOL to supply IT staff, as needed. And until I arrived in the US, they couldn’t find anyone who had the required expertise, even though the computer system in question was very much mainstream. So, when I signed up, they were delighted!
After a week in a brand-new hotel in Bethesda, MD, Jenny and I rode the overnight train to Chicago where I reported to work at the Federal Building right downtown. By that time, the computer system had been sitting there at least three months, and, as you can imagine, the client for that system was excited to finally see some action, but what could they expect from that tall, odd-sounding, foreign guy?
For administrative purposes, nationally, the DOL was divided into a number of regions, and Chicago was the headquarters (HQ) of the region comprising six states: Minnesota (MN), Wisconsin (WI), Illinois (IL), Indiana (IN), Ohio (OH), and Michigan (MI). However, only four of those—no MN or WI—were to participate in the project I was to design and implement.
The BAT regional administrator’s office was in the same building as mine, and he and his assistant were friendly, helpful, and very good at their jobs. The problem they wanted me to solve involved tracking apprenticeships in those four states, and being in the Midwest, many were related to the auto industry.
Up to that point, each state office maintained its own paper records, the best of which used a very well-organized card-filing system. When new apprentices started, old ones graduated, or their personal or work-related details changed, the state office would record that in its own records, and then put that information on a form, and send it to DC. At least three months went by before they got back reports, more than a few containing errors in the resulting data. So, the state office had to fill out a correction form and send that in. It was a slow, error-prone process and hardly of a quality to keep up state office staff morale.
First up, I fired up the computer system, which was—wait for it—a DEC PDP-11 running RSTS/E exactly like the one I’d used for my intro class at the South Australia Institute of Technology back in 1974. Only this time, IT WAS ALL MINE! It was located in a large data center containing mainframe computers and lots of disk and tape drives, card readers, and printers. I think my baby was the first ever minicomputer the operations staff had ever seen. They likely thought, “How could it possibly work without punched cards?” Now as it happened, I had never heard of the programming language that came with the system. It was called DIBOL (Digital Equipment’s Business-Oriented Language) and it had features borrowed from FORTRAN, BASIC, and COBOL, all of which I did know. So, the learning curve was quite short, and I wrote my first useful program in a few days. The language supported writing to a specific row and column on a display screen and it came bundled with a screen forms-design program. However, several weeks into my new adventure I decided that program did not adequately support our needs, so I designed and programmed a simpler version that I could customize, as needed. (I called that program ADEPT–A Data Entry Programming Tool, and I presented a paper on that at a national conference that December [of 1979] in San Diego, California, a great place to be in winter. By the way, San Diego happens to have the same latitude north as my hometown in South Australia has in the south, and it comes complete with good-old eucalyptus trees, koalas at the zoo, and Mediterranean weather.)
After initial talks with regional management and state office staff, my design was locked-in, and I started writing the program, which I dubbed RARES (Regional Apprenticeship Records Entry System). Then as pieces were completed, I consulted with management and staff again to get their feedback, and I made changes accordingly. After about nine months, the application was complete, and I travelled to three of the state capitals (Indianapolis, IN; Columbus, OH; and Lansing, MI) to train the state office staff. (The 4th state office staff came to my building for training, as they were in the Illinois state capital not too far away.) I wrote the user manual, as well as one for programmers who would come after me to maintain (and possibly enhance) the application.
During the development phase, I typically worked long days, including Saturdays, and often rode home after midnight on a Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) bus along with some very interesting passengers.
Here's how the program worked: Each state office got a monochrome video terminal, which was connected to the computer in Chicago via a dial-up phone line using an acoustic coupler (modem) running at the then-whizzbang speed of 300 baud. Yes, Dear Reader, the digital ones and zeros were turned into sound that was transmitted across a phone line by sticking the phone’s headset into the rubber cups of the coupler. The reverse process was used at the other end. A printer was connected to the terminal to allow various screens and reports to be printed locally. The interface to RARES was a main menu from which the user selected various options to add and remove apprentices, and to change their information, all in real-time, without having to code anything on a form and wait months to see if DC got it right! It was a radical departure from the old approach, and many of the staff welcomed it wholeheartedly. However, for a few, it was somewhat threatening; now they were completely in charge of their own data, and its correctness reflected on their efforts. So, people who had happily blamed the bureaucracy before no longer had that excuse. As we all know, non-trivial changes in any field of operation will have supporters and detractors.
Now when a first-time computer user sits down with such a program, they might well ask, “OK, ask it to tell me how many Vietnam-era veterans have automotive apprenticeships in my state?” While that is a fair question, they had not yet entered any of their data into that computer. So, their first task was to do that. And given that all input was validated as it was entered, they got immediate feedback if something didn’t gel, like an address or date of birth was incomplete. Each apprentice had a unique 9-digit identifier, their federal Social Security Number (SSN). However, if that was unknown, the software would allocate a pseudo-ID until the correct one could be provided.
From initial delivery, the application worked well, the computer ran 24x7 and was very reliable, as were the communication links. A few months later, I attended a national meeting of all the BAT regional administrators, in Salt Lake City, Utah (UT). There, I plugged in a video terminal I’d shipped out, connected it to the Chicago computer by phone, and demonstrated RARES. As they had also been using the old, slow, paper approach, they were suitably impressed. (I don’t know, however, if it ever went national, but technically there was no reason it couldn’t have.)
[In the summer of 1980, Genasys flew Jenny and me to DC to attend its annual corporate dinner. Afterwards, we drove to Niagara Falls and Toronto, Canada, for a vacation before heading back to Chicago.]
As the minicomputer had more capacity than we were using with the RARES project, management decided to take on a second project, and have me design and implement that. It was for the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), for a lab in Cincinnati, OH. There, staff repaired and calibrated various kinds of instruments for the Federal and State governments, as well as for private companies. They needed a system to track arrivals of equipment, the stages of the repair process, and the return shipping. Like the RARES remote sites, they dialed in over phone lines. That project also went very well.
[For details about my time in Chicago see my essay from 2018, “Living in Chicago.”]
Working for a Software Vendor; Hello, Northern Virginia
After 13 months of living and working in Chicago, I was ready for a change, and we moved back to the DC area where I interviewed with an international database management software vendor, Software AG of North America (SAGNA). While all their previous business was around IBM mainframe systems—Adabas and the 4th-generation language Natural—they had acquired a small company that was developing a database product for, you guessed it, DEC PDP-11s! (The company name came from their German affiliate, Software AG, where “AG” [Aktiengesellschaft] is a suffix that indicates something like ‘limited liability company.’ When people asked me what those initials stood for, with a straight face I’d reply “Achtung Gesundheit,” which, if you understood some German, made no sense whatsoever.)
The US company’s HQ was in Reston, a relatively new planned city in Northern Virginia (VA). (For information about Reston, see my essay from 2012, “Living in Utopia — Life in a planned American city.”) And they were looking for someone to be the tech support manager for the new minicomputer-based product. After a local interview, I flew to Seattle, Washington (WA) to meet and be interviewed by the 5-person team that was developing the product.
One very memorable event took place during that trip. I flew out the night before, so I’d be rested before my interviews. On interview morning, there I was dressed in a 3-piece suit and tie, sitting in the company’s garden at a picnic table, 30 minutes before the building opened. It was a glorious day, and as I was enjoying the morning, a flock of Canada Geese flew over, and one of them decided it was time to poop. And poop it did, right down onto the very table at which I was sitting. Fortunately, I had my briefcase standing on the table, and the mostly liquid poop splashed on the other side of that case, and only a very few spots reached me. Hmm, what might have been!
A few days after my return, they offered me the job, with a starting salary that was double what I’d been getting in Chicago. (And every six months after that, I got a major raise, and eventually stock options.)
[Having just finished a year of work in Chicago, I delayed my start by a week while Jenny and I took a vacation. On a Saturday morning in early September, we dropped in to our local American Express travel office and asked about taking a trip to the Caribbean island nation of Bermuda. When the agent asked when we were thinking of going there, we replied, “This coming Monday; in two days’ time!” Once he overcame his initial shock, he booked us plane tickets, got us accommodation, and issued us traveler’s checks, all within a couple of hours. After years of dealing with customers who vacillated over their plans and who kept changing their minds, he was delighted to deal with someone who knew what they wanted and were ready to make the decisions right then and there.]
Initially, I was assigned an office in a building a mile away from the company HQ, but as my minicomputer was housed in the main building, I spent a lot of time over there, mostly working from a conference room. I was the first person there on this project, and no-one had any experience, indeed any knowledge, about minicomputers. Basically, I was from a different planet, and that suited me just fine. (Eventually, the HQ office took over another floor of its high rise building and moved the other building’s staff there, so I no longer had to commute between the two.) Over the next several years, several other people were hired for my project, primarily in sales and marketing.
Like many jobs, mine involved doing whatever it took to do whatever I thought needed to be done, with no supervision. (Remember, no-one in the corporate office understood that marketplace, including my immediate boss, a vice-president.) I developed the product’s installation procedures, I accompanied sales representatives on their calls to handle technical questions, I developed a training course, I travelled to customer sites around the US to install the product and train new customer staff, I fielded technical support questions by phone from across the Continental US, and I worked with the marketing staff. And, of course, I liaised regularly with the product developers in Seattle.
At Eastertime in 1981, together with two colleagues from Seatle, I flew to Frankfurt, Germany, and spent some days at the German company’s HQ in Darmstadt. There I met with the original designers of Adabas and Natural, and the staff who were supporting my product in Europe. The three of us from the US spent a delightful free day in Heidelburg.
During my 2½+ years with the company, it began trading on the US stock exchange, and that was quite an experience for a young lad from the bush!
As the company was one of the biggest mainframe database vendors in the world, it had formed a user group, which hosted an annual, week-long conference for customers. Products were announced, there were papers presented by vendors and customer staff, and there was much socializing. The one I attended was in late summer in Tampa, Florida (FL). For one social event, we hired part of the Busch Gardens amusement park.
Eventually, it was decided to close the Seattle office. However, only one of the people working there on my project agreed to relocate across country. I was promoted to manager and was tasked with hiring people. However, there was a lawsuit going on against my company by the product’s original designer making it hard to entice new employees when the result was likely that we’d remove the product from the marketplace. It was my only time directly managing employees, and it left a very bad taste in my mouth, so much so that I vowed to never do it again!
By the way, at that time the company’s mainframe database software sold for US$100,000–150,000 per copy, and my product sold for $40,000. Interestingly, in the next 5–10 years, with the advent of the PC, very capable database products became available for a few hundred dollars! (Think dBase II.) Oh, and during my time at Software AG, a new database software competitor was founded, and its product competed directly with mine. That company was Oracle, which has since grown into a huge international conglomerate, while Software AG had quietly faded away. C’est la vie!
In the spring of 1983, company management had changed, and my product was no longer. Although I’d been offered a research and development position, I decided that it was time to move on. (In the dying stages of my time there, I did get them to buy an IBM-PC, with which I played around to see how the company might use it to interface with its IBM mainframe systems.)
The Path to Owning My Own Computer
Once I caught the interactive computing bug in March of 1974, I dreamed of owning my own home computer. However, I was never interested in electronics kits; I wanted one fully assembled and supported, and ready to do real work! In August of 1977, Tandy/Radio Shack launched its TRS-80, which was (according to Wikipedia) “one of the earliest mass-produced and mass-marketed retail home computers.” My guess is that it became available in Australia the following year. I certainly remember playing with one in a store on more than a few occasions in 1978 and early 1979. While I was sorely tempted, using cassette tape for storage was slow and well, unsophisticated! I had no exposure to early Apple products or early CP/M-based systems.
In 1982, Timex-Sinclair advertised a home computer with a 30-day money-back guarantee, for under $100. Although I never intended to keep it, I wanted to see firsthand what it could (and couldn’t do). It used a TV as a terminal, used a cassette player/recorder, had a tiny keyboard, and a limited version of the BASIC programming language. I was not inspired!
The IBM PC was released in August of 1981, but I waited a full year to see how well it would be received, how many hardware add-ons would emerge, and what sort of sophisticated programming tools would become available. (After all, I really wanted my own PDP-11!) Eventually, in December of 1982, I put down $3,000 and bought a system with a monochrome (green) screen, 64K RAM, keyboard (with both upper- and lowercase letters), two (rather small-capacity) floppy disk drives, and a dot-matrix printer. It ran PC-DOS V1, and I wrote programs in the disk-based, advanced version of BASIC. In the year following, I added a color/graphics screen, complete with light pen. Eventually, I bought a letter-quality character printer, my first mouse, and much later my first laser printer, and of course, ever-faster modems.
My first non-trivial program was to write a simple terminal emulator that could be used to connect to other computers via a dial-up modem.
By then, I had applied for US permanent residency, and I knew that once I got it, I’d go into business for myself. But rather than wanting to be a generalist, I set out to identify a skill that might be the basis on which to launch my consulting career. That turned out to be the C programming language, and was an excellent choice; for the next 15 years, I rode that wave all the way to the top.
My first exposure to C was through the definitive textbook (known very affectionately as K&R) by Kernighan and Ritchie. Then I saw an ad for a Small-C compiler for the IBM-PC for only $35, and I ordered a copy. I was unpleasantly surprised on two fronts: first that compiler emitted assembly language code, and I had to buy the $100 assembler package to make an executable program. C’est la vie! Then when I tried to build the first program in the book, which used the library function printf to write out a welcome message, I got the error message, “No such function in the library.” Say what! As it happened, that was true—the $35 product supported only a subset of the library and language—and as that function happened to be the core for all simple input/output, I had to find a workaround. So before having learned much about the language, I had to use some of its advanced features to write a primitive version of printf, so I could start learning the basics! As they say, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going!”
[Of course, now that I was learning C, I’d just have to reimplement my library catalog program in that language, but that didn’t happen until after that library arrived in a container from Australia in late 1984.]
Initially, I used PC-DOS’s simple line-based editor for all program and text entry, but once I found a decent (and cheap) full-screen editor, I switched to that.
That first PC paid for itself many times over, and along with its successors helped me launch my writing (1983), consulting (June 1984), formal standards (December 1984), editing (January 1985), teaching (May 1985), and publishing (March 1989) businesses, all of which were built around C.
I progressed through the various versions of PC/MS-DOS, but didn’t dabble much with Windows until Windows NT came along. (The planets were truly aligned, as one of the principal architects of that operating system had worked on PDP-11 and other operating systems at DEC, and it showed, with many aspects of WinNT looking familiar to me from my DEC experience.)
Although I dearly loved that IBM-PC and its high-quality engineering, IBM went off on a tangent with respect to a more advanced system design, which didn’t get a mainstream audience. As such, I switched to a Compaq system, and once Dell entered the market, I bought their machines and still do to this day.
When I was a regular columnist for a software magazine, once DEC started shipping its 64-bit-based Alpha PC, I got a loaner machine for more than a year. On it I ran Windows NT and used it to research many columns and articles for publication and use in my seminar series.
As for owning my very own PDP-11, by the time I could afford one, that machine was a relic of the past and would cost too much to maintain, especially as a hobby system. By then, most of DEC’s customers had moved to VAX and, later, Alpha.
By the way, several years after I started traveling to Maine on a project (see later below), I convinced the client to buy me a Compaq luggable PC (the size of a portable sewing machine), so I could use that for their work both on- and off-site. In that capacity, I wrote a mildly sophisticated version of a word-processing system whose files could be processed on both the PC and the PDP-11. (It was based on the widely used runoff program.) Having this portable system also allowed me to work on my own PC-related projects during my personal time while on-site. Eventually, I bought my own luggable Compaq, which, back then, barely fit into an overhead luggage bin on a jet. And when I took it on small commuter flight planes, I carried it to the plane where it was placed in an external luggage hold.
The US Department of Agriculture; Suburban Maryland
After my whirlwind experience with a software vendor, I was ready for a change. So, I contacted Genasys, the company with whom I’d worked in Chicago, to see if they might have something for me to do. They did, so I went back to work for them. However, they swallowed hard when they realized they’d have to pay me more than three times what they had done four years earlier!
While they still had contracts with the US Department of Labor, they also provided IT staff to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and I was assigned to a project in Beltsville, MD, in suburban DC.
This was early in 1983, and while the IBM-PC had taken off, big time, and there were many so-called PC-compatible systems being shipped by a whole slew of vendors, many of those systems were not 100% compatible. And so it was with the one I used at USDA. In any event, after having “played” a lot with my own PC over the previous four months, I was ready to do some real work on one, and this was my chance.
I worked on two unrelated applications. The first was a spreadsheet, my first time using that kind of tool. And to make it really interesting, it was a 3-dimensional version. (Spreadsheets and indeed PCs in general had become popular partly through the use of VisiCalc, the first such program, released in 1979.) The second involved dBase II, which, in its time, was a very popular database product, and it had a rather sophisticated programming language. Most interesting was the fact that for a few hundred dollars, one could buy a copy of this program that, in many respects, had much more capability than the $40,000 database product I’d previously been working with on minicomputers.
With one of those two applications, I implemented a system to track grant money that was distributed by the USDA to a variety of recipients. I don’t recall the purpose of the other application. I worked there for about six months.
Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society (DECUS)
At one time, Digital Equipment Corporation was the second-largest computer company in the world. And as stated earlier in this series, it was the purveyor of my beloved PDP-11 minicomputers. As such, it operated worldwide, and in 1961, a computer users’ group, known as DECUS, for its products and services was created.
In December of 1979, while working in Chicago, I attended a US-DECUS conference in San Diego, CA, at which I presented a paper. At the time, these annual conferences were attended by many thousands of people. The events were so large that there were only a few meeting venues that could handle them. For a PDP-11 lover, it was great to hang out with all those like-minded nerds.
[There, I met a man who had recently cofounded the RSTS Professional magazine, and he was handing out sample copies of the first issue. Nearly five years later, I started writing a regular column for DEC Professional, another of his company’s publications. I also wrote several books for them.]
The following year, I attended another conference while I was working for Software AG. And while I attended a few more events of the US chapter, I somehow got connected with DECUS Canada. They held conferences twice each year, each lasting for three days, Tuesday through Thursday. Initially, I attended as a speaker, paying my own way. However, as I had started teaching seminars, I proposed to them that they offer paid seminars on Monday and Friday with me (and others) presenting. They did just that, which got me free admission to the conference and covered my travel expenses. We met in great locations: Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal in the east, and Vancouver, Banff, and Edmonton in the west. Their membership was much smaller than that of the US chapter, and being a very big country, people came from far and wide to meet experts and learn. In short, they were hungry! We had great social events, and the whole time was much more laidback than in the US meetings. I very much enjoyed it and saw some great parts of Canada.
Stay tuned for Part 3.