Doug Ross @ Journal

Tales of Alpha

There were a lot of benefits to working for a mass-market software company. Some of them were obvious. And some weren't.

The obvious ones probably apply to a fair number of companies. If you wanted to wear a T-shirt and shorts, you did it. If you needed to show up at 11am and work until 9pm, you did it. If you wanted to write a quick program to help with ordering the pizza, you did it.

But some of the benefits weren't so obvious. They were... well, simply, good karma. One day I received this email, which was sent to the entire company.

To: *ALL From: Peter E Subject: Re: ted Date: 10/02/92 Time: 2:39p by popular demand more on..... Ted "$72000.00 dollar man " We made his wifes day. He made an pplication for thier girl scout troop. His application is a run time for the state of tennessee. I believe the application was for the state school system. A year and a half ago he was a mechanic. Now he is an Alpha applications programmer. We also made his kids year. This year his kids will have christmas. Next year his family will have a house. Hats off to all for helping this man with his new life. peter "proud to be on the team" e...

Ted had created an application for the state and had negotiated a $72,000 license fee using the Alpha run-time engine, which allowed distribution of applications. That was probably one of the better holiday seasons at Alpha.

Bad karma days? I remember one vividly. We had a product for a while called "AlphaWorks" [1], which Cian and another developer had spearheaded. It was a very good product, back in the days of DOS. And it even got a PC Mag Editor's Choice Award in the late 80's or early 90's, tying Microsoft Works.

The company had cut a deal with some low-budget computer firm to bundle AlphaWorks with each computer. The computer was sold on a home shopping TV network with a very, very hard-sell. My guess is the computer company was a fly-by-night operation, because if you received a computer from them, the only phone number you could find in the entire boxed system was... yes, Alpha Software's 800-number on the AlphaWorks manual.

How do I know this? Funny you should ask, friend. I happened to show up at the office on December 26th. I was new to the company and didn't know that day was a holiday. So there was no one there. Ghost town. The phone rang - on night ring, so it echoed throughout the building. It was quite loud and annoying, so I picked it up. This was maybe 9am.

"Alpha Software". Now you need to voice-over a hillbilly [2] accent here.

"Ah jest bought mah comm-pewter and Ah turned it on an' it jest sez Cee". This was in the days of DOS prompts. When you powered on a computer, it did just say "C>".

"Well, sir, we don't make the computer, you'll have to call the "D" company." After several minutes of disentangling myself from this hilljack's situation *, I managed to hang up. NIGHT RING. NIGHT RING.

"Alpha Software, can I help you?".

"Ah jest get me a comm-pewter, when the TV part comes on, it jest sez Cee. What do ah do now?"

Imagine an entire day filled with those calls and you have a good idea how I spent much of 12/26 that year. After a while, fifteen or so calls just like those, I made my home-brew, prison-style earplugs (use warm water, toilet paper and a patient rolling motion) and got back to work.

I don't know if the D company was a mob "bust out" operation or what. But I do know their tech support was nowhere to be found that day. And that's probably how they planned it.

[1] AlphaWorks ended up getting sold to Lotus and it became... drum roll... can you guess... no, the suspense is killing me... hold it... hold it... LotusWorks. Genius! That's gold, Gerry, pure gold! Not sure what happened to it, but the librarian at the Lotus Division of IBM may be able to tell us. IBM must have also purchased the AlphaWorks name, because I believe that's used by one of their mainstream developer sites.

[2] I'm licensed to use and mock hillbilly accents as I've technically been accused of being one. Peace out.