Fall 1995 - LifeUSA

After escaping Ameridata, I was without work for about a week before I got a tip about a gig: One of the tools I had used in my work was something called MicroFocus Cobol DIALOG SYSTEM. This was pitched as the power of COBOL (which truth be told, was actually very good at doing straight up transaction processing) with a graphic user interface. The way it worked was that you wrote your Cobol programs in text on the back end, and it worked just like any old mainframe. But instead of building a screen interface, you put in a single section to "call out" to a paired Dialog program: You built a graphic user interface in a different tool, and you had a single two-way pipe between your screen and your program logic. It was kludgey and you were definitely limited in how the program would operate - you collected the data on the screen, hit a button, and BAM it sent it to the back end where the real work happened. Then it passed the results back up the pipe, and you had your results on screen.

In other languages like VB, Powerbuilder, Delphi, etc, the logic was at the same layer as the screen code... but those tools were only just coming to the fore in the mid 1990s. For an number of years, Cobol and Dialog System was a very slick solution for the big corporate IT shop that was looking to leverage existing talent (years of Cobol programming), but modernize the user experience.

Having this on the resume was like having Java on your resume in 2000. It was HOT.

So I was out of work for a week, and then it was off to a project at a life insurance company LifeUSA - back to contracting. This was a local company, with a strong "ownership" culture - the employees were believers, the bosses were very out and about, and stock options were given freely. By the time it was finally sold in the late 1990s, there were more than a few millionaires made... across the organization. It was like Enron, only the business wasn't a sham and people actually made money.

I learned all of this in the course of the year I worked there, from Fall 1995 to Fall 1996 (when I was recruited to join ValueRX). Of course to start, I was not brought anywhere NEAR the company: Somehow I was put into a room with 3 other programmers, a classroom with tiered desks, a huge whiteboard, and four computers. In a low profile building in an office park 2 miles from the main campus. Our team included Eric, the chain smoker who only knew the back end Cobol parts, Steve, the young(er than me) geek who only knew the Dialog side, myself, who could bridge the gap, and Bob W.

Bob W (I don't often withhold names, but this guy...) was a programmer who I had run across at Ameridata: He had been working on Cobol reports for months and months, and suddenly had to leave due to a family emergency. I picked up his work, and discovered that he hadn't actually done much work, but that the work he HAD done was completely useless... and I rewrote them from scratch in a couple of weeks. My DAD had actually run across this guy's name in code HE had rewritten as well - the guy was a bad penny: If you saw his name on a program you were working on, you knew you were going to have to reach in, rip out the guts, and start from scratch.

So I'm on a new project, and somehow in the middle of this strange scene, I'm in an office with this guy again, who was all chummy chummy. He was supposed to be "the Architect" of the project, laying out the program logic that we were supposed to make happen. As it happened, he was around for maybe 2 hours a day, and out making phone calls the rest of the time. So Eric, Steve, and I whiteboarded the whole thing and got to work. After a few weeks, Bob stopped showing up entirely... and nobody asked us about it. But we suspected he was "reporting his progress" to the boss who was 2 miles away and never stopped by.

The project was a system to track Insurance Agent commissions against the draws they had taken. The data was complex, and we needed to calculate the value of the policy over time (commissions were paid at certain maturation times). Eric's coding was very tricky, and I actually learned some good tricks in the way he did things. We got along well even though his constant nicotine cloud was thicker than the haze inside of First Avenue. Steve, on the other hand, was a programmer who liked to make things complicated. He wrote elaborate error checking routines into the graphic front end that were unnecessary (validation could be done much faster and cleaner on the back end), and by the end of it, the screens were huge unwieldy affairs that pushed the very limits of the computers it was running on.

We had split our efforts because I had a hard time working with him: We were both young and convinced we were right - so he worked on one big screen, and I broke my half of the program into several smaller programs that handed control across as needed. Many small, simple programs that do their job well, versus one huge monster that crashed frequently. To be fair, his side DID work - and it behaved ALMOST like a Powerbuilder application would. But I would have done it completely differently.

We handed off version 1 to the client, who liked half of the program.... and wanted another project done. They gave me the whole project this time, and Eric and Steve were stuck working on Version 1.1 of the monster. Every so often I'd stop by to see Steve's handiwork. He was always defensive and I quickly learned not to comment on it in ANY WAY. We saw Bob W from time to time, and were never sure just what project he was working on.

Now, 2 months into the project, we were moved into the mothership: Goodbye remote facility with no privacy, hello cubicle. And it was here that I learned about the culture. For the most part, it was a pretty positive experience, especially after the slightly depressing start in corporate America at Ameridata and the Telephone Billing place. They had spirit days. People brought food to share. People went out to lunch together. It was at one of these spirit events that I witnessed the horror of one of the VPs cooking up RAW bratwurst as though they were pre-cooked. 3 minutes a side, soft and pink on the inside. I ate nothing but potato chips that day.

I was sitting in my cube one day in January 1996 when the Director of IS came by and asked "Have you met Mark? He likes music - you should go talk to him". So I wandered over almost immediately, met Mark Loesch, and we became immediate friends. A couple of weeks later, he invited me to his birthday party... but not being a particularly good listener, I came a week early. And we sat with a bottle of wine and knew that we were of the same tribe. The relationship with Mark was what brought me to ValueRx in the fall of 1996. On my other blog are more stories about Mark, who I miss every day since he died in 2007.

In the meantime, Mark and I were regular lunchmates, heading off the the "Cafetorium", where the neon sign promising "Fresh, Tender, Juicy Wieners" brought a laugh daily. There were other characters there as well: Mark's sister in law Molly was just beginning her programming career there. Our friendship there was wonderful, but by early summer, Mark had taken off to a new, mysterious gig, and I was stuck with the Cobol Guys.

Over on the "old Cobol Guy" side of the fence, a guy named Gene was never seen to be doing any actual work, but was always too busy to answer a question... and I overheard enough heated discussions about "Beany and Cecil" that I'm sure that once he left, he probably uploaded himself into the alt.tv.beany-and-cecil newsgroup and haunts it to this day. There was Tom, who resembled a pekinese, and wore clothes two sizes too tight - and vintage from the 1970s, which is when they were first bought. Another programmer, whose name is lost to time, had Solitaire up on his computer EVERY SINGLE TIME I WALKED BY.

I met more "Business Analysts" and was still none the wiser on exactly what their role in the organization was supposed to be. As I worked, I developed a work style to cope: Meet with the business analyst. Go to the client, review what the business analyst had told me, get the REAL requirements, and build according to the client's specs. This worked pretty well, until one of the analysts figured out I wasn't doing what he said. He tried to raise the issue with the client, but she was happy with my work. So he went to the project manager, who took him off the project, and put a different analyst in. Even today I have a suspicion of the pure "business analyst". They rarely understand what the client wants, nor what the developer can do. The best BAs I've worked with have a realistic view of their role. The worst actually believe they add value.

In addition to Bob W, there was one other "prize" coder at work at LifeUSA. One of the guys from the Telephone Billing gig was doing mainframe programming... and I was called in to finish his work on something when he was out for a week. I already told part of this story in another post, so you know that I fixed his 2 months of work in a few days.... and when he returned he wasn't very happy with me. But for a time, given my shared history, this guy, Eric the smoker, and I were friendly. It was in that time that Eric dropped perhaps the most crass line I've ever heard (outside of some of Phil's gems) - In talking about doing Y2K work for $70/hr, Eric paused and said "Man, for that kind of money, I'd blow dogs".

By the end of my year there, things were looking good: I had a good reputation, people wanted me on their projects... There was some tension with the Cobol Corps, but I didn't pay it much mind. In the early Fall, the IS Manager asked me into his office for a meeting.

He wanted me to consider dropping the contract, and coming on as an employee. He made the pitch for the culture, the people, the opportunities... but in the same breath he stressed something else which made me shudder: He wanted me to know that this was a slow moving place, and that I could expect a long, stable career there, but I'd need to slow my work down a bit, because I'm shaking up the team and people feel threatened by my work pace. We're a TEAM here, not a superstar shop, but it's a good family. So slow down, come on board, and I can have stability and an easy life.

I thanked him profusely for the offer, and within a week was interviewing with ValueRx.

Winter 1993 - The PPGs

By late 1992/early 1993 there was still a part of me that thought that a career in music was a possibility, and I crafted a plan: What I really needed was a decent mixing board, a multitrack ADAT, and a good effect unit. I came up with a budget of $6500 for the project, and approached my dad for a loan. This was actually the first time I had decided to ask: Up to then I'd been able to work and save for each piece of gear - $500 here, $1000 there. But a big investment like this... I needed some help. He gave the money willingly, though with the caveat that this is the last of it - what I did next would need to fund itself.

What happened next was absolutely brilliant and idiotic at the same time. Not one day after depositing those funds, I picked up the CityPages and saw in the classifieds "PPG Synth - Call for Details". I couldn't not call. The PPG. The legend.

The PPG was one of the first digital synths on the market in the early 1980s, but with an analog filter. It had a brittle, digital tone, but was very distinctive. The opening to "The Politics of Dancing" was very PPG. Most of Propaganda's "A Secret Wish" album was PPG. PPG was the sound all over Depeche Mode's "A Broken Frame". Nothing sounded quite like a PPG, and nothing still does. Plus, it was GERMAN, and RARE, and BLUE.

So I called. I was... I wasn't thinking. I had a plan for that money, I really did. But I called. And I went out to meet this guy.

He had a beautiful recording studio a block away from Paisley Park - he and his brother were a band I'd never heard of called "BroJo" (after "The Brothers Johnson" - but not the funky ones who worked with Quincy Jones). They got a recording contract and a big advance, plowed it into gear, and never went anywhere, and apparently started renting out their studio and gear to jingle artists. It was a gorgeous facility with just a hint of "starting to get run down" about it. And this guy was talking a mile a minute, too. He led me into the gear room, and I couldn't believe my eyes.

TWO PPG Wave 2.3 synths, a PRK FD Master Keyboard, AND a Waveterm B computer. This was the full PPG system worth well over $40,000 just 8 years earlier, a serious competitor to the Fairlight and Synclavier. And he had it all. And it all WORKED.

And I could take it all home for $6000.

Oh man. What a choice. Be responsible, get the Mackie 24/8 mixer, get the ADAT, get the Lexicon, actually have a studio where I could do more than "press play and lay it to DAT". Or blow the money on a dream synth system from 8 years earlier with a horrible reputation for reliability, manuals in German, and no support.

I don't need to tell you that I crammed that gear into the car, wrote him a check, and raced home, my mind full of justifications, of rationalizations, about how somehow just somehow, this gear would be JUST AS USEFUL in my long term plans as the recording gear... oh yes.... why did I even WANT that recording gear anyway? If I needed to, i could just rent time in a place like BroJo. Yeah, the music I'll be writing with this PPG system will be incredible. Plus, the gods must WANT me to have this, to have the ad appear RIGHT when I could afford it...

It was like Jack trading the cow for magic beans. And I knew the beans were magic. I had no regrets. My dad rolled his eyes. Pamela (my then-girlfriend, now wife) was excited by the blue things, and happy that I was happy.

I got a new Ultimate Support stand for the whole system, which rose up the wall, with one synth almost vertical. The glowing green screen of the Waveterm was comforting. I loaded up sample disks (5 1/4" floppies) and heard sounds I had heard before on records - very distinctive choirs and strings, punchy drums, and a stand up bass that was very very playable. I had a wonderful month with them - recorded several songs with the PPG as the main sound source, got to know their inner workings....

But the bloom was coming off the rose just a bit: The PRKFD didn't actually do anything that the manual said it did. All it did was send Midi notes. You could click the keypad all you wanted, and it wouldn't change what it did. The Waveterm was actually a user-hostile system, that despite having a full screen, still insisted that you communicate with it using unlabeled "soft keys" that changed function depending on the screen, and used cryptic acronyms (of GERMAN terms) for everything. I never got it to do several key things... like sample, or sequence. It let you build your own waveforms and wavetables, but everything I made sounded either like a flute, or a flute through a distortion pedal.

And then they started failing. It was a mere 6 months into ownership when one of the Waves decided to go dark. I brought it to The Good Guys, my repair shop, and 2 weeks and $250 later, it was fixed. A blown capacitor. 3 months later, the OTHER wave went dark. The Good guys fixed it. And so it went for the next 4 years: Every four-six months, one or the other would fail, and the Good guys would get $250 (or more) to fix it. They got over $2000 of my money that way, those crafty PPGs. And you really couldn't argue it.

Alas, I knew this going in: The PPG was a notoriously unreliable beast: They failed Depeche Mode in concert. Everybody who had one needed another for a hot spare. The inside was basically a computer with three big cards plugged into it, and the cards came loose over time - it was common to drop a PPG to reseat the cards! It was like having british sports car - a rich man's folly.

After the PPGs, there really wasn't anywhere I could go with the vintage gear - maybe a Fairlight... but that would have been at least $4k back then, and my money was spent. The PPGs were the last hurrah of my vintage phase. I had everything I could have wanted - a Jupiter 8, a Linndrum, a Simmons SDS7 kit, a TX816, a PPG system, a MemoryMoog, an OB8, and the Rhodes Chroma... And it was all running through my Mackie line mixers, sequenced by my Mac, using Performer...

It was a good setup, and I wrote a hell of a lot of music with it. And by 1998 when the studio fell, I had got my money's worth out of the gear. The PPGs wound up selling for a bit more than I paid in 1993, but less if you factor in all of the repairs - I think it was $7500 all told, and they had recently been serviced, so I hope the owner got some good use out of them. I'm sure the Good Guys knuckled back a tear...

In 2000, Wolfram Franke of Waldorf (which continued the PPG tradition) created a "Virtual PPG" plug in for the computer. And to my ears it sounded amazing - JUST like the PPG I remembered. And the PPG sound appeared again in a lot of my music... for a while. But it kept refusing to blow a capacitor, and it only cost $400 total, and I never had to drag it to the Good Guys... so the experience wasn't completely authentic.

As a coda, I decided to look up BroJo, and the only mention out there is "Three Charged in Hazardous Waste Fire - BroJo Sound Studios" under the category "Disaster - Fire" in the annals of the Carver County Historical Society. I don't think it's worth the $3 for the article reprint however...

Summer 1996 - The Awesome Denouement

I have to stick with linear just long enough to give the payoff on the Hip Clips Music story, because it was awesome.

In Spring 1995, as Hip Clips was failing to take the world by storm, Paul was being a good internet citizen, participating in various discussion boards (not astroturfing, just being online) and wound up chatting with a certain celebrity about Windsurfing. And after a while, the two became net-friends, and Paul was invited out to Half Moon Bay California to do some Windsurfing, and some talking...

And that was how it came to be that Thomas Dolby asked Paul to join him at his Silicon Valley startup company Headspace. As a part of this, Hip Clips was "acquired" by Headspace. No, there wasn't any actual money in this, but at this point I was just happy for Paul, so I signed away the rights. And Paul and his wife Melissa up and moved to California. JUST LIKE THAT.

Working for a man who I had somewhat idolized as a synth god in the 1980s... It just seemed so wonderful.

Of course, in those early days, Headspace was sort of struggling to find a place in the world - for a few years it got by being "Thomas Dolby's Company" - Paul did some soundtrack work for videogames under the Headspace banner... but it was more of a services company than a big product idea.

In early 1996, that changed when Headspace acquired a pretty cool browser plug-in called "Igor": The idea of Igor was to be a standard midifile player with a twist: You load in your own sounds. So we were approaching MORE bandwidth, but still nowhere near as much as if you were streaming actual music. A Midifile is maybe 4k in size, and the initial Igor download was I think 4 meg, which was as much memory as most professional synthesizers were providing as standard. So you could start with a good basic sound set, and then if you "sonified" your website with Igor, you could also specify custom samples to be downloaded into the player for your own sound. They called it "Rich Media Format" RMF files.

So after you bit the bullet and installed Igor (and it was available on those CD-Roms on the cover of magazines, don't forget), you could get a pretty good sounding bit of music going with a less than 100k download (10-20 sec on dialup), music and samples. It was a cool concept, which was ultimately doomed by the ever cheapening bandwidth that allowed for real streaming music without the gimmick, but for a few years, it was pretty unique. They refocused the whole company around this plug in, renamed themselves "Beatnik", and ran with it.

I know I know - we'll get to the ME part of the story now.

As they were preparing Igor for launch in Summer 1996, they wanted some demo files to show it off. They had the music licenses to Hip Clips already, and Paul knew I had the source files. So in what I'll call "the easiest money ever" (as long as you don't factor in the hours and hours of work that went into the ORIGINALs), Headspace paid me $100 per file to deliver the source midi files so they could repurpose them into Igor.

The catch is that I did need to do some prep work on the files: A lot of the drum tracks weren't mapped to traditional voices, since they were triggering my ancient strange pieces of equipment, not standard midi boxes. But once I got into the "cleanup" mindframe, the whole project was done in a few weeks, and they cut me a check for $4000.

But that's not the good part. The good part is that in Summer of 1996, I finagled a visit out to Headspace in San Mateo and got to hang out with Paul in Silicon Valley in the middle of the Tech Boom. As we walked the streets of San Mateo, there were shiny BMWs lined up like it was a dealership - every 25-year old in the area was flush with money, and were spending it as quickly as possible...

And while I was visiting, I got to spend a few minutes talking with Thomas. I tried to geek bond on a few technical things, but as it can be with professionals who lived through a time, he seemed mildly relieved to NOT have to be using some of those old synths, and was especially pleased with his brand spanking new Yamaha QY700 all in one synth/sequencer/groovebox. I grinned and rolled with it.

I did, however, get to pet his not-turned-on Fairlight CMI Series 3. That was some legendary tech.

And I heard tell that it was around 2003 when he finally got around to trying out his Fairlight again, and started playing some of his old tracks again, rediscovering his love for the gear once more. But that's his story, not mine.

By 1998, just about everyone was getting DSL, and the need for a tool like Igor (now the Beatnik plugin) was pretty much non-existent - the people who cared about a quality audio experience were buying the bandwidth, and the people who didn't stayed with dialup and didn't care about having music on their websites. Beatnik did a few re-focusing moves, partnering with Nokia to port the technology to mobile phones, and somehow getting into the custom ringtones market, but by then Paul had moved on...

It was a wonderful payoff to the Hip Clips adventure to finally get some money, some schmoozing with a hero, and some impossibly good Thai food as well. Paul never did come back to Minnesota, and I never did move out to California to find a pot of gold.

Fall 1994 - Hip Clips

You kids may not believe me on this, but in the early to mid 1990s there was an explosion of rich content playing on computers - animated menus, interactive stories, cool video clips on demand, funny animations... But it wasn't on the internet. No, there was a big market for interactive CD-Roms back then. Magazines were putting CDs on their covers. There were CDRom magazines you could subscribe to. Of course Games were on CD, but so were corporate presentations.

And the backbone for a lot of this development was a product called MacroMedia Director. Director has since been wrapped into the thing we all now know as Flash, and is sold by Adobe. But in 1994, if you wanted to be a king of new media, you dropped the $1200 on a license of Director, and you needed a pretty powerful machine to run it - we're talking at LEAST 40mhz CPU, and preferably 8 meg of ram. Yes, that is MHZ not GHZ. And it's MEG not GIG.

By 1999, almost all of this type of content was being delivered by the Web, with Broadband connections growing in popularity. But in 1994, one of the best selling CDRoms was from the San Diego Zoo, a virtual tour with short, tiny, embedded video clips.

Cards on the table: I was not a visionary here. I came along for the ride. All credit goes to Paul Sebastien, who called me up and asked me to help him with a project. Paul spotted the trend and connected some dots: People are making interactive CD Roms. No matter what your content is in there, you are probably going to have a menu or two or three, plus a splash screen. And what says "multimedia experience" better than music? GOOD sounding music?

CDRoms were the breakthrough over Floppies because they offered a crazy 650meg of content - bigger than many hard drives at the time. And games delivered on floppies were limited to 2 meg or so. The music on games and presentations at that point was "Midi Files" - this was basically a musical score that the sound card in your computer would play back. They usually sounded tinny and terrible, and never sounded the same from computer to computer. But storage wise, they were very economical. And the Web of the era was also limited to these Midi files too, and forget about video!

Paul figured with the huge storage size of a CD Rom, people could actually put REAL music on there. But few people in 1994 would have access to high quality license-free music. And at the time, the competition was very high priced "industrial music" companies, who did canned music for corporate films - each track would cost between $10-100. Paul's vision was FIFTY great, loopable pieces of music in 5 different styles for $150 (I think) - $3 a track, in high, medium, and low quality versions for inclusion in your project, license free.

But Paul needed some help: This was still in the days of Psykosonik, and he was having some degree of writer's block on their third album... any music coming from his brain would need to be dedicated to his actual BAND. So he asked me to join him and be "the music guy", and Paul would be the Macromedia Director guy, plus the marketing. That division of labor worked for me: We did some basic numbers modeling, and hopefully this would bring me somewhere around $10,000 in the first few months if all went to plan. The upside could be incredible. Of course there would be no up-front compensation, but I had a day job, so that wasn't that big of a hurdle for me.

For 3 months, I wrote music like a madman, laid it to DAT, and drove to his townhouse in Plymouth to play tracks and see how the project was coming along. The styles were Slow Groove, Midtempo, Upbeat, Ambient, and Hyper. In the end, I think we scaled back from 50 to 40, because I was beginning to burn out a little and the user interface looked good with 8 buttons per style. 40 completely distinct 1 minute pieces of produced music is a bit much for even a maniac like me. And I was obsessed with making each one really sound DIFFERENT, unlike some libraries we had found where it was really only 4 actual compositions, but sliced and diced 5 ways each. So for each track, it was a blank slate: I picked a tempo/style, and started writing.

Paul learned more and more about Director, but the application had mysterious crashes, and despite having a simple interface, would crawl to a halt on many systems. Again, this was new territory - CD Roms were hard to make compatible with every system, and you had to put a lot of "sensing" code in to see exactly what hardware landscape it was to interact with... Things we take for granted in the web world now.

Also recall my writing style during this era: Twirl the knobs, hit record, and move ON. I was still using Performer, and the sounds on this project were heavily weighted to the Jupiter 8, The SY77, The Oberheim OB8, the Juno106, LinnDrum, Simmons SDS7, and TX816 So each of these songs was truly a moment in time captured. There was no easy way to go back and recreate one if we wanted to change it a little... I delivered these "AS-IS", and Paul was very accommodating, really. And sitting with him in his austere, beautiful studio listening to my tracks was a very fun experience, because he wasn't shy about handing out the compliments. I felt very good about this project.

When the CD was finally ready for market, it was months later... and you probably don't need to be told it didn't sell all that well. I think several dozen all told. But it was alone in its genre, so it could actually be said to be the "best selling" of its type, which helped Paul down the road....

This experience was also my first encounter with... astroturfing. Since we didn't have much money, we couldn't take out a full page ad in the back of Mondo2000 magazine. We tried to spread "word of mouth" via various internet bulletin boards and usenet forums. But even back then, there were pretty strict "no selling" policies in these user communities, so Paul and I logged in as "normal people who had bought Hip Clips and really liked it". Of course, how suspicious is it that you have a user just join the forum and the first and last thing he posts is mention of a product he likes? Yeah.

I confess I only did a few of them because I felt guilty about it. But Paul went to town on it - I think he had 3 dozen different AOL accounts at one point, posting accolades for our product. Not that it worked THAT well, but hey, we sold a few.

In the end, I never got any actual cash from the venture: Paul went into debt getting the CDs printed with cases, and he had to pay off the Director software as well. But he did give me one of his pieces of gear as sort of a "sorry this didn't work out" sort of gift, and music junkie that I was, that was actually JUST FINE with me. Plus, I got 40 pieces of music done. I only wish I had thought to make each one a full piece of music, because I really really like these pieces even today, and want them to go longer than 60 seconds. Plus it proved that Paul and I were a pretty good team, which would come in helpful in our ventures in the in the new century... but that's another story.