- Apollo
- Technology and the world
- Esso Business Systems
- Exxon to Oglethorpe
- Software development
- Management trends
- Era observations
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Technology and the world
Apollo was an electric piece of the wider world during the early part of the Wild West era, which included events like the Beatles, the Vietnam War, flower children, antiwar protests, President Richard Nixon and Watergate, and rising inflation. While the global geopolitical and social changes were significant, business leaders continued much as before. The economy was hit by oil crises in 1973–1974 and 1979, whose major impacts included rapid wage and price inflation, which slowed business growth. The combination of these conditions inspired the term stagflation. Retail sales sank, and corporate profit margins suffered.
Some big businesses suffered. In particular, manufacturing titans like General Motors and Ford lost ground to European and Japanese car makers, whose vehicles offered both higher mileage ratings and lower costs. But there was another emerging trend. New companies like Apple (1976), Starbucks (1971), Microsoft (1975), and Nike (1964) showed smaller, nimble companies might have a future.
The 1950s had laid the groundwork for 50 years of corporate myopia. The economy boomed, people had jobs, prosperity seemed inevitable, and the future appeared to stretch out into a grand undertaking (unless, of course, you were female, BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color], LBGTQ+, or a person with a disability). Corporate executives planned for the future as if the progression was predictable and linear. Some things did change, however, so businesses had to adapt, but within acceptable limits. This assumption of predictability infused everything from business planning to project management. “Plan the work and Work the plan” was the corporate mantra. This predictability and internal focus led to trends like management by objectives (MBO) and cost and schedule as the primary objectives of project management. Even into the mid-1980s, big corporations had large planning departments.
In the late 1960s and all of the 1970s, IBM dominated the mainframe business computer market. Prior to that time, IBM offered different lines of computers depending on how much processing power a customer required. Unfortunately, these computers, which had designations like 1620 and 7064, were incompatible, so upgrading from one size to the next was difficult and expensive. The IBM 360/30, released in 1964, was the first of the 360 series of computers having, among many innovations, a common operating system. Magnetic tape drives provided external storage for these early systems.
Beginning in the 1970s, IBM began delivering random-access disk drives with its 360 computers. A small configuration of 2314 disk drives, with 146 MB of storage, sold for $175,0004 (today that much storage would cost about ½ cent, not adjusting for inflation). Commensurate with the development of disk drives, IBM introduced an early database management system, called Information Management System (IMS). Random-access drives and IMS introduced new complexity, and new opportunities, into software development.
The rise to prominence of minicomputers began in the 1970s and extended into the 1980s, led by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which released the PDP-8 in the late 1960s. DEC developed ever more powerful minis, driving Data General, another major manufacturer, to release its Eclipse superminicomputer in 1980. The intense development effort of the Eclipse was documented in a Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine (1981). Still, IBM mainframe computers dominated business computing during this entire era.
Interactions with computers during this time were primitive and impersonal (as illustrated in Figure 1.5). Large mainframe computers resided in specially constructed rooms with raised floors, overhead wire bins, and serious air conditioning.5 Computer operators input card decks, mounted and dismounted tape and disk drives, and gathered and distributed printouts. Because disk storage was so expensive, most systems used a combination of storage forms—magnetic tape for high-volume data, disks for lower-volume data. Online, time-sharing systems were available on minicomputer systems using Unix and some mainframes, but were primarily reserved for academic and engineering applications.
Software was poorly understood by business executives. They could see the mammoth computers, but the software was hidden. In addition, most of the vendor-supplied software during this time was included in the price of the hardware—software appeared to be free!
WANTING TO DESIGN and build rather than audit, I quit Pan Am and relocated to Saint Paul, Minnesota, to work for Univac Federal Systems Division, which manufactured computers for the Navy and Apollo ships. I was involved in designing gates and registers for computers and early communication modem design. After two engineering jobs, I began to see myself as more a generalist than a specialist and decided to pursue an MBA degree, attending night school at the University of Minnesota for the prerequisite accounting and economics courses. I had anticipated the cold weather in Minnesota but driving to work one morning, after hacking ice off the car windows, with a windchill of minus 78 degrees proved too much. Having braved the cold for one winter, I decided to high-tail it out of there.
Back to the warmth of the South in Tampa, I graduated with a master of science in management degree from the University of South Florida in 1970. For my master’s project, I developed a simulation application for analyzing barge traffic from Tampa to ports along the Mississippi River. While I was working as an intern for a local company, the model proved useful, and managers were pleased with the results. The simulation utilized a package called the General-Purpose Simulation System (GPSS). This software was new, so none of my professors could help. I learned how it worked from incomplete manuals and trial and error. Since this was still the punch card and printout era, with slow turnarounds, I spent many evenings in the school computer center. However, there was a flaw in my analysis, which one of the managers caught in my final presentation. One of the data tables contained bad data, throwing off the final results a bit. The bad data was given to me, but I should have been more diligent in reviewing it. In projects to follow, I made sure someone on the team was as detail oriented as I was big picture oriented—I sought to ensure the team had the diversity of skills required to do the work and optimize team performance.