IBM Rockville

IBM won a contract from British Telecom (THE telephone co in England) to finally collect the data to provide the customer with an itemized monthly bill. At the time, all the customer got was a "You owe us" bill.  IBM was one of three contractors to win $20 million to build a prototype. Then, two of the three were to be awarded the contract to install their version in half of England. IBM was bidding the Series/1 computer, in 1983, late in its life cycle.

The contract was already over budget before TechLanCo joined the project.  More than half the programmers were contractors, a sure sign of panic. So during the following year and a half, another maybe $5 million over budget was spent. Near the end, work was running out, so we spend part of the day at MCI, part and Network Solutions, and part at the Kuwait Embassy (see other entries).

We had been hired because we knew the EDL interpretive (then) language. Our first assignment was to learn the assembly language and write a start-up program so they could begin testing the program parts already completed. The Series/1 computer was different than the prior 9 computers in that it was not based on a fixed word size. So some instructions were 2 bytes, some 4 bytes and some 6 bytes long. No problem. They had their startup program in about 2 weeks. Then back to the EDL problem of building a program with a small table that would allow the Operator to schedule the pickup of data from other Series/1 computers on any half-hour increment any time within the 24 hour day.