Forgotten Voice

In August 1981 IBM surprised the world by launching the IBM 5150 Personal Computer. The product was developed in Boca Raton by an Independent Business Unit run by Don Estridge set up to play by different rules from the rest of IBM. Estridge decided early that to be successful and to meet deadlines, the group had to stick to the plan: using tested vendor technology; a standardized, one-model product; open architecture; and outside sales channels for quick consumer market saturation. The development team was staffed by a small group of engineers from Mike Davis’s old Series One team. The plan was outstandingly successful. The product team’s biggest problems were growing the manufacturing and delivery capability and dealing with phone calls from IBM teams that wanted to be part of the action.

The solution to the problem of dealing with the rest of IBM was to create a department in Boca Raton (actually in Delray Beach) staffed with assignees whose job it was to coordinate the work of the IBM Entry Systems Division with the work of other product divisions. In 1983, I was sent on a six month assignment to Boca with my young family. My wife was expecting our third child while we were there. The IBM assignment process was well oiled and the tasks of finding a home, a car, a physician and a pre-school for our oldest boy went with barely a hitch. We were, however inexperienced with the ways of American car salesmen and were somewhat taken for ride. After the event, we read a book on buying used cars in America which embarrassingly revealed our mistakes.

IBM Hursley was to develop the next generation of displays and display adapters to enable the IBM PC to meet Big-Blue standards and requirements, which were rather tougher than the standards met by the standard IBM PC. For example, Big-Blue standards demanded bigger screens, more pixels and bigger keyboards than those supported by the IBM PC, although, as it turned out, most customers didn’t seem to care one way or the other. I was given an office in a typical modern American office block in Delray Beach, with a PC on which was loaded an IBM 3270 emulator with which I could log on to my VM account in Hursley.

During the fall, South Florida is regularly crossed from West to East by lines of thunderstorms and we were used to the daily afternoon downpours. One day, the downpour started at about 9:00am and by lunchtime, the parking lot was filling with water. An announcement was made over the public address system that the site was closing and that everyone was to go home. When I reached my car, the water was higher than the door sill and I feared that I was stuck. However, my car was an AMC Concord, made on the same production line as Jeeps. The engine started first time and while others remained stuck I was able to slowly edge the car out of the flood. By pure accident, the mistake we had made buying that car turned out to have been a good decision after all.

In November, I was sent on a business trip to IBM Kingston in upstate New York. My wife and children came with me to experience a different side to America. After the oppressive heat of Florida my wife relished the nip of the cool clear autumn air and the remains of the woodland colours. We had rented a house in a new development west of Boca and owned by a local IBMer as a buy-to-let investment. Air conditioning was essential but it almost caused a fire. Around Christmas 1983, Florida experienced a rare frost, which damaged much of the Florida orange crop. Our air conditioning system automatically switched from cooling to heating. We were shocked to find burning bits of paper issuing from the air conditioning vents. The installer had failed to remove the packaging on the heating elements! Fortunately, nothing was damaged.

I took a week’s vacation around the New Year and took the family to Orlando to visit Disney World and Epcot. It was a quiet week in Orlando and with the help of a guidebook to Disney World we were able to enjoy all the rides we wanted, without waiting in line for very long.

Living in America was certainly a learning experience, not least in the conversations I had over lunch with colleagues. I learned about the gun culture and about how guns were believed to be the last line of defence against a real risk of a repressive and dictatorial Washington government. I learned that it’s OK to talk about money and politics with an American in a way that you would not risk even with your friends in the UK. I learned that many Americans are deeply committed to their local communities and charitably support them in a way that is rare in Britain. I came to admire the values of entrepreneurship, self-reliance and community responsibility on which the USA was founded, while continuing to be repelled by some of the uglier features of the American way of life, such as the outright avarice of some and the inhumanity of others to their fellow human beings. I learned that many British prejudices about America and Americans were at best oversimplifications and at worst gross misrepresentations of the truth.

While nearly all of my American colleagues were extremely friendly, welcoming and helpful, particularly those born and bred in Florida, I experienced a little national prejudice from two disgruntled IBM old-timers who still seemed to think that the American War of Independence was in progress. These old-timers were also unhappy with the IBM PC which they thought violated IBM’s ways of doing business. Even the multi-coloured IBM PC logo was a source of irritation and incredulity. It takes all sorts to make a world.

Some of the people I met in Boca had participated in the Space Shuttle program. They had interesting tales to tell. Some had participated in a project to create a workstation for the US President to “manage a global nuclear war” although I was assured that the President had less direct control of events than he might suppose. I was taken to see the prototype. IBM later sold that business.

A few weeks after we returned from assignment, I was in Bob Avgherinos’s office in G Block when the call came that my wife was in labour. At the age of 29 my young family was very soon complete.