Stewart spent $31,000 on a computer and soon was suffering defective circuits and junky software. He paid a secretary to cram almost a million words of newspaper articles into the machine’s hard-disk memory, but it still couldn’t fetch facts as easily as he’d hoped. Then the data-base program, the one he was using to store facts and juggle them around, crashed—apparently overwhelmed by the volume of data. Micro data bases at the time, the early 1980s, couldn’t easily handle big hunks of text. Stewart couldn’t retrieve whole articles.
It was time for a consultant. A good consultant (the “Who”) theoretically could write or install a new program (the “What”) in an effective way (the “How”), justify his actions (the “Why”), and ideally do everything at a reasonable price (the “How much”) before the data base grew too unwieldy[unwieldy] (the “When”). Stewart wanted him working on his own premises (the “Where”) as much as possible so he could supervise him.
“Our first consultant lasted all of four days,” Stewart said. “He was abrasive, nasty, and didn’t know what he was doing. One of our staffers was so frustrated trying to work with him that she wept. We’d hired him because he was a friend of a friend and said, ‘I’m a computer programmer. I can fix it for you.’ We never quite could pin him down about his background. We were so burned that for five or six months we put off hiring another consultant.
“And when we did get one,” said Stewart, “we wanted a solid, established firm.”
So he went to a government contractor headquartered in an imposing building, the size of a small public library. The consultants even owned the same-model computer that Stewart’s company did.
Unfortunately, however, they were using different software for much different purposes. Stewart’s needs were new to them.
“Look at MDBS,” Hillard recalls telling the contractor. “It really looks like a good package.”
But he says the consultants told him they hadn’t even heard of it.
That in itself might have been a tipoff that Stewart had hired the wrong people for the job. MDBS stood for Micro Data Base Systems. Ads and reviews about it had appeared in Byte and other prominent publications of the micro world.
With the clock ticking away at up to $35 an hour, the consultants searched for data-base software meeting Stewart’s detailed specifications. “Three weeks later,” Hillard said, “they handed me a bill for $2,500 and said, ‘The package you need to use is MDBS.’ I said, ‘Where is the work, where are the hours in relationship to the $2,500 bill?’ It went around in circles.” Stewart and Hillard must have remembered the old saying that a consultant borrows your watch to tell you the time of day and then charges you for it.