“I like to be fair about my salary, and that gives me $30,000 a year.”
“Okay,” said Hillard, “that’s cute.”
Brown wasn’t about to apply for welfare. On top of the $30,000 for consulting part of the time, he was enjoying income from sales of computer hardware. In short, he came across as successful and honest. And he may have been. Just the same, client and consultant were clearly mismatched.
Their downfall was a familiar kind—software problems.
You could customize the MDBS program in FORTRAN or BASIC. The earlier consultants, the ones with the large government contractor, had suggested FORTRAN. Brown himself was more familiar with that than with BASIC. And Stewart was convinced that FORTRAN would make the best use of software already purchased. So Brown went ahead with it despite three strikes against him:
1. The computer company’s FORTRAN, according to Stewart, was as badly botched as its hardware.[hardware.]
2. FORTRAN wasn’t as good as BASIC for micro data bases that stashed away English prose rather than mainly numbers. Another consultant was amazed when I told him that Brown had used FORTRAN in a data base storing newspaper stories. “You can use it if you like,” he said, “but you’ll lose something. It’s like trying to translate Hemingway into pidgin English.”
3. Brown was still basically a mainframer. And micro FORTRAN was different from the kind used at large military installations. Writing software for micros is like writing short stories instead of novels. You’ve got to be more elegant and get to the point faster. A micro’s memory simply lacks the capacity of a mainframe and brooks less sloppiness than would a larger machine. Many great novelists could never write decent short stories, and many first-class mainframers just couldn’t code cleverly or deviously enough for micros—couldn’t electronically trick them into thinking they were larger machines.
“What happened,” said Hillard, “is that we were paying for Brown’s training on how to use FORTRAN on a micro. He spent forty or fifty hours developing specifications for the data base and writing the code. This went on and on. Brown kept running into all these problems, and he could have cleared up some with just a quick call to the manufacturer.” Meanwhile, the money clock was ticking.
Several months later, thousands of dollars richer from those $30.02-hours, Brown threw up his hands. “This isn’t going to work in FORTRAN at all,” he said. “Maybe we should do this in BASIC.”