Friday, March 2, 2018

I Got Hired by Synex Systems

After working with Synex as a contractor from DataSense / Escom, I switched jobs to Synex Systems to become their Development Manager for PK Harmony and the PC Harmony products.

Synex was an interesting company.  One of the key people at Synex was Chris Graham.  In addition to terminal emulators, they were writing add-ins for Lotus 1-2-3.  They had a couple of Compaq luggable computers.  Below is a video clip of someone demonstrating one.



Murray my boss told me of going on a trip. Back in the day the airlines didn't let you take a computer as carry-on, so he had to check them in. He was telling the person beside him, in the window seat, about his concern that his computers would be OK, when the guy looked out the window and told him "I think your computers just fell 5 feet off the conveyor onto the tarmac!"  When he got them back to the office, he re-seated the boards in them, turned them on. One needed a new monitor and both cases were wrecked, but both ran just fine. Those Compaqs were truly rugged!

You could also get them with a built-in acoustic coupler, so you could put the phone receiver into it and dial up another computer.

Back to add-ins for Lotus 1-2-3.  You could only write them in Assembler, which was a pretty slow way to program.  There was a special piece of hardware call an Antron Probe, that would mount over the CPU chip. It would track all instructions going through the CPU and could back-trace these for you.  Chris took one of the luggables home for the weekend and reverse-engineered every entry point into DOS that Lotus 1-2-3 called, creating back-traces in assembler.  He then figured out how to hook a C program in.  Productivity for Lotus add-ins was immediately improved!

Chris later went on to be Director of Interoperability for Microsoft, and was a key contributor to Windows 3.0. The Easter Egg that listed Bill Gates and all the other key contributors listed Chris along with the others.

I also recall seeing a complete IBM BIOS assembler listing when I was still consulting there.  The draw was irresistible!  I had to work there!

It didn't take long for me to get my first Mark Williams C compiler. I poured through the Kernighan and Ritchie book, and went through the PC Harmony C and Assembler code.  I was hooked!

This was a time when it was possible to have a grasp of what was happening from your software right down to the hardware, before computers turned into onions with many layers.  You could order a set of Intel developer manuals and they'd ship them to you for free.  The first manuals were about 3 or 4 volumes, but over time they've grown. The last hard-copy ones I ordered were about 6 volumes and today you get them electronically. They are 10 volumes, but since they are electronic, they'll let you download them as 4 massive volumes instead.  I've always felt that the ability to visualize what is happening at different layers of a multi-layered, even distributed, application, is key to being able to architect, design and troubleshoot it.

At one point, I got to use a Compaq luggable that we called the "brick".



In addition to DOS, it had this cool new graphical Microsoft program called Windows 286.  It would do CGA graphics on the monochrome amber monitor.  It could also dual-boot into IBM's equivalent to DOS called OS/2 which had its own graphical component called Presentation Manager.

It was a really cool time to be working with computer software, and I was having a blast!

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