While I was still running the station I had wanted to buy a computer to improve the business — not just for bookkeeping, but to track car maintenance services by time and mileage, send reminders to customers when an oil change or tuneup was due, and build the kind of systematic customer relationship that would grow the business over time. I did buy an address-making machine and tried to build a manual file system to do some of this, but it was slow and labor-intensive. Any computer, even the smallest PDP-11, was too expensive at the time.

When I started looking for work as an application programmer I felt I had a strong case — business experience running a real company, combined with a solid understanding of computers and programming from my time at MIT and Honeywell. What I found instead was that 5 years of running a gas station had made me invisible to the computer industry. No one would look past it. They assumed I knew nothing about computers and would not even consider me for an interview. Digital, Honeywell, and companies like them would not let me in the door.

I enrolled in night programming classes at Framingham State College, taking Fortran, Cobol, and Basic. The professors teaching those evening courses were working professionals in the industry, and they knew a good student when they saw one. Several of them offered to write recommendations for me. It helped, but not enough to get me through the front door at the larger companies.

Then I heard about a job fair at a hotel in the area and went. One of the companies there was Modcomp Business Systems. Modcomp made minicomputers that ran primarily scientific applications, but they had recently opened a new division developing ordering and inventory control software for wholesale distribution companies — a business application, exactly the kind of work I was looking for. An application manager named Kent Bradley interviewed me, recognized what I could bring to the role, and took a chance on me.