After moving out of Sherborn I rented a room a few blocks from the Shell station in Weston, from an older woman whose husband had been an airline executive. He had died before they could realize the house they had planned together, and she had used his life insurance money to build it herself — for both of them, in his memory. It was a remarkable house. My room was lined with built-in storage and cedar closets. She had added a large living room with a fireplace, a 2-car garage with a loft, and converted the cellar into a complete separate living area. All the equipment and furniture were of the highest quality. It was a genuinely wonderful place to live.
Tag Archives: 1976
Looking for Work
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.
Lamar’s Business Schemes
Before I found the programming job there was another business I was reluctantly drawn into considering, and it started with a customer named Lamar.
How I Approached Programming
From the beginning I wanted to do application programming because I felt my business experience from running the gas station gave me something most programmers did not have — a real understanding of how businesses actually worked and what they needed from software. That was where my interest was and where I thought I could contribute most.