THE STORY OF MY LIFE WITH STRATUS COMPUTER INC.

A Letter to Bill Foster
Dear Bill. With joy and much delight I have read the Stratus part at http://www.teamfoster.com/ I was wondering about myself, why it took me so long, to discover your story which I could be a very small part of for some years. Your website gave me deep insight in your personal development and feelings you and your family went through in the seventies. The open words you found for writing down the true story hopefully will motivate entrepreneurs and startups worldwide to get started with their own ideas and stay on track up to the point where they find prove they are wrong and adjust plans and continue. If all money got burned you can still get a decent job in a decent company, right? Ok you need to have acquired some risk genes in your human genome, as you write in your story. For example from your father or grandfather. You obviously got that type of genes I believe I have been lucky enough to inherit from my ancestors.

That’s why I was motivated to write down my own story which I planned to do for so long but never managed cause there is always something else to do which takes priority in the 1st place. E.g. found another company. Number three was kicked off in 2016 and number two I am still part of. Dealing with computers is so much fun. I hope you enjoy if you can find time to read. If not it’s ok as well cause it gave me the chance to write about my own thoughts and the story of my life with Stratus Computer
Inc.

The early years and first computers

In my teens I regularly visited the nearby town of Schweinfurt in Bavaria, Germany. Actually I was born there but my parents went 30k east and started a new business about 1950 selling clothes and other textile. The city had an engineering school (Polytechnikum) which was an excellent place to study.
That was my plan from my later high school years on, after I read about Wernher von Braun in a book. The famous engineer helped both Hitler and Harry S. Truman to launch the 1st and 2nd generation of rockets and later on space ships for the NASA to get the first men on the moon. The political aspects of his career of course I learned much later on and in my early years there was nothing but admiration for such a genius. That’s what I wanted to become as well!

My school mates where more interested in German football. At that time computers just began to play an important part in the number crunching execrcise that is needed to calculate the tracks to shoot a
spaceship into orbit and hit the moon in the end. Not an easy task to calculate on paper! You better got an IBM, the supercomputer of the sixties, and a huge team of programmers to get things done. If you are interested in movies, this is excellently presented in the movie “Hidden Figures” by Theodore Melfi based on Nathalia Holts book „Rise of the Rocket Girls“. Astronaut Glenn Johnson, asked Katherine G. Johnson, the programmer, to manually compute the Mercury 6 track, as he didn’t trust the IBM mainframe.

At the engineering school they got a Z23 computer, one of the first commercial machines built in the factory of German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse, which I met twice on conferences later in life. My fascination for rockets immediately changed into one for computers. But it took me 10 more years until I got the chance to punch the first holes into punch cards for my own math calculation programs.

After leaving the army in 1973 I went to that engineering school in order to become an engineer for machinery and plastics, the hot stuff of the early seventies. The first machine I was allowed to program myself was a tabletop computer “Diehl 2000” capable of 100 program steps. A rather crude machine
with very limited functionality compared to the electronic calculators that came up in the early seventies by HP and others. But it allowed for match calculations like standard deviation and other algorithms, the needles and pins of all engineers.

For my “Diplomarbeit” I needed more complex calculations to simulate the aging of the plastic stuff BASF produced who generously supported my diploma. BASF was one of the big players in the upcoming world market. The calculations where still batch programmed (read Bill’s article first for
excellent explanations of how computers worked in the early years) and I spent long nights at the remote job entry station in the cellar of the university with the mainframe operator of the TR440, a mainframe type computer built by Telefunken which later became part of Siemens which layed out the
base for their computer business. Many years later Siemens decided its not their core business and sold it to Fujitsu. Damn stupid management decision. In 2019 they decided to setup a new campus in Berlin to take part in the race for artificial intelligence! For my diploma I had to migrate my program written in FORTRAN IV to the IBM mainframe they used. It had English OS commands unlike the German OS commands used by the TR440. Again double check with Bill how incompatible computers where at that time.

First job and real world experience

With that little computing background and a 2.0 degree on my university scorecard I got a job at a scientific institute in 1977 which helped German steelmakers like Thyssen Krupp to produce even better products. I was my own project manager, marketing expert, trainer and only programmer in a
one man show. The targets that I had to meet where easily achieved. I was free to do whatever I believed was necessary and had a chance to be sold to other scientists who had similar problems to solve. I started to travel Europe and worked with many people in the evolving computer industry. Not a single day I worked in my engineer profession, but it helped me a lot to understand what industrial customers needed.

After six years there and part time work in Italy and the Netherlands I left the place and found a new job in 1983 with former IKOSS which today is one of the top IT service companies in Europe named ATOS. This engineering company was 100% focused on computing. They even built their very own general purpose CPU and computers which were sold to customers using them for controlling rail switches and other logistic tasks. However the new machines from HP, DG and others where much smarter and much more powerful. They had to look for a replacement. As IBM mainframes where used already in house as standard platform for timesharing tasks like CAD, it was quite natural to ask IBM for an alternative device. IBM series/1 seemed to be the right thing to use and I got the chance to run successfully a couple of engineering projects powered by this computer, a midsize machine used for many engineering and business tasks. However the series/1 capabilities where limited and requirements like availability, performance and ease of use always were an issue. After a couple of years another replacement was due. Again it was IBM that was approached. The business relationship was rather strong and much better than the midsize machines they were offering. So they proudly presented there is a new kid in town. Actually maybe it was the other way round, cause the engineers had been looking for alternatives by themselves. Anyway IBM presented an OEM machine which was new to their portfolio. They had only one engineer to deal with and we were happy to help them out. It was called IBM System/88, a true Stratus machine!

Stratus Computers in Germany

The IBM OEM machine was rather ugly with IBM logo and colors compared to the original Stratus machines but its inner values were 100% from Marlborough, Massachusetts and not Boca Raton, Florida, where the series/1
came from. The common language set for our program system between IBM series/1 and Stratus machines was macro assembler and PL/1. So we believed it would be rather easy to migrate the existing multitask runtime environment including proprietary database to the new machine. We quickly learned this was a bad idea.
Our proprietary program system was split between the application modules and the underlying transaction platform. The platform was 100% rewritten for Stratus VOS OS, while the transaction modules written in PL/1 could be migrated. One of the 1st projects was connecting teller machines to mainframes via System/88 used as frontend processor running the realtime transaction system talking to the ATMs. In the 80s ATMs were a brand new service offered by the German banking industry.
Many mainframes in use by the banking industry did not even talk TCP/IP. So we had to program the ATMs with standard PC architecture inside as well as to educate the mainframe programmers about how to connect their mainframes to our Stratus frontend computers. in the end all money transactions for individual accounts were controlled by mainframes.

The project was well underway and I came in contact with many Stratus people including my 1st trip to Boston HQ in 1987. In the end it was only natural for them to ask me to make a new contract with the German Stratus
branch in 1988. Paul Tucker, vice president Europe, came to Frankfurt Airport and we signed the contract at the Airport Hotel Lounge. The 1st ATM project was a big success and in the end about 20 banks used the Stratus system to supply almost every German with cash! If it was sold directly or as an OEM machine we didn’t care much. Olivetti had an OEM agreement as well. As they produced their own ATMs and self service printers it wasn’t too difficult to convince them to sell the ATMs together with their Stratus OEM machines. More than 50% of all Stratus computers sold in Germany used the software of my former company IKOSS. Whenever there was a problem I traveled between Frankfurt where Stratus GmbH was located and my former company 300km away and Stratus headquarter in Boston. Later on I added Dublin factory on my list of preferred destinations. My Lufthansa bonus miles went through the roof!

Stratus was a real nice and friendly community at that time. I did my training at HQ and met Bill for the 1st time at an employee gathering with cold beer in the big hall and wonderful sunshine outside. We exchanged a few words I am sure he forgot about. Anyway I explained to him I’m the guy from Frankfurt Germany and was impressed by the way he communicated with his team. I never met a boss of his type before.

The years with Stratus have been great fun filled with 10h-12h shifts of work all over Europe, but at the same time family gatherings, summer trips and barbecue meetings. We met the European team in Paris and performed “satisfaction” life on stage with an alternative song text we created on the 4h bus trip the day before! Unfortunately I kept no copy. In the end Stratus was facing kind of trouble like many successful computer companies growing to big too fast. One of the issues was that Stratus decided to offer their proprietary platform with UNIX OS as an alternative. Basically this was a splendid idea, as customers started moving their applications to one of the many UNIX dialects. Unfortunately to make full use od the hardware features they had to create their own UNIX version called FTX – Fault Tolerant Unix. The source code was an UNIX system 5.4 licensed from AT&T the code owner at that time for 500.000 US$. Now software engineering had two OS to maintain and this wasn’t the last decision in that area of “standard” OS. Please do not ask me for Windows NT introduced after I left the company.

Half of my life I had the idea back in my mind to found my own company. But venture capital was widely unknown in Germany and I had no contact to people in that area. My business background merely didn’t exist and so I had
to wait for my personal chance. In 1995 the German country
manager got fired cause he made comments at the European board meeting in Paris some people didn’t like. When he came back from Paris next morning he came straight into my cubicle and asked me to double check his company mail account. He knew he was in trouble. Having admin rights I quickly found out that it had been disabled from HQ the day before while he attended the board meeting. The decision to lay him off was made before he even came to Paris. So I unlocked his account for allowing him to send his goodbye email and disabled it again afterwards. When he finally left office after an hour, he asked me if I could imagine to start something new he could not talk about now. I immediately replied to him “yes, of course”.

This became the sparkling flame for our new company that was founded by four Stratus people consisting of two engineers and two sales and marketing managers. It seemed to be low risk compared to what we could win. We sold all our stock options and put the money in the new company.
We had no real idea what technology to use and which software to sell. But we knew if we teamed together we would be successful in the end.

My first company and IT Security Industry

In 1995 “The Internet” wasn’t an everyday buzzword yet. The “world wide web” had just been invented and there were radio ads with Boris Becker promoting telephone bill boards that allowed for low speed connection to the outside world. We felt this might be the new thing to come and setup our four offices in our own homes using VPN technology and ISDN line bundling to work remotely from there. The server we used was installed in my cellar and was powered by MS NT 3.51. The VPN vendor Gandalf of Canada became our 1st customer. One year later every company seemed to need a website of their own and we made a contract with Guardian, who offered a software firewall for Windows NT and Unix. We went to Hannover trade show and came back with hundreds of business cards. In a one year timeframe we became the 1st German company to exclusively sell IT security technology. Ten years
later we had about 30 people and a 10 million revenue per year.

We partnered with IT security companies and I had the chance to meet many entrepreneurs like Christopher Klaus and Tom Noonan of ISS and Nir Zuk of Palo Alto Networks. Every time I met those smart guys I learned more in a 10 minute meeting than in 100 days at school.

The company was sold in 2014 and we were free to start something new. In 2015 my long term business partner and I founded our 2nd company, which still exists and in 2016 a former customer and myself created company number three. What kind of service we offer? IT security consulting and
products – what else?

P.S. For five years I am in contact with Bill now, mostly per email discussing „good old times“ and why computer industry developed like it did over the last 50 years. If you would like to learn more from one of the founders of our industry about Data General, Stratus Computer and all other companies in the Boston area please have a look at his website which is more than interesting and filling a whole book available online for free! https://www.teamfoster.com/