As you might imagine, the president of the company spoke to dealers regularly. Incredibly, he didn't have a way to look up their sales numbers and service satisfaction ratings in a timely fashion. He was in the dark unless he planned a call a few days in advance, giving his staff time to produce a dossier with all of the numbers and biographies.

The CIO stopped by and asked if there was anything I could do. Fortunately, the requirements were similar to some of my consulting projects. I worked closely with the mainframe programmers to consolidate the data into several flat files, then wrote a Clipper program that pulled it all together. The user interface was very simple, so training the CEO was a snap. And I had indexed the data a dozen different ways, so the response time was sub-second.

I received a technical achievement award for this, but the appetite for executive applications was just starting.

The CIO stopped by my desk a few months later and upped the ante. He wanted me to develop a graphical workstation for all executives, not just the president. I surveyed the tools available, arranged for vendor demonstrations, and eventually settled upon the Comshare Commander EIS product.

This was quite an interesting beast, as it had a mainframe-based repository that collected information from batch jobs and other sources. Each night the workstations would log on to the mainframe through a 3270 connection and download the latest numbers.

I installed the product on our mainframe and PCs and trained both executives and programmers in its use.

There were some unexpected challenges as well: the mainframe end used a started task and a VTAM services component that required some tricky configuration. And the automatic mainframe logon scripts gave me fits -- It used screen-scraper technology that would break whenever the text on the mainframe screens changed slightly.

Commander was ahead of its time -- it used a hypertext interface similar to a web browser.