We were in a tough situation. An important new brand was set to be launched in three months. There were thousands of details to work out and many commitments made to the dealers -- some of who were gambling millions on an unproven line.

One of our commitments was to provide the dealers with a fool-proof method of selecting parts. The old method, microfiche, required an expert to work through the model types, engineering updates, and option groups before arriving at the correct part number. We also promised to include all of the service manuals and technical bulletins.

The company had outsourced this task to a firm specializing in this kind of thing. The vendor had completed its work and the product was impressive.

Unfortunately, one of our competitors owned a minority stake in this vendor, forcing them to cancel the contract at the last moment. A conspiracy? Perhaps. We were left with a deadline and had to start from scratch -- we had our data formats but none of the vendor's code.

The CIO assembled a team moved us all to an isolated "skunk works" environment. He said he would slide pizzas under the door.

We divided ourselves into five specialties: client, server, image processing, data base, and quality.

I handled the server piece and wrote it in C. It was classic client/server with some interesting wrinkles. The workstation would send requests to the server using a Netbios protocol, and the server would do database lookups, returning query results and images. There were about a dozen databases involved.

The "interesting wrinkles" were service bulletins imported automatically via satellite, producing then-new compact disks, and sending "shopping lists" to the dealership AS/400.

It was a crunch effort, and I worked full time for 21 days in a row to hack out the initial version. We ended up delivering the product on time, thus honoring the commitments made to the dealers. Later I assisted with the first installations at dealerships and had a cameo role in the training video.

The system fulfilled its mission: a clerk with little training could get the right part within seconds, a job previously taking a minutes for an expert.

The system was remarkably bug-free. There was only one problem found in the first year of operation, owing to a specification error. The parent company later "stole" the design and used it for similar systems worldwide.

Main Dish on right, Propagation Tester on Left	Satellite Control Equipment

Screen from Electronic Service Information System