Map of/Excerpts from May 31, 2014, Interview with John Kolman, Maribeth Ward, Stacy Kowalczyk
Link to complete unedited audio recording of interview
(There seem to be problems with moving to a different place in the recording under Chrome; IE and Firefox are OK.)
[Highlights:
h:mm:ss
0:40:00 John: “There might have been another road. We could have still been profitable – not wildly profitable,..”
0:56:20 John: “I remember at the end that we had exhausted the IBM people.”
1:14:00 John: “… NOTIS Horizon. I really think we had it right with that”
1:19:50 Jerry: Having to fire a VSE Systems Engineer on Halloween, dressed in a clown costume
1:28:15 MB: “You felt as a woman you had to pretend you were a man.”
1:43:45 MB: “Paul was a better schmoozer”.
2:05:00 Jerry: “I felt abandoned.”
MB: “We all felt abandoned.”
2:16:30 High-up NOTIS staff member from the late ‘80’s: “Let’s say that we could make millions of dollars by selling little buttons saying ‘I [heart] libraries’ … wouldn’t you do that?”
2:17:40 Jerry: “I don’t want to get all mushy and teary-eyed about library systems, but …” ]
Complete map/excerpts
h:mm:ss
0.00.00 Intro
0.00:30 Jerry’s history (same as other interviews)
0:02:20 Stacy’s history
0.05:30 Maribeth’s history
0.07:30 NOTIS Systems Inc. Board of Directors
0.09:00 “An extremely stressful time in my career”
0.09:50 Jerry stepping down; “I hired John”
0.13:50 “I was put in charge of Dev. for some period of time…. I didn’t do a horrible job.”
0:14:20 Dynix merger
0:15:10 John was in charge of the “Internet group”
0:15:20 “They were going to let me go. I immediately found a job in Ameritech long-distance.”
0:17:40 “I decided I was going to go into teaching.”
0:18:25 John’s history
0:18:25 Jerry: “John, I think Maribeth has covered most of your history.”
0:19:30 Y2K
0:22:50 Importance of email/Internet to Support
0:23:30 Giving customers the source code
0:23:30 Jerry
0:26:30 Maribeth
0:27:30 Jerry: “What you’re talking about is a ‘version problem’”
0:29:10 “Variables imbedded in macros requiring assembly”
KeyNOTIS, LSYS, Escrow of source code
0:31:15 “Programmers not used to academic/collaborative model”
0:34:25 John: “No really good products to do source-control at that time, like we have nowadays”
0:35:25 “Didn’t have the ‘intellectual property’ angle handled very well”
0:37:10 “API’s in NOTIS Horizon made people very excited”
0:37:45 In Geac: “I am Yale switch”
0:40:00 John: “There might have been another road. We could have still been profitable – not wildly profitable,…
“Unrealistic revenue goals”
0:41:00 MB: “Most intense time for revenue was before we were bought by Ameritech”
0:42:40 Stacy: “I felt a lot of pressure after Ameritech bought NOTIS.”
0:43:40 Reasons for NOTIS’ success
0:45:30 Jerry: “I think Cataloging/Authorities was especially strong”
0:50:00 Most revenue was coming from (shared) MVS systems
0:52:40 Superior performance due to IBM or NOTIS code?
John: “I’d go for the more efficient programs being a large percentage” … “separate indexing system on top; compression of indexes”
0:53:20 Jerry: “Very elegantly and efficiently written”
0:55:40 IBM’s domination of university administrative computing
0:55:25 Jerry: Jane realized what this system could do and who would benefit from it and she went after those sites.
0:56:20 John: “I remember at the end that we had exhausted the IBM people.”
0:58:00 KeyNOTIS; PS/2 / Linux
0:59:00 Jerry: Why weren’t there more IBM mainframe library systems?
0:59:40 John: “I don’t think IBM was as big as we are saying.”
The big schools needed IBM, but many of the smaller had DEC
1:00:20 Stacy: Allstate paid $1 million/year [in 1990 dollars] to lease MVS
1:01:00 John: “keep on moving ‘downstream’”; “you hit a wall on what you can sell”
Stacy: “That’s why we started Horizon”
1:02:15 John: “ability to run consortia … You have to design that in” Music, Transportation libraries
1:02:45 “we never maximized the revenue on consortia”
Support; filtering problem reports through central office, e.g., FCLA
1:04:00 John: PACLink/z39.50 over TCP/IP; partners with Yale/IBM; RS6000
1:06:40 WebOPAC ’94? ’95?
1:07:10 John: “People were searching each other’s CICS systems”
1:08:30 Navigator; WinGopher; Infoshare; NetPublisher (MB: “we were that close to the big money”)
1:10:10 MHI John: “Colin didn’t know where start; I knew where to start; I went over to Jim Aagaard.”
1:11:30 NOTIS 5
1:12:20 Jane said: “I won’t force this to happen, but I think we have to put John Kolman as Vice President of Dev.”
1:13:10 MB: “Unbelievably stressful”
1:14:00 John: “Finally [of big projects], would be NOTIS Horizon. I really think we had it right with that”; visit to Oxford U.
1:15:10 NOTIS was pretty limited to North America
1:17:15 Different programming managers: John Barron, Colin Smith, John, Verne, Jim Martin
1:19:50 Crazy/funny/odd things you remember
1:19:50 Jerry: having to fire a VSE Systems Engineer on Halloween, dressed in a clown costume
1:23:00 MB: Employee dying of AIDS; insurance issues
1:25:30 John: Good location; building
1:27:00 Stacy …
1:28:15 MB: “You felt as a woman you had to pretend you were a man.”
[During interview process] I never told anyone I had children.
1:29:45 Stacy: “First experience with meeting the president of the company in the women’s washroom.”
1:30:20 Jerry: “I want to talk about it from the other side: most librarians are women.”
1:31:30 Stacy: “Too many people in meetings” … “I’m never doing that again”
1:33:00 MB: “You had everyone in the department interview me.”
“No nurturing going on … but there was all this huge democracy”
John: “A pretty tolerant organization”
1:34:00 Fix priority list
1:35:00 NUGM; Bum Steer Roast – best for managers to stay away
1:36:00 Prettyman … very talented family
1:37:00 Ameritech “divestment” of NOTIS Horizon
1:37:00 Jerry: “I contend that this was a failure to understand how the needs of large research libraries differed from those of public and special libraries.”
1:38:15 MB: “They never should have bought us in the first place; they didn’t know what to do with us.”
1:40:00 Ameritech
“Paul’s [Paul Sybrowsky’s] plan was more compelling than Jane’s plan.”
1:42:00 Paul was saying: “They’re taking money off our [Dynix’] table with smoke and mirrors, and it’s going to come back to bite us.”
1:43:45 MB: “Paul was a better schmoozer”.
1:44:15 Jerry: “Jane felt that’s what you needed to do: create good software and have people to sell it to… She won in the end.”
1:44:40 John: “It was 90% political; 10% technical.”
1:45:30 John: “That’s the kicker; there wasn’t a product.” [We didn’t really have a product yet.]
1:47:40 MB: “Failure in thinking that they could buy these two different companies and merge them together… set up from the beginning to fail.”
1:48:10 John: “If we had just stayed with the ARL’s, there could have been a détente there [between Dynix and NOTIS].
1:48:50 MB: “We had to go down-market”.
1:49:20 Differences between academic, public, and special libraries
1:50:20 John: “The big mistake wasn’t Dynix and Ameritech and that; the big mistake was Northwestern selling NOTIS…. It took us away from the ARL roots, the collaborative development.”
1:51:10 John “Instead of a Board of Directors of movers and shakers, we could have had a Board of people who understood libraries.”
1:52:00 Incubators
1:53:40 MB: “Revenue number … this is impossible”
1:54:00 Jerry: “She [Jane] was very intense, passionate person, and, to me, a lot of the success of the company was [due to] that…. Not being a big, profitable company necessarily.”
1:55:00 Other academic/public differences: authorities; foreign-language; Campus Accounting / Student Records
1:58:00 John: “A lot of it is positioning.”
1:59:00 Jerry: “Having really good customers can result in a really good product.”
1:59:30 John: “Jane knew how to bring back Development requirements … and filter them.”
2:00:50 John: “… we probably would have gone with Digital Equipment….
Where are they today?
2:02:00 KeyNOTIS; elimination of arbitrary differences; 9370 mainframe, not
that competitive.
2:04:20 “They only listened to Jane and Paul.”
2:04:50 Jerry: “In retrospect, you have to say it was the wrong decision that they made. The system that was created from NOTIS Horizon (Voyager) ‘ate the lunch’ of the Ameritech Horizon…
2:05:00 Jerry: “I felt abandoned.”
MB: “We all felt abandoned.”
2:06:10 MB: “He let Jane out of her non-compete”
2:08:00 MB: “If you were an investor investing in your retirement, would you have put your money in NOTIS Horizon? I wouldn’t have. It’d be too long to wait. I’m getting old.”
2:08:00 Stacy: “No collaboration between Evanston and Utah.”
2:10:00 Stacy: “It was like being at a funeral.”
2:10:40 Jerry: “What I expected Ameritech to do was to provide a [viable] successor system…. I felt they were abandoning the market I was serving.”
2:11:10 MB: “I don’t think Paul was a wonderful business person either, but he was a wonderful schmoozer… We were kind of selling vaporware…. The day they bought Dynix, there was going to be only one winner.”
2:13:10 Stacy: “The cultures were so different.” Male/female.
2:14:10 John: “Drive usage on the network.”
2:16:30 High-up NOTIS staff member from the late ‘80’s: “Let’s say that we could make millions of dollars by selling little buttons saying ‘I [heart] libraries’ … wouldn’t you do that?”
2:17:40 Jerry: “I don’t want to get all mushy and teary-eyed about library systems, but …” Son’s college assignment: “What makes work meaningful?”
2:19:10 “Actually, I never imagined that I would make as much money as I have, but I’m sure I could have made more….”
2:19:40 Stacy: “I figured out how many people had the opportunity to use NOTIS software … upwards of 3 million … all the research at all these top-tier universities…. I loved that idea.”
2:21:30 Stacy: Libraries were very early in automation.
Jerry: I think the university connection played a role.
2:22:30 Was Assembly language a good choice?
2:27:40 Jerry: “To say before 1989 that client/server was going to be the future … you had to be a psychic.”
John: “Dynix/Marquis was first,… but not that far ahead.”
2:29:45 John: Limitations of Assembler
2:35:00 Testing of releases
2:37:20 John: Some of the old Ameritech people … what they’re doing.
2:38:28 End