Mission Critical Systems - February 1995

In late February of 1995 - following the week when my father died - I went to work at Mission Critical Systems.

Our office was in the Suburban Lawn and Garden headquarters at 137th and Wyandotte, south KC.  

The company was actually one guy, Leonard Pruett, so I became his employee.  Leonard was perhaps 10 years older than me and was one of the few guys in the world who was expert in a Hewlett-Packard niche product called Eloquence .  Eloquence was a primitive relational database with a programming interface based on the HP BASIC language, combining text-based screen forms and reporting with the procedural capabilities of BASIC.  

Leonard was a CPA who made his living by doing piecework for clients who had installed Eloquence systems; these clients included a wholesale nursery in Oregon, a metal-spinning job shop in Toledo, and Suburban Lawn and Garden in Kansas City.

The reason Leonard hired me is that he foresaw the inevitable decline in the use of Eloquence, and the pending drop in support for that product by HP.  He wanted to rewrite  Eloquence-based packages using the Informix database product; however, once he bought an Informix package and tried to get started, he found himself stumped.

I had been working with Informix for about seven years.  The Informix that we worked with at the IRS was actually PRE-SQL, with its own query language.  It was a great database package, based on C-ISAM files; it was elegant and simple but had great features which allowed the building of very useful screen forms and reports in a very short time.  When Informix switched to Informix-SQL and added the procedural capabilities of Informix-4GL, it became a world-class product without losing any of its desirable properties.  I learned SQL from an on-the-job Oracle class at the IRS and Informix-4GL from an on-the-job class provided by Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) in 1991.

During the three months I worked for Leonard, I wrote the accounting package, i.e., Chart of Accounts, General Ledger, General Journal, A/R and A/P.  Leonard, as a CPA, guided me in this endeavor.

I needed to make more money than Leonard could pay, and in the Summer I got a job as a contractor working at GST Steel.