Bill Putnam and Bill Pardini had a company called Data Consultants, Inc. And they wanted to create an Automobile Finance System.

This small company produced software in a few variants of Basic as many small companies did in the 1970s.

In walks this kid (me).

Perhaps 19 or 20. Wet behind the ears. No computer experience except in school. And his only work experience was washing dishes and selling products at Weinstock’s and Radio Shack.

What can he do? Sit him down at a Wang Computer. Make him create a Basic program to compute the finite element analysis for building an arch for a large church. The outside is straight for the roof, but the inside is curved. There’s no chance he could possibly do that.

Well, I was that kid. It also turns out I had the persistence and background to meet the challenge.

How I God My Skills to Start Programming

I started out as a music and religion major but fell in love with architecture and acoustics. I wanted to major in building anything related to producing the finest quality music. Since there was no acoustics major at Fresno City College, I was told Architecture would be a good major.

I had a background in building materials, mathematics, physics, and engineering statics. And I hacked my way into an educational system in school using it to help teach myself Basic programming and Physics while studying Fortran.

I must have impressed the two owners of the business either with my skills or talent or youthful persistence. But somehow I earned myself a job for $2/hour.

Building the Automobile Finance System

Bill Putnam seemed to see me as just an annoying kid, though somewhat intriguing. Perhaps an annoying whiz kid. Bill Pardini was full of contagious excitement. He had a hand-held device used by automobile salespeople to provide loan calculations–a device to help them when typing up contracts by hand. But he wanted a whole automobile finance system to expedite this process.

So, I developed a program in Northstar Basic to set up fields on the screen where a person could enter all the numerical values for a car purchase leaving out any one of them, and the program would calculate the missing number.

This could be the interest rate, the term of the loan, the down payment, the monthly payment, the type of insurance, and the method for calculating interest.

And yet the way these values depended on each other, there was no way that a simple algebraic calculation would work.

Newton-Raphson Iteration

\(x_{n+1} = x_n – {f(x_n) \over f'(x_n)}\)

So, I rewrote each calculation into a form where some function of x=0. From that, I could perform a Newton-Raphson iteration using the formula above. This produced highly accurate results almost immediately.

I also used this technique to help a friend with a civil engineering business calculate flagpole footing depths on an Apple II+ in Basic. Instantly, his calculations dropped from taking several minutes to get to 1 decimal place of accuracy to several places in 1 1/2 seconds. He had to try it many times before he could believe the results.

Now, engineers could create flagpole footings quickly and accurately, and the car salesperson could work with prospective customer to customize a loan to their liking.

Returning to our automobile Financing Program, we needed to print bank contracts from the numbers established.

We had Xerox Diablo star-wheel printers with contracts using carbon sheets for copies. So, I developed the subroutines for printing forward and backwards and specified where the fields were on the contract so a person could load the contract into the printer and tell the computer to print, and all the appropriate fields would be filled in automatically.

Customer Demo – POOF!

Bill Pardini was excited and got ready to give the first demonstration of the program to a prospective customer. But somehow, he accidentally deleted both the originally saved program AND its backups.

He was crushed. And for some reason I thought I could just take home the computer and remake it from scratch overnight all over again.

And, well, I was right. I brought the computer back the following morning, and everything was working again. I did not remember the program verbatim, but I remembered the logic and was able to reconstruct it again, test it, and have it ready for the demo the following morning.

Not bad for a $2/hour kid programmer, huh?

Pardini’s Continued Success With Automobile Finance System

I would not want to take credit for Bill Pardini’s success because ultimately he was the one who came up with the idea of doing this program and provided me all the foundational math computations other than my turning them around and doing a Newton-Raphson iteration to do the calculations backwards and upside-down in every which-way. And he was the business genius behind selling this program to so many companies in the area.

From there, he asked me to create a similar program for automobile leasing. And as it was essentially the same as the automobile financing program, the work was fairly trivial. It was more of a customization than the start of a new program.

From there, he recommended me to another business owner of an employment agency and told me I had to charge $20/hour which seemed like a ton of money at that time. And he told me if I did not charge that much, he would refuse to send any more business to me. He ended up being a bit like a protective big brother, and in a sense I loved him like a big brother.

The company split into two with both companies trying to claim ownership of the program. I think Bill Pardini won out and in his business dealings he did very well. He had a nice home in Fresno as well as one by the sea and was an active member of the Ferrari club with his red Ferrari.

Sadly, in recent years, I tried to contact him to say hi and learned that he had fallen ill to cancer and passed away. But I will always have fond memories of working with him for my first programming job.

Other Related Jobs – Pat Paris

After completing that work for Bill Pardini and DCI, I went on to develop business applications for Pat Paris where I earned my first computer–a Vector Graphics 8080 system as pictured above. I created most of the standard business programs–GL/AP/AR/PR, Inventory, and I cannot remember what else–all in a form of Business Basic.

My memory of Pat Paris was that he was a very pleasant old man who unfortunately smoked a very stinky cigar. And he would lean over my shoulder looking at my screen to see how things were coming, and he was quite pleased. And we worked together in his trailer outside his home.

International Peripheral Systems

From there, I went to work with a company called International Peripheral Systems, Inc. or IPSI. It was owned and run by an older gentleman who for some reason was always nice to me but seemed to yell at most people sometimes. His company assembled Xerox Diablo printers like the ones used at DCI. And my job was to modify or customize the Payroll program and create an Order Entry system for the company.

Two fond memories I had were of my coworkers. While I was working on the Payroll program, we ran into a calculation that the bookkeeper and the boss’ daughter were not in agreement about. But it was a basic algebraic calculation, so I already knew what the calculation should be and why it “magically” worked. The two young ladies argued, and I left them alone to work on other things while they figured things out. The two ladies were smart, but I wondered how it is that algebra could become a controversial subject.

The other fond memory was of break time. The bell would go off and the rubber bands would fly. And the boss’ daughter would say to us, “You guys are so immature.” And we were. But we had an awesome time. Break would be over and we’d be back to work responsible and committed as ever.

Argos – Farm Accounting and Irrigation

In 1979, I went to work for Argos programming in an in-house language called ARGOL. That’s not ALGOL, but ARGOL, and the language was completely different.

This computer language was almost like a stripped down assembly language with calls to a screen painter and a report writer. And we built a farm accounting system in that language.

Later, an Irrigation specialist joined the company and I would work with him to build an irrigation scheduling program. While he was indeed an expert in irrigation, he did not have a good understanding or tolerance for some basic principles of good programming, and he would insist on entering data in ways that could cause ambiguities and conflicts between the same data from different sources. So, sadly I felt it was necessary to leave as I did not feel I could perform the work as specified in good conscience, though I had great respect for the leaders in the company.