BofA Again

 

ITEL eventually failed—a common occurrence for Silicon-Valley companies, both then and now. In fact, my manager at Breuners had warned me of such a possibility when I was considering working for ITEL. I had foreseen the end of ITEL and had already been looking for a job. I had two offers, one from BofA and the other from Intel, the chipmaker. So receiving the layoff notice wasn’t traumatic; it just forced me to decide between the two offers. I chose BofA.

 

In those days, IBM didn’t try to copyright or otherwise protect their source code. In fact, for VM/370 they actually shipped the source code with the product. At BofA we did extensive modification to that source code to run an interactive bank application. (BofA had always been technologically innovative; I believe they were the first bank to make widespread use of computers for accounting. I used my first email system while at BofA.)

 

Most of BofA’s computers ran the MVS operating system, not VM/370. Even rarer at the bank was DOS—in fact it wasn’t used at all in California. In those days, U.S. banking regulations forbad a bank from doing consumer business in more than one state, so BofA was constrained to California. However, they weren’t constrained from doing business overseas, and BofA had a thriving business in Asia. I remember that they even had had a branch in Okinawa when I had been stationed there in the army.

 

BofA’s Asian computer centers were located in Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, with their headquarters in Manila. All these computers ran DOS.

 

Our group in San Francisco became tasked with providing a system to Asia division to distribute new software to their data centers. Because of my own background in DOS, I was chosen to go to the Asia division headquarters to help roll this new software out. System programmers from the other data centers were to also fly to Manila to meet me there. I had mixed feelings about going. Seeing more of the world would be interesting, but the Philippines at that time was under the tyrannical rule of Ferdinand Marcos and there was a fairly active guerilla movement against him.

 

At the time we were scheduled to go, it turned out there was a convention of travel agents taking place in Manila so all the hotels were full. A last-minute decision was made to move the trip to Tokyo instead. I was very pleased with the change: Tokyo seemed safer, and I had recently read Shogun, by James Clavell and had developed an interest in Japanese culture.

 

Just before I left for Tokyo, the anti-Marcos guerillas had set off a bomb in the stadium where the travel agents’ convention was occurring. I don’t think anyone was killed, but the convention was canceled, and the hotels were empty by the time we would have arrived. But we had already made other plans, so I was off to Tokyo.

 

I spent three weeks in Tokyo, installing VM/370 and our software on their system and training bank employees from all of the data centers in Asia Division. I learned while I was there that the Tokyo data center wanted to connect to SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication). I was asked to come back to work on that project.

 

So I returned to Tokyo the following January. That was 1981. This time I stayed for three months. We had one 24-hour window where we could test our connection to the SWIFT network. If we failed the test we would have to wait six months for another opportunity.

 

I had already tired of visiting tourist sites in Tokyo after my previous visit, so I set myself the free-time project of learning more about Japanese music. That is described in more detail at Music.

 

While working at BofA I became good friends with Dick Wheaton, who was a sort of one-man telecommunications department for our project. He taught me a lot about telecommunications. When I went to Tokyo he advised me to contact Junko Ogawa, a bank employee that he had worked with (although never met in person). I took his advice and Junko proved to be very helpful, particularly for connecting to the Bank’s email system.

 

Junko taught me how to use a Wang Word Processing system as a way of composing my email offline before I sent it. The Wang was essentially a minicomputer system dedicated to the application of word processing. As such it had special-purpose terminals that had keys specifically for word processing.

 

More than that Junko and I became good friends, and we spent many evenings together. It never developed into a romantic relationship, although I suspect it might have if I had been single.

 

BofA had the policy that if an employee was away on business for more than a certain amount of time, then they would either fly him or her home, or they would fly his or her family to wherever the employee was. Naturally we chose the latter, so for a short period out of my stay, Dixie and Elizabeth (who was then less than a year old) joined me in Tokyo.

 

When the appointed day arrived, Bank of America passed the connection test and was allowed to join the SWIFT network. I headed for home.

 

Because of some changes in working-hour policy I decided to leave BofA. I talked to a significant number of companies, all but one of which gave me offers. The first was Tandem Computers, a maker of fault-tolerant computers. Then there was Amdahl, a maker of IBM clones (similar to ITEL). Amdahl was founded by Gene Amdahl, one of architects of the IBM System/360. The one I was hoping to get was with Atari, a maker of personal computers. They were the only one that didn’t make me an offer.

 

Somehow during this job search my boss found out I was looking. In the mean time Asia Division was asking for me to go to Manila, as their system programmer had a family emergency and they wanted me to fill in while he was gone. My boss told me he wouldn’t send me if I was going to leave the bank. I was waiting for Atari to decide. My boss refused to answer the email messages from Manila and forbad me to do so either. They were getting increasingly frantic, wondering why we didn’t respond. Finally I went to my boss and told him that I was still waiting for an offer, but I had others and was definitely going to leave. To my pleasant surprise, he then sent me to Manila.

 

Once I got to Manila, the manager there tried to talk me into a permanent assignment in Manila even though he knew I was planning to leave the bank. They also offered me a job in a new branch in Korea. I didn’t think Dixie would like Manila (too many mosquitoes) and I didn’t want to accept a job in Korea sight unseen, so I turned down both offers. My career would have turned out quite differently if I had accepted either of those jobs.

 

My boss in Manila decided he wanted me to hand deliver some software to the other data processing centers in Asia so set me up to visit them all on my way home. Singapore got dropped from the list because someone came to Manila from Singapore, but I did get to go to Hong Kong and back to Tokyo. What a great way to end my employment with Bank of America!