Micro-Systems Software

(despite the name, no connection to Microsoft).

Most of this is from recollection.

I went to work for Micro-Systems Software in 1992, my first job after returning to the US after a year back in Panama. I was an Amiga enthusiast in addition to having just gotten a computer science degree, and wanted to work for an Amiga company. As luck would have it, there was one in the area, one that I had actually heard of, Micro-Systems Software. I even owned their Scribble! word processor. However, amigas were certainly not used at my school and i had no idea where to start with them. So I sent a letter, called them and got an interview.

They told me they could only offer $175 a week. Wanting to get a foot in the door, I accepted. Then they told me they wanted to spend a week with their tech support guy, whose name was (IIRC L-something Rawls. I can't recall exactly), so as to learn their product line. I did this. One week later they fired him and told me I was running the tech support. Presumably because I was cheaper than he was. (I felt bad for him, but what could I do at that point?). Anyway, there I was, one week into it, running the tech support. I was shocked by how small the outfit was, I initially expected them to be much larger. The employees at the time I arrived were, in addition to Rawls:

• Steve Pagliarulo - vice president, and main programmer. Really, the company's main reason for existance, he did almost all the coding. He co-founded the company with someone else when they both left IBM, and later bought out the other guy.
• Chris Debracey - another programmer. He left about one month later to join some anti-virus outfit. Not that amicable a split, either.
• Esther - Steve's wife, and the president. She was in about 1-2 days a week. Didn't deal directly much with her at all.
• Jack Appelman - Esther's father, who ran the shipping. Was a long time butcher in New York before this.
• A secretary/accountant named (I think) Barbara whose last name eludes me.

That was it. And as I said within a month or so it was down to just 5 of us (with one not there most of the time). Chris Debracey had been scheduled to go with Jack to a Commodore trade show in London, but with him gone they needed some one with some tech experience to go, and i had a passport, so I got to go to Earl's Court, in November. That was a fun trip. I didn't get along that well with Jack though.

Micro-Systems Software was actually one of the better-known amiga developers, they had a full productivity product line:

Scribble! - a text-based word processor. You could insert images and things but it wasn't WYSYWIG. Still, was much better than anything that preceded it on the amiga.

Analyze! - A pretty good spreadsheet with features similar to what you'd see in Lotus 1-2-3 or early versions of excel.

Organize!A databaseprogram with features similar to Dbase or early versions of Access

A terminal program whose name eludes me.

Works! - The five above programs bundled into one package. Later all of these would have a platinum edition. The fact that microsoft had a program called Microsoft Works created no end of confusion. Sometimes we'd hear from someone with a bridgeboard (an amiga with a PC built in to run both amiga and pc software) who had both versions installed, wanting to know why they didn't work together better.

BBS-PC! - A very full-featured (for the time) Bulletin Board System. This was released on the IBM PC as well as the Amiga. It was one of the standard BBS systems out there for a long time. As part of its promotion, MSS ran a very good board with an excellent tutorial linked up with the system. They had a huge files archive as well. An electrical storm killed that BBS and after they brought it back up decided to focus away from running a BBS.

excellence! -To the best of my knowledge, the first wysiwig word processor for the amiga. This went through three versions, 3.0 was the one done while I was there. More on its page.

Prior to developing for the Amiga, they had been a name in the TRS-80 market, with a product called "Dos Plus". Steve told me how he had been bidding to do the operating system for the TRS-80 but lost out to Gates and Microsoft, so Dos Plus was his enhancement to that platform. They had a couple old TRS-80s in the lobby. He also did a version of Analyze! for the macintosh that I gather did rather poorly. There it was competing with excel. On the Amiga, they had no such major competition. The main word processor competition came from New Horizons, I forget its exact name.

We worked for about a year on excellence 3.0. I didn't do that much coding... as I said my background was in C but pretty generic C. From Steve I did learn that the books i needed were the Rom Kernel manuals. I did write some routines, and also wrote the manual for 3.0.

Anyway, some time after excellence! 3.0 came out I got wind that something was up -- Steve was selling his house and he and Esther were looking to move to Boston. They were going to start some new company called Quintessence. I never heard about that company again. I remember them showing some jigsaw puzzle creator asking if I thought it was worth them purchasing. Steve was also working on a windows 3.1 terminal program with a lot of features. Windows 3.1 was just starting to take off then (we'd been beta'ing it for a while). Not that I would have left florida, but it was clear they weren't going to ask me to. The Amiga home market was starting to really slack off by then and the plan was for me to stay there in the wellington office and they'd get what mileage they could out of what was left of the amiga product line. They cut a deal to include the full scribble platinum edition with some british amiga magazine. I figured it wasn't going to last much longer. This was 1994.

By this time I'd met an amiga enthusiast from a local computer store (Dana, from Harris Systems) who told me there was another amiga developer called RGB Computer & Video in nearby Riviera Beach -- and the head programmer there had previously worked at Micro-Systems. With that inside I got a quick interview over there and was hired in short order. I informed Jack of this and gave my two weeks. He of course knew Chris Devine, as did Steve, who called me from Boston later. They wished me well. Within a month of going to RGB we got a call back asking if we were interested in buying any old amiga equipment. I went back there with Chris and we rooted through all the old gear and hauled off what we thought was worthwhile, they were shutting down.

About a year later my boss at RGB sent me a memo welcoming a new amiga programmer with a ton of experience, Steve Pagliarulo! Shocked, I went in to talk to him about it only to have him erupt in laughter. Chris Devine was also there and in on the joke. They did get a job application from him and were messing with me. I dunno. It was a joke on that end, but he was still a damn good programmer. I don't think he ever thought much of me as a programmer, nor Chris Devine, which basically would have made it impossible if he had come over. That is the last i ever heard of him. Even google doesn't turn up anything on him post micro-systems. Nor can I find anything on Micro-Systems. Which is one of the reasons I wrote this page.

If you have any additional info on micro-systems software and would like to share, please contact me at [email protected]