My employer from 1982 – 1989.
By mid-1982, I had made up my mind to leave Bei Jing-Washington, after deciding that being a young, white salesman in China with no technical experience and poor language skills was neither my calling nor a wise career path. I was interested in China, but did not want to restrict myself to one fickle country, especially having seen what that decision had done for Fred and his generation of China watchers. I enjoyed my exposure to electronics technology and wanted to get smarter about that long-term bandwagon. I wanted to marry Barb and embark on whatever would become of our lives together. I considered several avenues.
- I tried to find other career paths in the nascent China trade or wider Asian markets, applying for roles at various think tanks, companies and trade associations. None came through, and few seemed likely without getting a Masters or other advanced degree and much stronger language skills.
- I considered going for an MBA or learning more about technology by going back to school. But the dual thoughts of jumping back into classes and taking on student debt were not appealing, even more so once Barb decided she would start law school.
- I started looking for places where I could learn about technology on-the-job. Ideally, someplace that would value my liberal arts background.
I regularly scoured “Employment Opportunities” in the Washington Post and other publications and came across a posting for a Technical Writer at Atlantic Research Corporation, or ARC. I didn’t know anything about the company or the career, but sent my resume and an optimistic cover letter and was delighted to get a response. They brought me in for an interview which I remember included a grammar and spelling test administered by my prospective boss, Joan Aronson. I think I got the job when I correctly spelled “queuing” which is actually a term that comes up in telecommunications, not that I knew it at the time, but thanks to Hong Kong and British spellings I knew the difference between “queue” and “cue.”
The job entailed writing training manuals for ARC’s telecommunications test equipment. There were three other tech writers in the group who had stronger technical backgrounds and experience, but Joan seemed willing to gamble on bringing in a liberal arts neophyte who was willing to learn on the job. I was game for the challenge and eager to learn. I quickly accepted their offer of employment. My starting salary, a whopping $18K, was still more than I made at Bei Jing-Washington, plus it offered full medical, vacation and retirement benefits…a real live job!
When I started at ARC, all the telecommunications operations were housed at their headquarters complex in Alexandria, VA, off I-395 just inside the Beltway. It was a very easy commute from Skyline Village when I lived there, but by August or so of 1982 Barb and I moved together into a townhouse in Fairfax. The commute wasn’t terrible from there, but involved navigating the Beltway and the “mixing bowl” in Springfield, VA.
The main ARC building was a 1960’s space-agey structure that felt outdated even then, but reflected the optimistic group of engineers that founded the company. ARC was the result of a 1976 leveraged buyout by 10 key engineers (led by Coleman Raphael, who was still the revered Chairman when I got there) of the Atlantic Research division of Susquehanna Corporation, which in turn had been around for decades. ARC’s main business was building solid rocket boosters used in missiles, including Stinger and Tomahawk weapon systems. A smaller segment of the business, involving about 100 people, focused on designing and manufacturing telecommunications test equipment. It was an odd mix of military and commercial interests, an early example of a Beltway Bandit, but maybe a little more pure in that we actually made stuff.
My job was to write operator’s manuals for equipment like the Interview line of telecommunications data analyzers. They literally plopped an analyzer on my desk and told me to get started. I had very little guidance or training, but copied the style and format of other manuals. Given little choice, I approached the task of describing the unit’s operations from the standpoint of a beginner, which I was. I described every button, light and connector on the box, then would sit with the engineers and designers of the unit to try to understand the function of each item. There was typically a Technical Manual (that described the box in gory detail) and Operator’s Manual (how to use it) for each piece of equipment. Writing these manuals was slow and methodical, but evidently I did the job pretty well. Joan and the engineers who had to proofread my work were encouraging.
I had few illusions that anyone other than those tasked with proofreading would actually read the manuals that accompanied this equipment, but it was a good opportunity for me to learn about telecommunications technology and the day-to-day life of working in an office. This was a corporate drone job if there ever was one, and I would have slit my wrists to contemplate being in the same job 10, 20 or 30 years down the line. But I always considered it a learning opportunity and a chance to open doors to some uncertain, hopefully greater and more interesting future.
A word about the technology of the time. My main workstation was a DEC VT-100 terminal. It used a line-by-line text editing program called “vi“. You wrote and edited a “document” one line at a time. “Word processing” and full-page editing had barely been invented and it would be several years before anything resembling it filtered down to our desktops. Drawings, photos (hardly ever used) and layouts were handled by a separate set of technical artists with whom we’d collaborate. Producing a single manual took about six months, and you needed two (Technical and Operator’s) for each product rollout. Then, you’d need to update each manual every time there was a software or hardware update.
One of the features of the DEC workstation allowed for simple one-line messaging to co-workers. It was a precursor to today’s text messaging, and our little group of cubicle-dwelling tech writers used it to arrange lunch or sometimes share snarky messages. It felt slightly rebellious. Even this simple form of silent communications had an obviously negative impact on productivity but a definite positive impact on our sense of empowerment and well-being…that is, until we realized the messages could be monitored by our bosses and the IT department. I can’t remember the specifics of someone (not me) getting caught sending inappropriate messages, but I remember it happening, a very early lesson in the power and pitfalls of social media.
Largely unbeknownst to me, the whole world of telecommunications was just starting to change in the 1980s. For a century, AT&T (“Ma Bell“) had a monopoly on the telephone system in the North America. Bell Labs and Western Electric (later AT&T Technologies) developed and manufactured all the equipment, including nearly all the test equipment, used in the network. Slowly, a combination of new technologies, competitors and court rulings put the old monopoly under increasing pressure. The Carterfone ruling in 1968 allowed non-Western Electric equipment to connect to the network, MCI used new microwave technology to offer competition for corporate networks and long distance calls starting in the 1970s, and new computing technologies spawned increasing demand for private corporate data networks. These private networks were the main users of our data analyzers. ARC didn’t sell much to AT&T, but got its start giving AT&T’s customers a way to monitor their private data networks.
In January 1982, under pressure from antitrust suits by MCI and the Department of Justice, AT&T agreed to divest itself into multiple new entities, effective in 1984. Thus were born the Regional Bell Operating Companies, AT&T Technologies, and more. AT&T retained its long distance and wireless businesses, still huge but much diminished from before. Suddenly, ARC and what became a whole host of independent manufacturers had a new landscape of prospective customers. Without realizing it, I began to ride the swelling tidal wave of changes in telecommunications over the next two decades.
After about a year or so in the headquarters building, the Teleproducts Division of ARC moved to its own building at 7401 Boston Boulevard in Springfield, Virginia. It was cool to move into a brand new office park, with shiny new cubicles and custom-designed consolidated engineering labs and a cool demo room set up to mimic a network operations center. It felt state of the art, gave our telecom business a new sense of identity and reflected the growth we were seeing.
In addition to its data (or protocol) analyzers, ARC had a line of products to manually or automatically connect the test units to data lines. The manual connectors were called Data-Patch, the automated units were Fallback Switches, and they came under the remote control of the Network Test System (NTS). I became the main technical writer for these lines of products, and got to know the systems and engineers pretty well.
A later ad for analyzers, from 1988 
By 1984, the company was growing and there started to be openings in other departments. I knew I didn’t want to be a technical writer forever, and gravitated into a new position of Assistant Engineer for the network test systems…basically all those products that were not actual data analyzers. The systems represented maybe $10M of the $30M total revenues of the company. I became responsible for product line technical support and product verification — making sure new products did what we claimed they did before they shipped — and I became a proofreader of the manuals rather than a writer. I may have been called an Assistant Engineer but I was never really on an engineering track. It was more like I was an assistant to the engineers (doing stuff they didn’t want to do) and it was before ARC had anything officially called marketing (or, more properly, marketing was the one or two well-entrenched guys that did our advertisements).
This job let me start actually traveling and interacting with customers. Several of my first big trips were to help install systems and train users at the VISA credit card data center in San Mateo, CA, just south of San Francisco. At that point, all VISA credit card transactions from half the world were routed into this building for verification, a point driven home to us when we (not me, precisely, but I was in the mix) accidentally took the network offline for about 10 minutes while we were testing our switches. There was a panic in the room until we figured out what went wrong and corrected it. They told us those few minutes delayed tens of millions of dollars of transactions. Then they emphatically told us not to do it again.
I greatly enjoyed being out of the office at customer sites, having a rental car, living on a per diem and getting to explore new places. I remember staying over one weekend (an unusual occurrence) and having time to explore San Francisco. I especially enjoyed a terrific day hiking all through Golden Gate Park, up the coastline to the Cliff House and then through the Presidio and Golden Gate Bridge, capped off with a dinner at Scoma’s on Fisherman’s Wharf.
Another early set of trips was to Stockholm, Sweden, to help get a new bank customer up to speed. I remember going there first for about a week in November (probably in 1984) and feeling like the whole country was depressed by the cold, short days and gloomy weather. Plus the prices for food and especially alcohol were incredibly expensive. Then I went back in springtime the following year and the mood was totally different. The days were long and bright and the people were gorgeous and smiling. Scandinavia was suddenly a whole lot more appealing. I could understand why Sweden was both one of the happiest countries on earth and also had very high suicide rates — it depends on the time of year.
On the second trip to Sweden, I was accompanied by ARC’s international sales director, a much older man whose name I’ll let slide. He was an interesting character, retired from a long career at AT&T, with international contacts everywhere, it seemed. He was married, but seemed to spend 80% of his time on the road, mostly traveling solo, hawking ARC’s test equipment to telephone companies around the world. We traveled from Stockholm to Helsinki on a very nice overnight ferry (I had my own room and bed) and I participated in some meetings with the Finnish telecom company. To some extent, I envied his international nomadic lifestyle and considered it a possible career objective, but in traveling with him it didn’t seem like he particularly enjoyed it. More about him a little later.
One of my favorite assignments at ARC was helping a small telecom provider in Anchorage, Alaska (Alascom, before they were bought by AT&T), open its new network management center built around our system. It was probably in 1988. They’d gone to a lot of expense, including contracting Patrick Stewart of Star Trek: The Next Generation (which he had just started doing in 1987) to do a commercial and come up for the ribbon cutting. They invited me and a few others up twice for several summer days to showcase our systems and make them look as whiz-bang as possible for several open house celebrations. I did what I could and things went off well. I stretched out the second trip with a few more vacation days in Anchorage and took drives down the coast, past the Portage Glacier to Whittier and north to the Alaska State Fairgrounds in Palmer.
I harbored some thoughts of becoming an engineer and took evening technical classes at Northern Virginia Community College in 1983-1984. As I recall, the first semester or so went OK, but I bombed out of a programming class and it became clear that getting an engineering degree was out of the question. I shifted toward marketing and business management courses and found them more up my alley. Later, I started to take classes at George Mason University with the thought of getting into their MBA program, but as I began to travel more and get promoted, it didn’t seem like an advanced degree was that important. I felt like I learned more on the job than I did in a classroom. Maybe in some form of overcompensation, for years I devoured the telecommunications trade press trying to learn more about the market, technologies and competitors. I became further enmeshed in the blizzard of acronyms and technologies that accompany the world of telecommunications.
Some of the biggest issues at the time involved global discussions on open standards. With the devolution of the Bell System and growth of independent, interconnected communication system providers and equipment manufacturers around the world, the need for new international standards became apparent. A lot of this got hashed out through the United Nations and its International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
The Open Systems Interconnections (OSI) model with seven layers of communications protocols was becoming accepted by the time I came to the scene, but there was still a debate on how to manage communications systems. There was an active argument between proponents of CMIP vs. SNMP, which reflected a wider dichotomy between the older international telecommunication world and upstarts from the new world of the Internet. There was also a consensus building around an overall management framework called FCAPS, which encompassed the network management functions of Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance and Security management. I became something of a proselytizer for FCAPS within and outside the company because it was a high level model I could understand. In fact, these slides look suspiciously like ones I cooked up back in the day.
I attended and spoke at a large international conference, the First International Symposium on Integrated Network Management, in Boston in May 1989, one of the last big events I did with ARC. I somehow was given a slot to speak about network management and FCAPS. The CMIP vs. SNMP debate was raging, to the extent that things raged in that community, and industry luminaries like Vint Cerf were in attendance. I was so nervous I got sick before my presentation (it took me a long time to learn to eat properly before big events) but soldiered through it in front of a conference ballroom with hundreds of much older, more learned experts. One of ARC’s senior VPs, Lightsey Wallace, was in attendance and noted that I’d done well.
Our NTS systems used an operating system called CP/M which also had a whole set of new office productivity programs like WordStar and SuperCalc. In the days before personal computers, these were revolutionary products and I became a proficient user, developing marketing information systems for our bookings, customers, revenues and margins.
As PCs started to filter onto desktops, I got my hands on a luggable Compaq PC and also bought an Apple Macintosh computer of my own that I would bring into work to do graphics and charts. It was exciting being an early adopter of these new tools of the trade and being part of a clear revolution in information management. Everyone was a beginner and I was further along than most. It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary the Macintosh was, with its graph user interface and mouse. I loved it (and, yes, it’s still hiding in our basement…a collectors item at this point if it’s not completely moldy).
In mid-1985, I was promoted to Market Analyst for the NTS network management product line. I tracked competitors and the market, continued performing customer support and product verification, and helped design a new operator interface for our systems. I started to regularly attend industry trade shows around the country and began to work more closely with ARC’s sales representatives. This was the official start of my career in marketing, and the first time ARC used the title for anything other than advertising. I pretty much carved the job out of tasks that no one else was doing, with the aid and connivance of my colleagues, whom I’ll get to momentarily.
In September, 1987, I became Product Manager for the RESTORER dial backup product line. I was responsible for developing the product marketing plan, functional specification, promotional plan, competitive analysis, sales tools, forecasts, and actively participated in all phases of product introduction, sales, installation and product support (that’s from my resume so it has to be true). The product itself was a dud, but not for lack of extensive supporting materials!
The key folks I worked with in my last several years at ARC included my boss, John Oliva, who was the director of the network test system line, Frank Faff, the senior engineer, and Mike Niero who was another marketing guy. They were each 10-20 years older than me, but we became a group of buddies, more or less, who hung around after work dissecting life at ARC and the world. They also became my role models and mentors, of sorts. John was a very classy, single guy with a Jaguar. We didn’t know much about his lifestyle but he made it seem like one could live very well as a single man on a director’s salary. Frank was a very down-to-earth family guy who loved explaining things in detail to me; he taught me most of whatever technical product knowledge I gained. Mike was a wheeler-dealer who was always looking for angles and information, even conspiracies.
Our product line was second fiddle in ARC’s universe to the test equipment line, and we had an underdog/rebel attitude to gain a larger foothold within the company and the market at large. It was fun to gather after work, sometimes with beers, trying to make sense of life and commiserating with each other.
At some point, Mike somehow learned that the international sales director, with whom I’d traveled from Stockholm to Helsinki, was caught up in some (alleged, I’ll say for safety) kickback schemes involving some of his international customers. Mike had seen some of the evidence and shared it with us before others in the company knew, leading us to speculate how far up the chain the corruption went. I remember the four of us sitting together and Mike commenting that I looked like I’d just been told there’s no Santa Claus. My tender sensibilities were having a hard time grasping that corruption existed in our midst. Not long after, the sales director was fired and his misdeeds more or less explained away (or covered up). We never did figure out if anyone else was involved, but a sense of trust had been broken between me and the corporate leaders. I became more wary over the motives of leadership, whether in my company or in the country. Of course, this was also in the later Reagan years when Iran-Contra and all sorts of other misdeeds were in the air, so I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise.
The sales director’s downfall also pretty much ended whatever idea I had of getting involved in international sales. If kickbacks and corruption were part of the game, and the nonstop international travel wasn’t all that much fun after all, and (most importantly) you had to be a good salesman and schmoozer to succeed, then it probably wasn’t the best choice for me.
ARC was bought in December, 1987, in a hostile takeover by Sequa Corp. There’s a good article about the takeover (by then-Washington Post staff writer, Michael Isikoff, before he became a big-time political reporter and muckraker). Our Teleproducts Division was kind of an afterthought — Sequa was really interested in the missiles and defense systems of ARC. It started to dawn on some folks that our division would probably be sold off or downsized and some of the better engineers started getting jobs at other companies. One of our key Vice Presidents, Lightsey Wallace, and a few others in the company bolted to a nearby quasi-competitor, Hekimian Laboratories, in Maryland.
Posing for an ad in ARC’s demo room
In March, 1988, I was promoted to Product Line Manager for Network Management products. This made me responsible for life cycle management of multiple network management product lines, which is a fancy way of saying I had to figure out which older products to kill off and try to help grow the right new ones.
It was a nice title and a promotion, but the writing was on the wall for ARC and the Teleproducts Division. Good engineers were leaving and competitors were beating us in the marketplace. The telecom world was moving quickly and ARC under Sequa was not keeping up. In August 1989, what was left of the ARC Teleproducts Division was sold to a competitor, Telenex Corporation of Mount Laurel, NJ.
It quickly became clear that my position would likely require me moving to New Jersey. I made one or two trips to Telenex to discuss our product lines and there was nothing appealing about moving to Mount Laurel, regardless of Barb’s career.
Fortunately, a headhunter contacted me with an opportunity at Hekimian Laboratories (I never figured out if Lightsey put them onto me, but he likely did). It looked too good to pass up, and Gaithersburg, MD was a lot closer than Mount Laurel, NJ. In September 1989, I jumped ship.
Next job: Hekimian Laboratories, Inc.
Previous job: Bei Jing-Washington, Inc.
Work page: My Brilliant Careers
You must be logged in to post a comment.