Facebook Feedback and ofther comments
Having shared this website on Facebook I have received several responses which I am showing below. The comment is in Italics, any addition comments from me are in standard text
Nico was my Danish agent. Small business, just Nico and his wife but always very enthusiastic. What we all learnt from Nico was the possibility to automate processes. In the 1990s this was floopy disk handling. We developed a system so that a disk library would read the barcode on a floppy disk and then write the corect files to it.
Nico de Jong
Ouch, that was a BAD idea, Michael ! If I had to tell about all my adventures with InterMedia, I'll have to buy a new keyboard. Anyway, my adventures started with the demise of a previous supplier : EMS in Brussels. They had a conversion system called Octopus. At that time, we had about 15 EMS systems installed in Denmark and Norway, all in the "transaction based" industry, like Tax, Bank, etc. The solution proposed by Michael was that if the customers signed a 5-year support contract, InterMedia would supply the needed software for free, and I had to rebuild the 5-drives-in-a-box so it could be used by the software. This required the development of an AT-size card with the usual input, and the usual flat-cable connectors for the usual drives. However, a few customers had autoloaders for 3.5, 5.25 and 8" drives. The way this was solved, was to prefix the drivenumber with a 1, so drive 17 was the autoloader for drive 7. Most companies were happy to oblige. The other condition was, that when they needed other drives, they would buy at market price. To add a decent ending to this story, I can tell that when the last customer, the Danish Employers Union, left the ship in 2010, some 45 systems had been installed, ranging from 1 single drive system with a 4 mm drive, to multiple maxed-out systems with autoloaders for 2 drives (17 and 15) equipped with barcode equipment for the reading of labels. This was the Danske Bank with 3 identical systems.
Steve, a programmer did most of the development for the SCSI subsystem within InterMedia. This was used, I believe, with only small changes until the end of MM/PC. He moved to Australia when he left InterMedia and is still there.
Steve Ireland
Late 1980's Intermedia developed a SCSI driver for early Adaptec ISA cards that enabled DTP to use a range of new devices mainly magnetic tape drives. Lyn in the "Media Conversion Bureau" loved getting mag tapes as her media conversion rates were based on Kilobytes processed and MagTapes held huge amounts of data! Kerching!
Michael who I think was fed up with looking after mag tape drives and formats, one day asked me to come for a drive in his Beamer (or a Merc ?) (I think it was my TR7 with the hood down)
to Shoreham. We visited a double glazing company that Michael had part ownership in. We don't mention this venture 🤣. It was on this drive he said 'How would you like to look after the mag tape side of media conversion". Sure no worries Michael. Was not a choice. It was a challenging technical challenge like all things in Intermedia. I really enjoyed the work.
Jules - known as Julian in InterMedia days. He was I think first in customer support and then sales support. Always keen on tech and I seem to remember radios
I can remember our German agent asking if the system worked on networks so you tasked me with contacting either 3com or Novell, asking for a loan ‘Network’ including 3C509 network cards and building up a small network to test. I also recall our move (Syd’s idea I believe), and adding a Newbridge Networks printing network to the portfolio, using a proprietary interface, and launching Interlink PS&T a Linotype interface for the emerging ‘DTP’ Software that started to appear and wouldn’t directly drive typesetters. My head hurts now Michael Cotgrove