ASK Computer Systems

~ the eulogy ~

The founding story fits in one sentence and has been retold until it wore smooth. In 1972 Sandra Kurtzig left a job at General Electric and started writing software part-time in the second bedroom of her house, on two thousand dollars of her own savings. She incorporated two years later. There was no venture capital at any point, which in Silicon Valley terms makes the whole company an anomaly before you get to anything else about it.

ManMan was what it ended up selling. The product was salable by 1978 and it did manufacturing resource planning: what parts are in the building against what the line needs on Thursday. It ran on Hewlett-Packard minicomputers and a copy cost six figures, which tells you the customer was a factory and not a person. ASK went public in October 1981. Revenue was 76 million dollars in 1986 and 206 million by 1990, and by 1992 Entrepreneur put it at 450 million with around 2,400 people behind it.

Kurtzig's own relationship with the thing was not a straight line. She began handing over duties in 1984, the year Ronald Branniff became president. He took the chief executive's job the following year, when she resigned it. She came back at the board's request in mid-1989, appointed a new president in 1992, and stepped back again to the chairmanship. The failed ASK Micro venture of 1984 cost a million dollars to close, and her verdict on it is the best line anyone connected to the company ever gave a reporter: they had their fingerprints all over the murder weapon.

~ the dossier ~

~ what ingres cost ~

In 1990 ASK bought Relational Technology Inc., the company behind the Ingres database, for 110 million dollars. To pay for it, it sold 30 percent of itself to Hewlett-Packard and EDS for 60 million, and cut 270 jobs, around twelve percent of the Ingres workforce, in the merger. Kurtzig called the deal a home run in the Wall Street Journal at the time.

Whether the Ingres purchase is what finished ASK is a question nobody answers cleanly in print, and it is tempting to write the story that way because the timing is neat. What the sources do support is thinner and duller. The company was on minicomputers and stayed there, shipping upgrades where it could have been building something for the hardware that was arriving. The 1992 results carried a 44 million dollar loss on write-offs even though revenue was up more than 23 percent.

~ speedbird ~

Computer Associates signed the merger agreement on 18 May 1994, and the vehicle it used to do the buying was a subsidiary named Speedbird. The tender offer went out at 13.25 dollars a share in cash for all of the roughly 23.2 million shares outstanding, and on 23 June 1994 Speedbird accepted them for payment. CA's own filing puts the total funds needed at about 330 million dollars. The legal merger followed on 20 September.

ManMan then went the way of most products CA acquired in that period, which is to say that nothing was announced about it either way. It never had a shutdown date. It has frozen installations and third-party consultants instead, with factories still running a release from the mid-1990s and nobody funded to replace it.

~ the spare room ~

None of this was in a part of the industry that reached ordinary users anywhere, let alone a Turkish one. Manufacturing software is the layer under the layer: you see the finished box in a shop and the thing that scheduled its parts is four companies away and has a six-figure license. I came to all of it through the paperwork, two decades after the paperwork was filed.

The beginning and the end sit badly next to each other, which is the reason to write it down. Two thousand dollars and a spare bedroom in 1972, and a 330 million dollar cash tender in 1994, with a shell company called Speedbird signing for it.

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