How bricks-and-mortar retailing got modern
When he got to Columbus, Ohio, my late father Peter Monash helped make retail industry history. So before I continue a more personal view of his life story, let me talk a bit about the broader industry dynamics. I am, on the whole, no expert on retailing.* But perhaps I know just enough to get the discussion kicked off.
*Well, there was that one time Duane Naccarato and I did strategic consulting for a Central American general merchant chain. But that only came about because their culture put strong emphasis on personal friendships, family connections, and the like. Also, one of the many things they needed to upgrade was their information systems …
Big stores were only made possible by technologies such as (fairly) modern transportation and, for that matter, electric lighting. Malls, well-stocked specialty stores, further depended on developments such as automobiles and suburbs. So as of the 1970s, the modern retail industry really wasn’t all that old. Read more
| Categories: Personal, Peter and Anita Monash | 8 Comments |
Peter Monash, the second quarter-century
If you knew my late father Peter Monash, you knew him to be a very personable and social man.* Frankly, I don’t know any stories from his life in Germany or France that particularly bear that out, save perhaps in the immediate WW2 aftermath when — like everybody else — he was scrounging resources so that he and his family could survive. But it sure came into play as soon as he got to the US. He lived in poverty in New Haven, CT, working as a dishwasher. But he also fell in with a group of Yale students, who set about “Americanizing” him. He got progressively more decent jobs. He took one or the other Yale extension course, the basis for wild academic resume inflation later (in fact, he never actually graduated the equivalent of high school). He blew the covers off a prototype IQ test. He had an active social life. And he did his part to bring the rest of his family to the US to be with him.
*And if you didn’t know him, you may not care much about the narrative in this post.
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Peter Ernest Monash, the European years
The man later known as Peter Ernest Monash was born Ernst Rainer Monasch, on August 16, 1924, in the German town of Rudolstadt, where his father Alfred Monasch had recently opened a factory that employed a couple hundred of workers. His life was probably not unlike that of an only child, in that his brother and sister were 10 and 11 years older respectively. He was smart, high-strung, fast, and short. From all I know he was basically a normal kid, leading what for that era and socioeconomic class was a normal life. I know from one story that he was lousy at Latin, but I’d guess that overall he did pretty well in school — and even that supposedly not-known Latin was, from time to time, quoted to me at the dinner table.
In 1933, the Nazis took power. Read more
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Where I’m going with these obituaries
I have multiple motives or angles in writing about my late parents (and other deceased relatives).
- When people die, their friends and acquaintances have some curiosity about their lives. I am inclined to oblige that, perhaps at greater length than is common.
- As you can see from the fact that this blog exists, I am generally interested in recording history. In writing about my parents, grandparents, and so on, I can touch on:
- The general history of various eras. My maternal grandfather engaged in quite a few hijinks wearing top hat and tails.
- Certain political high- or low-lights. The story of the “Mischlinge” in the Holocaust is not widely known. In an era of increasing Holocaust denial, I generally want to add to its documentation. I’ll touch briefly on McCarthyism as well.
- Business history. When I’m not repurposing it for personal subjects, this is a business history blog. My father helped make retail business history. Some of his insights influenced my own thoughts about other industry sectors.
- To a remarkable extent, I am my family’s last survivor. I am not just an only child but, on both sides, an only grandchild as well. I do not plan to have children of my own. In essence, there is nobody to tell my family’s stories to except “the world at large.”
- I’d like to lay out some “lessons learned” about elder care, medical care in general, and perhaps other topics as well.
That’s a lot. If it ever is completed, it will cover a lot of different blog posts. So please understand if any one post in particular feels a little bit sparse or incomplete — it’s just a piece of a larger whole.
The series so far
- Introduction to the lives and marriage of Peter and Anita Monash. The first post in the series, it also has details such as time of death.
- Religion and the Holocaust in the lives of Peter Monash, Anita Monash, and my grandparents.
- Peter Monash’s life before he immigrated to the United States.
- Peter Monash’s life his first quarter-century in the United States.
- The peak of Peter Monash’s working life, and the overall business movement in which he played a key part.
- Anita Monash’s life until she got married.
- Anita Monash’s life from marriage through retirement.
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My family and religion
My mother’s grandparents all died in Nazi concentration camps.* My father escaped from the labor camp at Zerbst the night before the inmates expected to be massacred, when an American air raid destroyed their just-completed project and, along the way, knocked out the electric fence. Read more
| Categories: Personal, Peter and Anita Monash | 10 Comments |
A bad week in the Monash family
This is the week of my parents’ deaths. My father, Peter Ernest Monash, born August 16, 1924 in Rudolstadt, Germany, had his ventilator turned off Wednesday, October 27 at 11:02 pm. Time of death was 11:15 pm. My mother, Anita Kaete Monash (nee’ Jonas), born June 23, 1928 in Dresden, Germany, was transitioned to palliative-only care a day later. She is being given neither nutrition, fluids, nor medication (other than for pain or anxiety). Her death is imminent.
Edit: Anita Monash’s time of death wound up being 4:10 am, Saturday, October 30, 53 hours after her husband’s.
Memorial service plans have not yet been firmed up. Please make in-lieu-of-flowers donations to the Clinton Foundation, which is doing terrific work in Haiti relief, microfinance, tropical disease, HIV/AIDS, and much, much more. Read more
| Categories: Personal, Peter and Anita Monash | 26 Comments |
Ray Lane and the integration of software and consulting at Oracle
Oracle pretty much doubled revenue every year until it got around the $1 billion level. Then things got tougher, industry-standard revenue recognition scandals not excepted. At one point there were only three buildings on the Oracle campus, with large portions of them eerily empty. But the ship righted itself, best exemplified by three transitions:
- Mature financial management arrived in the person of Jeff Henley.
- A serious commitment to product quality emerged, often credited to the late Bob Koii.
- Mike Fields* brought enterprise-class adult supervision to Oracle’s US field operations.
Political battles still raged at Oracle — Mike Fields vs. Craig Conway, Terry Garnett vs. Jerry Baker, and later on Mark Benioff vs. pretty much everybody. But the company was ready to move to next level. Read more
| Categories: Application software, Oracle, SAP | 10 Comments |
Ingres history
Roland Bouman reminded us on Twitter of an old post I did on another blog about Ingres history, the guts of which was:
Ingres and Oracle were developed around the same time, in rapidly-growing startup companies. Ingres generally was the better-featured product, moving a little earlier than Oracle into application development tools, distributed databases, etc., whereas Oracle seems to be ahead on the most important attributes, such as SQL compatibility — Oracle always used IBM’s suggested standard of SQL, while Ingres at first used the arguably superior Quel from the INGRES research project. Oracle eventually pulled ahead on superior/more aggressive sales and marketing.
Then in the 1990s, Ingres just missed the DBMS architecture boat. Oracle, Informix, Microsoft, and IBM all came out with completely new products, based respectively on Oracle + Rdb, Informix + a joint Ingres/Sequent research project, Sybase, and mainframe DB2. Ingres’s analogous effort basically floundered, in no small part because they made the pound-wise, penny-foolish decision to walk away from a joint venture research product they’d undertaken with innovative minicomputer vendor Sequent in the Portland, OR area.
Computer Associates bought Ingres in mid-1994, and immediately brought me in to do a detailed strategic evaluation. (Charles Wang telephoned the day the acquisition closed, in one of the more surprising phone calls I’ve ever gotten, but I digress … Anyhow, the relevant NDA agreements, legal and moral alike, have long since expired.) There was nothing terribly wrong with the product, but unfortunately there was nothing terribly right either. Aggressive investment — e.g., to get fully competitive in parallelism and object/relational functionality, the two biggest competitive differentiators in those days — would have been no guarantee of renewed market success.
Notwithstanding the economic question marks, CA surprised me with its enthusiasm for taking on these technical challenges. But another problem reared its head — almost all the core developers left the company. (If you weren’t willing to sign a noncompete agreement that was utterly ridiculous in those days, at least in the hot Northern California market, you couldn’t keep your job post-merger.) And so, like almost all CA acquisitions outside of the system management/security/data center areas, Ingres fell further and further behind the competition.
Some of the same information made it into my post here on Ingres history later the same year, but for some reason not all did.
| Categories: Database management systems, Ingres, Oracle | 2 Comments |
David Childs
Talking to Algebraix reminded me that David Childs is still alive and kicking. I only ever encountered Childs once, in the early/mid-1980s, when he was pushing his company Set Theoretic Information Systems. The main customer example for STIS was General Motors, for which he had achieved a remarkable amount of database compression. It was something like 4-5X, if I recall correctly, but for 1983 or whatever that was pretty darned good. The idea was to replace data by partitioning according to shared values. E.g., you didn’t store whether cars were red, blue, or green; instead, you stored records about all the red cars in one place, the blue cars in another, and so on. There was also some set-theoretic mumbo-jumbo, but I never figured out what it had to do with implementing anything.
Comshare — a BI vendor before anybody called it BI — did actually build a DBMS based on Childs’ ideas, as Ron Jeffries reminds us. It was relational. Eventually, if I recall correctly, it was swapped out for Essbase (the original MOLAP product, now owned by Oracle).
What Childs really focuses on, however, seems to be “Extended Set Theory.” (This was brought to my attention by Algebraix, even though Algebraix doesn’t actually use many of Childs’ ideas.) And he’s been doing it for a long time. Way back in 1968, Childs wrote a paper outlining how set theory, relations, and tuples could be applied to data management.
And that’s where I did a double-take, because 1968 < 1970. Sure enough, Footnote #1 in Codd’s seminal paper is to Childs’ 1968 work. Indeed, Childs’ paper is the only predecessor Codd acknowledges as having significant portions of his idea.
I’m far from convinced that “Extended set theory” has much to offer versus the standard relational model. But that debate quite aside — Childs’ original achievement doesn’t get the credit it deserves.
| Categories: Analytics, Database management systems | 3 Comments |
Those who forget history are doomed to believe it is recurring
The top PostgreSQL-related April Fool’s joke this year, which seems to have successfully pranked at least a few people, was that Postgres is dropping SQL in favor of an alternative language QUEL.
Folks, QUEL was the original language for Postgres. And Ingres. And, more or less, Teradata.* I’d guess Britton-Lee too, but I don’t recall for sure.
*Once upon a distant time, when I was a cocky young stock analyst, I explained to Phil Neches, chief scientist of Teradata, just why it was a really good business idea to drop T-QUEL for SQL. I doubt he was convinced quite on that day, more’s the pity.
| Categories: Database management systems, Fun stuff, Ingres, Teradata | Leave a Comment |