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                       Stories about a software company

> Mercator Software, TSI International Software at the time, was my entry to
> the professional information technology (IT) world. It couldn't have come
> at a more interesting time, the peak of the dot-com bubble. We weren't a
> dot-com company, we were in business years before the Internet, but we were
> swept away by the madness. In a flash it was a billion-dollar company, only
> to sink in equally spectacular fashion. And there's me in 1998, last one in
> the office that unseasonably warm night, about to witness it all.
>
> **Semi-Disclaimer:** My experience at Mercator is not comparable to the
> majority of employees who worked there over the years. I worked at the
> Bannockburn Illinois office which supported their line of EDI/B2B software.
> The home office was off in Wilton Connecticut and the flagship Mercator
> product line was developed down in Florida.
>

“HuguesJohnson.com - The Abridged Story of Mercator Software [1]”

I'm finding it odd to read a story about a company I worked (however briefly)
for. I was hired on as a contractor in Florida office in the mid-90s by a
friend [2] who worked there and my job at the time was to help port the
software to various flavors of Unix popular at the time. I spent less than a
year at the company and I probably departed long before Hugues Johnson [3]
started. Two things I remember about working there—one, the computer that
ordered parts for itself [4], and two, the product produced cost anywhere
from (I think) $1,500 (Windows version) to over $50,000 (for the computer
that ordered parts for itself), and it was the same codebase. I remember
thinking to myself, for $50,000 all you got was a 3½ floppy disk and one
sheet of instructions? Shouldn't you get a bit more for that amount?

I still know two people who work on the project to this day (still in
Florida, but they work for IBM [5]). And the funny thing is—even though they
both work on the same product, they've never met each other! (although
they've heard of each other).

[1] http://huguesjohnson.com/programming/mercator/
[2] https://twitter.com/colbydyess
[3] http://huguesjohnson.com/bio.html
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2002/01/09.2
[5] http://www.ibm.com/

Email author at [email protected]