Everybody knows the term "beta test" but hardly anybody knows where it came from or what it really means. Well, folks, it's an IBM term dating back fifty years and more. And beta testing was preceded by alpha testing. Let's talk about that.

Alpha was IBM's term for in-house testing. Like Microsoft they made every effort to use their own products in house, and to become dependent on them. This was because the definition of a product -- its capabilities, look and appearance, packaging, etc -- comes only from the real world of use.

So IBM would create a product and then put it into service in-house. This is part of the product definition phase and they called beta because just as beta follows alpha, so does field test follow in-house test.

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Many software vendors go directly to beta thinking that they can bypass alpha. What usually happens instead is that beta becomes alpha, and the guinea pig customers become very unhappy because they think they're buying a finished, debugged product when in fact the party is only just beginning.

With FS Flight Training, and with AirBoss , my PC Game Controls company is not going to make that mistake. I've been working with a tester, Michael Blomberg, whose mission in life it is to help me determine what an AirBoss is.

You see, the Golden Midi experience taught me that while you can go through the motions of developing a product, and while you may think that you've got it styled because you don't know of any bugs, the fact is that only your customers can tell you what business you're in.

Michael Blomberg is the first AirBoss customer. When he says "Can you ..." or "Gee, I wish ..." or "I'm getting frustrated ..." or blah blah blah, I have the opportunity to make changes to AirBoss without angering a whole bunch of early adopters.

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Michael asked me yesterday whether I have a schedule. "Only a very loose one" I said "because the product will be ready when it's ready, and not before, and it's not ready yet, though I can see it from here."

When I think that AirBoss is ready, and when I think that the FS Flight Training set of products is ready, then and only then will we be going to beta test.

That's right. We're going to pre-announce the products and, as much as possible, work with actual customers who will be told that they are guinea pigs.

Why should they do it?

Because they will have the same opportunity that Michael Blomberg does -- a chance to help shape the product definition to arrive at something that fits them to a T.

Of course by the time we get there I hope it will be more a matter of refinement than of the kinds of outright changes that Michael has been helping me want, but you never know. Here's a story about that ...

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Early in the product's development I was product manager for DEC's R-80 removable disk drive. This was a revolutionary product -- 500 MB in a package not much larger than a milk crate. :)

The project began in Massachussetts but was moved to Colorado Springs about the same time that the early prototypes were coming on the air. The protos worked fine in Massachussetts, but they died in the Springs.

I made the wild guess that the head flutter we were seeing was because of the thinner air. Maynard, MA is at about 25 feet MSL. Springs is at about 6,000. My guess proved to be correct but that didn't help a lot -- the engineers still had to make the drive work. This was a crisis because the VAX had just been announced, but essentially no VAX machines would ship unless the R-80 had entered volume production.

At just about the time this problem was surfacing, we got a new manager of Storage Systems -- disks and magtapes. I don't remember the gentleman's name but when the following incident occured I realized that he was a Good Guy. (Which meant that he would not last long at DEC, which had become totally political by then.)

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I'm going to call this fellow "John". The manager of Disk Engineering, Grant Saviers, who now reported to John, came to the Springs every six weeks with his royal entourage in tow -- about thirty people. I mean no criticism of Grant, he's a crackerjack engineer and a brilliant manager. However, by then the DEC culture had changed to the point where sixty people were looking over his shoulder, and thirty of them insisted on coming out to the Springs with him.

Anyway, one fateful day about four months into the problem, with no solution in sight, the newly hired John came out with Grant and his groupies. As the usual 3-day meeting convened, John turned to Grant and asked "When will this drive be ready?" Grant hemmed and hawed and then said "In three months".

"Wrong answer" said John. "It will be ready when Paul Esling, the Project Engineer, says that it's ready."

John then turned to Paul and asked "When will this drive be ready". Paul's answer was, "I don't know".

"Right answer" said John. "Now lets's talk about how to identify and fix the problems. Forget the schedule, as of right now there is no schedule, only hard work."

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Predictably, John didn't last long. And when he was fired I realized that the DEC I had known and loved was gone forever. The Wall Streeters had put enough pressure on the company to let the VP of Finance start driving the train that the board, and founder Ken Olsen, had to make concessions to them. The result was the destruction of the company, just like Passport's SOB meant the stillbirth of their MIDI sequences business.

So I became an entrepreneur and, except for the occasional short stint as a wage slave, have been one ever since these events of almost thirty years ago.

Have I been a financial success?

No, but the words of the wife of a detective in one of my True Crime books have some relevance here ...

"He kept us poor but there was never a dull moment."

Exactly.

I might get weak from starvation but what the hey, I was born poor. What I could never tolerate would be to die of boredom.