Dead kelly, p.2
Ticket Masters, page 2
By the fall of 1966, however, TRS still had nothing to show for itself beyond an estimable board of directors. Part of the problem was focused, capable leadership. The company remained a sidelight for Bronfman, who had a liquor company to run and was beginning his push into film. Broadway producer George W. George, who had taken an exploratory role via a feasibility study that led him to pitch a computerized ticketing system to Bronfman, found himself swallowed up by George’s vocation, with Happily Never After, The Great Indoors, Ben Franklin in Paris and Any Wednesday all on the boards during this time period.4 The Ultronic System Corporation had been tapped as a programming partner for TRS but, lacking steady direction, soon committed all available resources to its new global stock quotation service.
So, despite the company’s pedigree, TRS might have remained a well-funded abstraction had Bronfman not approached Jack Quinn in early October 1966. Quinn, who was then forty-five years old, possessed experience with start-ups as well as a general technical understanding of the issues brought to bear by the undertaking.5 Quinn had spent the 1950s at Kimball Systems, Inc., where he rose to vice president and marketing director while developing a perforated sales tag that functioned as an early version of the present-day bar code (one highlight was a cold call at the Sears Tower that eventually led the company to place the tags on all Sears garments at the point of manufacture). He would become the driving force that brought TRS online.
When Bronfman approached him, Quinn, who had recently left his post as VP at Litton Automated Business Systems, recognized not only the business opportunity but also the potential returns for his wife and eight kids. Quinn’s wife, Jane (like many of the unnamed spouses to follow, as this was still an era of “Mad Men”), deserves her share of credit. She recalls the initial days after he took the position: “Jack spent that entire weekend at our dining room table on the first business plan. I was running a second corporation, which was a family of eight children. I spent all weekend making sure they were busy to keep them away from Daddy because he had a big project. But he was able to concentrate in the middle of the chaos. That weekend he wrote the first attempt at a business plan and drew the first sketches to be used for the patent [which was eventually granted].”
Quinn recognized that, to launch TRS, he needed to focus simultaneously on three essential elements: outlets, clients and a system (not necessarily in that order, as it would become something of a tightrope act, providing assurances to everyone while working to achieve what he represented as a fait accompli). So began the saga of Jack Quinn, which a few years later at his farewell party, one of “Jack’s Guys” committed to rhyme. The poem opens:
Listen employees, a tale I shall spin
Of the four year ride of a Jack named Quinn.
On the fifteenth of October in ’66
He started in doing his Ticketron Shticks.
He started with nothing — like the man in the barrel
A little cash from Edgar and a little Cash named Carol [his secretary was named Carol Cash]
And a passionate feeling deep down in his genes
That folks would buy tickets from funny machines.
Responsibility for the “funny machines” was left to Harvey Dubner, who made some decisions that would have long-term repercussions for the fate of TRS. As he had initially suggested to Quinn, rather than using a mainframe, he opted for a minicomputer. Not quite as compact as the personal computers that would arrive in the 1970s, minicomputers were closer in bulk to large office desks. The creation of the integrated circuit allowed these machines to be more manageable in size and a bit less temperamental in their maintenance needs. In A History of Modern Computing Paul Ceruzzi writes, “One could obtain a minicomputer and not feel obliged also to get a restrictive lease agreement, a climate-controlled room or a team of technicians whose job it seemed to be keeping users away.”
The computer that would remain at the heart of the TRS system for well over a decade was the Control Data 1700. In the summer of 1957 Bill Norris, head of the UNIVAC division at Sperry Rand, resigned along with many other key employees, including the eccentric, virtuoso engineer Seymour Cray. They soon founded the Control Data Corporation, setting up shop in downtown Minneapolis.6 By the middle of the 1960s, with IBM swiftly gaining traction to the point where the industry was described as IBM and the Seven Dwarves (Control Data, Sperry Rand, Honeywell, RCA, General Electric, Burroughs and NCR), Norris’s company distinguished itself and rose to number two in worldwide sales by focusing on niche markets, building machines for scientific and military applications. The “Big Box,” the CDC 6600, which Cray designed, exceeded any IBM machine in terms of performance and price point. As something of an afterthought, Cray, who worked in his own Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin lab nearly 100 miles away from corporate headquarters, also created a smaller computer to service input and output functions for a larger machine. This device soon inaugurated a line of minicomputers that would prove lucrative, even if much of CDC’s focus would remain on the so-called supercomputers, where it dominated the market.
Here is where many critics of Ticket Reservation Systems and its successor, Ticketron, would later get things wrong. It is certainly true that Control Data made its name on mainframes and would remain in that business well into the 1980s, long past the point when this represented prudent business sense. However, the computer that Dubner placed at the center of the new system was slightly larger than an office copier from the 1990s. The CDC 1700 appears with Bill Norris in a photo that ran alongside an October 2, 1965 Business Week feature on the new machine, “Control Data Widens Line,” and one can find matching equipment in the TRS marketing brochure.
Unlike the IBMs, which typically ran on the company’s own operating system and software (which is how IBM ensconced itself in the business market until the PC era), the CDC 1700 was a bit more pliable. So Dubner and half a dozen CAI employees under his watch took the 1700 and made a series of modifications, crafting a custom operating system.
Larry Littwin ran computer operations after Dubner and CAI completed their work.7 He explains: “Most systems today and then came with an operating system, but an operating system is inherently inefficient because it’s meant to handle any case that you might want to run on the computer. So Dubner and CAI wrote their own which was much smaller, more efficient and much faster than the standard operating system. The performance of the system was such that it could do a lot more than people ever thought because it was running a very application-specific software custom tailored to do just the job it was doing.”
Dubner’s operating system required only 5,000 words of memory and would achieve a transparency that he would describe in the title of a paper he delivered at a computer conference in 1970: “Ticketron — a successful operating system without an operating system.”
While that operating system may have been the height of efficiency, the corresponding equipment provided to the remote outlets did not share that designation. The “agent sets,” as described in the initial TRS brochure, did not provide visual support through a cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor. Instead outlets were provided with a ticket printer, a Teletype printer and a “latched keyboard” on which the keys remained depressed after someone typed each entry until manually released (an article written shortly after TRS commenced operations described the units as “accordion-like teletype machines”). While the CRT-free system may have been a relatively cost-effective way for TRS to place its systems in multiple remote locations, it limited users’ ability to glean info at a glance, and the clatter of the Teletype was not altogether suitable for retail settings.
What’s more, for the first few years, the ticket printing process had its quirks. For efficiency’s sake each printer received bursts of information in thirds. The system then briefly polled other units, occasionally creating hybrid Frankentickets that mixed and matched various orders. The printers themselves also could be erratic, and Bill Schmitt, who eventually joined Ticketron as company president in the early 1970s, shares one situation in which the company took extreme steps to ensure reliability: “There was an early demonstration of the system for the press, and while I can’t vouch for this personally, I heard as a rumor that they hired a midget to push out tickets.”8
Returning to the poem at Jack Quinn’s farewell dinner, some of these initial challenges were referenced in couplets:
Then Jack sold the pilot: in the New Theatre they’d stick it;
(And it took just two minutes to print out one ticket).
But the show was a smash and business was fine
And a lady had twins while waiting in line.
So back to the drawing boards; once more they began
With Tinkertoy printers they bought from Di/An.
Di/An Controls had been enlisted to create the second batch of printer units. However, TRS soon turned to Control Data to assist with the next round, a decision that further entwined the futures of the two companies.9
With system development now in motion (a motion that proved nearly perpetual in the first few years), Quinn set his sights on an outlet network. Given the company’s initial focus on Broadway ticketing, he gravitated toward banks and travel bureaus to host the “Electronic Box Office Terminals.” By the time of TRS’s formal launch, its outlets would be found at American Express offices, Chase Manhattan, Broadway Bank and Temple Travel Services. Quinn and his team also pitched retail stores, emphasizing not only the added foot traffic but also, initially, the additional source of revenue. TRS’s approach can be seen in a 1967 Supermarket News article that emphasized that, although agents would pay “a $150 monthly equipment rental and miscellaneous overhead,” they would earn twenty-five cents per ticket fee. If they sold “two hundred tickets daily, they could gross $1,250 per month.”
A few retailers did eventually sign on, with Grand Union supermarkets and Abraham & Straus department stores among the initial partners. The flagship retailer, however, was Gimbels, which committed its iconic Herald Square store (the setting of the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street and a frequent shopping destination of Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz). The announcement of Gimbels’ participation carried a degree of star power as Edgar Bronfman himself appeared for a rare company photo op alongside a Gimbels executive.
As it turned out, the initial commission projections far exceeded the actual monthly revenue. These numbers would rise in the early 1970s once TRS moved beyond Broadway and into the world of rock music. However, that higher volume would be accompanied by bigger heartache.
Kurt Devlin, another early TRS employee (and the iron man of computerized ticketing, now in his fourth decade in the business, working for the Shubert Organization), notes: “The department stores came to view ticketing not as a profit center but mostly as a crowd attractant. So they would put it in the furthest, most obscure back part of the store, so that when you went in you had to walk through the entire store, with the hope you would stop and buy something. They liked that business but they hated some of the rock business. When they had to sell the Grateful Dead or Jethro Tull, they didn’t like the people coming through the store.”
Matt Whelan, who joined Ticketron in the mid-1970s, adds: “I had a lot of dealings with Sears and Roebuck. We sold it to them as a way to get people into their stores. The executives at Sears sort of liked the concept, but then you had the little old lady behind the counter. In the early days sometimes the computers ran smoothly and sometimes they didn’t. If the lady went on lunch and you put Led Zeppelin on sale, well, she didn’t care about Led Zeppelin; she cared about lunch.”
In the spring of 1967 Jack Quinn wasn’t fixated on rock music either. In fact the company as a whole took little interest in the genre, as evidenced by its brochure, which didn’t specify rock concerts among the TRS targets: theater, sports, motion pictures, summer stock, supper clubs, non-profit and college events and “all other reserve seat spectator attractions.” So Quinn occupied himself in making the rounds from theater office to theater office, attempting to enlist any producers or theater owners willing to commit their ticket inventory to the new, untried system. Edgar Bronfman took a hand as well, tapping into his many networks (and presumably offering up occasional complimentary cases of Crown Royal).
The proposed TRS business model directed nearly fifty cents of gross income from every ticket into company coffers. The tickets themselves typically carried a service charge of twenty-five to fifty cents, half of which would return to the outlet. TRS also would collect a twenty-five cent “inside charge” from the theaters, producers and sports teams who utilized the system. This amount would not be generated from an additional expense to the consumer but would be contributed by the TRS client. In addition, venues paid a monthly rental fee for each box office terminal (somewhere in the neighborhood of $150) and a monthly service charge based on the total volume of seats sold, an expense that typically reached $500 to $1,000.
This approach resulted in some tensions regarding the price point of the service charges added to each ticket. TRS clients accepted the expense of the service in the belief that the inside charges would be more than offset by the overall increases in ticket sales. Part of these calculations took into consideration the ultimate cost to the consumer. As a result, the facilities resisted even the smallest of incremental increases to the service charges, which yielded no direct financial benefit while potentially alienating ticket buyers.
Ultimately a single Broadway theater production, an off-Broadway show and a soon-to-be-defunct sports team were willing to participate in the launch, for which TRS waived its fees to clinch participation. On July 6, 1967, TRS finally debuted its self-described pilot project (an earlier announcement had proved premature). I Do! I Do! produced by David Merrick and starring Mary Martin and Robert Preston, was then seven months into its run at the 46th Street Theater and in need of a ticket sales jolt. Also signing on was Drums in the Night, then appearing in Greenwich Village at the Circle in the Square Theater, as well as the National Professional Soccer League’s New York Generals, who had already started their first (and only) season in the NPSL.
The debut of TRS was mostly successful in that tickets were indeed sold from remote locations, although there were still a few kinks, which again were reflected in the poetic serenade to Jack Quinn:
They sold tickets at Gimbels; while half of the troops
Were back at the office, counting the dupes.
When clients complained, with a smile on his mug
Jack would buy them a drink, and say “It’s a bug!”
But no matter the problems, he just kept on goin’,
And told bigger whoppers to Merrick and Cohen.
A few instances of double-sold seats provided only a minor distraction for TRS, which otherwise basked in the media’s fascination with its operations. The New York Times reported somewhat breathlessly (for the New York Times, that is) on the TRS pilot, with an account from Gimbels on the opening day of ticket sales. The article quoted Quinn’s assertion that “TRS is the first major innovation in 100 years in the sales of reserved seat tickets for entertainment events.” Drama reporter Louis Calta marveled at the technological achievement whereby “automated machines called terminal units are hooked up by telephone lines to a central computer at 15 East 26th Street, which has been programmed to handle ticket requests.” National papers also took interest in TRS and television soon followed suit.
One morning in mid-1967 news of the TRS launch reached Los Angeles, where Roy Bellman watched a report on NBC’s Today Show that provided remote coverage of the “world’s first computerized ticketing system.” He felt as if the floor had dropped out beneath him: “I thought we were developing the world’s first computerized ticketing system.”
ON JUNE 10, 1966, a self-described “automation consultant” named Walter T. McHale made a presentation in the El Segundo, California offices of the Computer Sciences Corporation. CSC had been founded seven years earlier by Fletcher Jones and Roy Nutt, who met in an IBM user group while each worked in data processing for the aerospace industry. The pair correctly anticipated that the future of computing would rely increasingly on independent software. CSC swiftly secured its first contract, creating a business language compiler called FACT for Honeywell, translating a higher level of programming language into a more accessible one. By 1965 Computer Sciences had become the largest company in the United States exclusively producing software, and the thirty-two-year-old Jones was among the entrepreneurs solicited for advice in a Time magazine cover story entitled “Millionaires: How They Do It.”
Before a team of junior CSC executives, McHale, who had previously run a data processing division at Security National Bank, outlined “The Teleticket Concept.” His introductory materials explained, “The Teleticket system was designed to update the ticket distribution function of the entertainment industry by application of the latest techniques of automation. The basic concept is all seats to all events within a geographical area (such as Southern California) are stored in a central electronic file. This total inventory of available seats is accessible through 200 to 300 outlets via a ticket printing terminal. Total transaction time is measured in seconds. Under this concept, promoters of events will contract with the Teleticket Corporation for storage of their seating information in the central computer. The Teleticket Corporation will provide the network of distribution outlets.”
