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