Given how far ahead of the curve my colleagues at Ardsley Partners were, I have to give some kind of shout out here.
The year was 1997, and I was trying to finish up college, finally, 15 years after I had started. I was no longer a dropout, I was now a Dean's list student at the B school, and was interviewing for internships. I interviewed at some big companies ( I thought it would be a valuable experience) like IBM & Pepsi. But no one wanted an adult student it seemed, or at least me. And then I got a post card to go interview at some place called Ardsley Partners. I had no idea who they were or what they did, probably some funky direct mail envelope stuffing outfit in a sweaty room somewhere in an industrial neighborhood. I decided to call them and go interview for the experience. I had nothing to lose.
As it turns out, they had an amazing office on the water in Greenwich on Steamboat Road. There was a dock on the back of the building, and water views from all the rear facing offices. The insides were custom millwork, custom furniture, marble and fancy fixtures. I learned later that it was designed by Victoria Hagan. I remember thinking in the waiting room that whatever it is they did, I wanted to do. It reeked of success. I was a broke 34 year old who desperately needed a chance to prove himself.
Fast forward a bit and I got the internship. I was now the $10/hr IT intern, assisting their network administrator with the both of us reporting to the COO & CCO who would become a mentor and really a "work father". The network was running on Novell 4.1 SFT3, an advanced clustering solution using a fiber optic link. Heady stuff for the 1990s. The network was 10Mb and was not connected to the "internet" - yet. The workstations were Windows 3.1 for workgroups running SPX/IPX. Ardsley is a buy-side money manager, a "hedge fund" in popular terminology. The term comes from their ability to take opposite bets - to hedge their bets. They can sell short, trade options and so on. Things that Mutual funds can't do. They were created at the same time as mutual funds, by the securities act of 1940, and are also sometimes referred to in aggregate as "40 act funds". Net net, there were analysts, traders and then accounting and support staff. 30 odd folks, managing what was about $3 billion at the time. I had never seen anything like it.
One of the business problems they had was that the traders often had one or both hands tied up speaking with their counterparts, buying or selling stuff. If an analyst needed to get a message to them quickly, there really wasn't a good way to do that. My co-workers had come up with an idea - use messaging that ran over the network to pop something up on their computer screens. Flash Messaging was their brainchild, and it used the IPX connection number to ID the various stations. It built a list of available stations (users) to send to, and would tell you who sent you a message.
To address any possible arguments about who said "buy" or "sell" it logged every message on both sides and would only log if the message was successfully able to "burn through" to the front of whatever windows were displayed - eg: they all but guaranteed the messages would be seen. Later on it would be migrated to TCP/IP and use an encrypted connection so it would work well over the internet.
Novell Connection magazine wrote an article about it. A few years later, the product folks at AOL would see that and interview me about how we used IM in a business environment. (I donated the money to charity) Fast forward 20 years and Slack is a billion dollar IM company that has some great features but is still missing at least one of the things that made Flash so good - the quick reply buttons. The client UI came with a few buttons built in, "yes", "no" and "take a message". But you could add your own. Our head trader, a former floor trader from the Chicago exchange added some very colorful ones in addition to his trademark, "Danka". It encouraged brevity and helped messaging not break your focus. The logging prevented a lot of arguments. It was lightweight and stable and while it didn't have every feature, it had the right features. They sold it commercially for a few years but there were free offerings, like AOL messenger, that made it hard to sell. On the flip side, AOL was trying to figure out how to not give theirs away - which was the real reason for our interview.
Here is the UI. It looks terribly dated now, but this is what the Windows VB world had to offer then, a world populated by Pentium chips and RAM measured in MB.
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