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Nick Hodge is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

-33.831416, 151.222526

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North Ryde, NSW 2113

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Who are the Munge Brothers?

By Nick Hodge | November 25, 2001

Who are the Munge Broth­ers, & What is this Munge Thing?

pre-Munge Brother Mythology.

Prior to join­ing Apple Com­puter Aus­tralia, I worked for a reseller in Adelaide, Ran­dom Access (Ran­dom Access, Adelaide).

In early 1991 I was near a burn-out situ­ation. It reached a point where I told the Man­ager of the reseller to “get me some help or else!”

Sub­sequently, RA advert­ised for another Sys­tems Engin­eer. There was only one can­did­ate who stood out: Mike Seyfang.

Prior to join­ing RA, Mike worked at Eld­ers IXL (a pas­trol, real-estate and broker­age com­pany) as “End User Com­put­ing Man­ager.” Whatever the hell that meant … see, I was a Apple/Macintosh-centric Sys­tems Engin­eer with no formal Inform­a­tion Technology/Management Inform­a­tion Sys­tems train­ing. Mike, on the other hand, was had a degree in Chem­istry! Now, that was more relevant.

Com­ing from a Mainframe/PC back­ground, and Hyper­Card pro­gram­mer in his spare time, he was the per­fect fit.

Mike remem­bers his first day on the job. It was straight after the Easter long week­end. I had spent it installing Ingres, A/UX and Apple’s Data Access Lan­guage on a Macin­tosh IIci. Without doc­u­ment­a­tion. The aim was to show Mike that “we Apple people knew about ser­i­ous IT stuff, too.” This week­end of hack­ing did not impress my wife: she was 6 months preg­nant at the time! On his first Tues­day, I sat Mike down and demon­strated Apple’s Data Access Lan­guage (DAL — Again, Apple demon­strated it was sooo far ahead and then dropped the ball. RIP) as mid­dle­ware to link Excel, a query tool and Hyper­Card to a Unix-based Rela­tional data­base. Need­less to say, Mike was impressed!

The very next day Mike and I flew to Sydney to meet “rel­ev­ant” people at Apple Aus­tralia and other dis­trib­ut­ors. One of the most import­ant people we vis­ited was the legendary Apple Sys­tems Engin­eer, Garry Turner. (Garry now works for Cisco). RA’s man­ager thought it was import­ant to build the rela­tion­ships early.

Another Gary, Gary Vial — RA’s Travel Agent — booked Mike and I in a hotel in Oxford Street, Sydney. In a twin-room suite. Now, for those of you who do not know Sydney, Oxford Street is in the middle of the gay sec­tion of the city. Mike and I had noth­ing against gay people, but we were both mar­ried men with kids (or on the way) — and Mike didn’t really know me at all. When the male recep­tion­ist sug­ges­ted we go to the 10th floor for a relax­ing spa — well, poor Mike didn’t know what to think! It didn’t help that there was a dry cleaner out­side our win­dow called the “Come Clean Laun­dry” Hmmm.

There are two dis­tinct memor­ies that I have of this jaunt to Sydney. One was Garry Turner explain­ing the lay of the Apple land­scape. It did not bode well for resellers of Ran­dom Access’ ilk *unless* they entered the value-added side of the industry. The other was explain­ing AppleTalk, AppleTalk rout­ing and net­work­ing to Mike on the flight home. Need­less to say, a “defin­ing moment” of my career.

Emerge: The Munge Brothers

So, RA had to enter the Con­sult­ing busi­ness. Thank­fully, Unlce Mike (by this time we were call­ing ourselves Uncle Mike and Uncle Nick) had some exper­i­ence — and under­stood all this IT/MIS stuff that Apple people tend to either ignore or hate.

Mike was an excel­lent mentor. In my career, he was the second to really influ­ence my think­ing and chal­lenged me to extend myself. The first is Brian Mus­ker, ex-MIS Man­ager of the Aus­tralian Sub­mar­ine Cor­por­a­tion, now an IT con­sult­ant in the US.

RA’s strategy was to “split” into two: A Con­sult­ing busi­ness called Ran­dom Access Con­sult­ing (RAC) and a retail store­front called Simply Mac. At the time, it was a pretty good strategy.

Mike and I were the con­sult­ants in RAC. We star­ted out by show­ing the world the Client/Server — DAL extra­ve­ganza above. In the end, we found that while it appealed to the IS/MIS people of the day, it was before its time. Nowadays, every­one uses the ODBC stand­ard to do these sorts of things; Visual Basic to cre­ate front ends to rela­tional data­bases. In mid to late 1991, it was just too much out there.

At around this time, someone named us “The Munge Broth­ers.” We had a habit of say­ing ‘munge’ to explain a com­plex pro­cess of chan­ging data into inform­a­tion. Who can for­get the magic hat demon­stra­tions? Uncle Mike and I changed hats depend­ing on who we were in the demon­stra­tion: an IT bod, an end-user com­put­ing type and a manager.

That said, we did con­vince one cus­tomer to cre­ate a ware­house of main­frame data on an A/UX box run­ning Oracle RDBMS. The cus­tomer cre­ated cus­tom front ends in Hyper­Card to extract data. The data orgin­ated from a MVS-mainframe, and was down­loaded via IND$FILE and bulk impor­ted into the data­base. With data-warehousing all the rage (along with Intranet) — it is sad to real­ise Mike and I were 5 years too soon. This was to be a com­mon experience…

It Ain’t F**cking Rocket Science!

No, this is not a Munge Brother cre­ated quo­ta­tion. A cer­tain Sys­tems Engin­eer in Apple Com­puter Australia’s employ was rumour to have said these immor­tal 5 words to a non-so-technically lit­er­ate fel­low staff mem­ber. The story goes that he was in the midst of a DAL/Client-Server demon­stra­tion and became rather frus­trated when attempt­ing to explain what was going on.

Need­less to say, the Munge Broth­ers took on the term “Rocket Sci­ence” to describe their anti­cts with tech­no­logy. It col­min­ated in the now-collectable “Munge Brother/Rocket Sci­ence” cus­tom T-Shirts. Of which only three were made — and only worn once — the 1993 Apple Aus­tralia Christ­mas Party hos­ted by Roy Ramage.

Diver­si­fic­a­tion; or the blue period

In late 1991 I was offered a con­sult­antcy. The pro­ject was report on the implic­a­tions of chan­ging a large AppleTalk Phase 1 net­work to AppleTalk Phase 2. In the end, I was given a con­tract to imple­ment the changeover. Now that was a Christmas/New Year break that I won’t forget.

As always with con­tracts, I was exten­ded for a total of 10 months. This strained rela­tions with the ‘moth­er­ship’, RA and RAC. For me per­son­ally, I learn much about large organ­isa­tion polit­ics and man­age­ment struc­tures. And more import­antly, what didn’t work.

In 1992 we gained another Munge Brother, Paul Baily. At the time, Paul was a gif­ted sup­port engin­eer at the Aus­tralian Sub­mar­ine Cor­por­a­tion. He com­pleded the Munge Brother three­some. We added Paul to the team to do some more low level cod­ing work. Mike and I couldn’t cut 68K assembler!

Dur­ing this period, we also had other people on the RAC team: Dr Charles Hart and Peter Harris.

1992–1993 — Pro­jects Galore

After my sojourn on con­tact, I re-entered the RAC team with mixed feel­ings. Being away from your mother-ship on a customer’s site can ser­i­ously skew your per­spect­ive — and this is a les­son that I have remembered since. For instance, you find it hard to re-establish your­self in the mother organ­isa­tion and can feel an outsider.

At this time, Unlce Mike star­ted a product called “Coun­cil­lor.” It was a PowerBook-based agenda man­age­ment sys­tem for Local Gov­ern­ments. Uncle Mike based the solu­tion on Frame­Maker and the SGML stand­ard. Look­ing back, I wish that WWW/HTTP/HTML was around in mid 1992 — it would have been such an easy thing to do with Intranet based technologies.

In 1992 I star­ted the “Macin­tosh Sup­port Expert Course” — a 3 day intens­ive course for people sup­port­ing Macin­toshes. Christ­mas 1992 was a hoot. The Munge Broth­ers hos­ted a Christ­mas party in our office — and released our now fam­ous “Night­mare on Bent Street” Quick­time movie. Who can for­get the “DOS BOX” scream­ing up the levels at the car park with Jimmy Hendrix’s gui­tar wail­ing in the backgound? Stunt driver: Mike, Stunt cam­era: Nick. Stunt Music: Jimmy Hendrix.

In 1993 we star­ted to diver­sify our pro­jects. How­ever, there was one pro­ject where all three of us col­lab­or­ated. Due to commercial-in-confidence issues, I can­not name the cli­ent — but suf­fice to say, RAC was in a little over its head. The exper­i­ence cer­tainly helped us all under­stand the bounds of our skills, and our abil­ity to expand into altern­at­ive platforms.

1994: The End

In 1994, the Munge Broth­ers, aka RAC split up. First to go was Uncle Mike: he went to Ferntree. Next to go was Uncle Paul. He fol­lowed Michelle to Sydney. In early 1995, Nick moved his fam­ily to Sydney to join Apple Com­puter Australia.

In Decem­ber 1995, Ran­dom Access closed its doors. 14 years of his­tory went too. Its sad to real­ise that the amal­gam of people and tech­no­lo­gies will never be repeated. In many ways, we were ahead of our time — and if we had stayed together to the present day I am sure we could have kicked butt in the Adelaide IT industry.

Where are they Now?

Nick Hodge: (this page’s author) Tech­nical Resources Man­ager, Adobe Sys­tems. Mike Sey­fang: Con­sult­ant, Microsoft Con­sult­ing Adelaide Paul Baily: Con­tractor at large, Brisbane

Hon­or­ary Munge Brothers:

Peter Svans, Garry Turner, Dr Charles Hart, Peter Harris.

People we would like to thank:

David Sher­rah, Mark Keough, Brian Mus­ker, Kay Lind­ley, Roy Ramage

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