03 TOPS People & Places

The History and Future of TOPS Software (part 1)...An Interview with Ki Han and Wayne Drennen, Programmers

In recent interviews, you have had an opportunity to learn about the Sales and Technical Support sides of TOPS Software. In the next two issues, we wanted to give you an opportunity to learn about one of our most important departments: Programming.

Since our programming department really pivots around two individuals, we decided to interview them together. Here is the transcript of an interview with Ki Han, Director of Programming, and Wayne Drennen, Senior Programmer:

TOPS: The first thing I wanted to do is introduce both of you so our readers know who's who, so Wayne-could you start by telling us a little about yourself?

WAD: Hi. My name's Wayne Drennen. I'm the Sr. Programmer at TOPS Software.

TOPS: Tell us about your experience – tell us how you got to be in this position.

KI: That's in his – Oh, you haven't written your bio yet have you?

WAD: (laughs) Well, I was a trainer at CompUSA, training the programmers here at TOPS. I have been working in Visual Basic for five years, and programming for – 22 years.

KI: What is your hobby?

WAD: My hobby is programming. Computer tweaking and programming.

TOPS: Thank you Wayne. Ki, can you tell us about yourself?

KI: My name's Ki Han, and I like to be referred to as just a programmer. Director is my title, but I just think that all of the programmers are equals in different fields.

I graduated from the University of Maryland with a Computer Science degree in 1987. For two years I worked for a small contractor company who did hardware and software work for small businesses. I started by building computers and writing software.

In 1989 I met Jeff Hardy. Jeff had started a software company, TOPS. At that time TOPS was so small, we had an office with just two rooms, which we were sharing with some other company. We had an IBM XT computer with a 40MB hard drive (in two partitions), which when we compiled one program, took us about a half hour. That was great for me, because I would compile a couple of programs, and 8 hours had gone by!

I became a full-time employee in 1993. You could say that TOPS Software is the first major software that I have been involved with from the beginning. The programmer before me was Kerry Wilson, and he had a great vision for this software, and he had set up an excellent foundation for the software. It's been 10 years and we are still using some of his code in TOPS. Believe it or not, it’s the same foundation and we just built in all of the modules around it. So, I grew up with TOPS. I guess that's it.

TOPS: That's excellent! We want to focus on TOPS in the past and TOPS in the future - how TOPS has grown. Could you start by telling us how TOPS grew?

KI: Well, you know that the software started with Jeff Hardy. He used to own a property management company called RMSI, which is still in Maryland today, and I think they still manage around 50 or 60 communities.

TOPS was originally developed by Jeff for his own management company, and then he saw the future of the software, and he saw that he could design something that a-lot of management companies could really use.

He sold his management company and focused on developing the software, but if you start an accounting software like this from scratch, it can be impossible because there are so many different aspects to the program. So what we did was search for different accounting software that maybe wasn’t an exact fit, but could be enhanced to fit our needs. We found a source code company called Real World. We bought their source code, and then built our software on the foundation of that source code. That product was the original TOPS.

We used Real World until 1996, and then we developed our own accounting system, which we used in TOPS Pro for multiple communities, and TOPS EZ Lite for a single community package.

When we got Windows 3.11, which was Windows for workgroups, Jeff started thinking about how we could move to a windows version. Jeff is very smart. He knew that people would move up to Windows 3.11, and he also knew that another version of Windows was coming – Windows ’95 that was. He researched what we could do to move to Windows, and discovered that it was impossible to do so in COBOL itself.

So then we found a company, Flex Software, who made a product called SP2, a GUI [Graphical User Interface -ed.] interface for COBOL. So in 1997 we started to develop the Windows version of TOPS using this product. Later we also added in Visual Basic.

It took about two and a half years to make the bare bones Windows version that we first came out with in early 2000. I think it took another full year to get it fully functional – a long time.

It’s amazing that we got to where we are now. Version 3.03 is clean, and we have a perfect match between old technology and new. I really like it a-lot now, and based on what we have we can continue to make it better. I think Wayne is the right person to lead us in the new technology.

...Continued Next Issue

Andrea Drennen is the Internet Services Manager.

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