Maximo Secrets

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Maximo History – 1985 to 1995

This article was first published on LinkedIn on 13th May 1985.

It is a hot Saturday afternoon in Twickenham, London and it is a special week this week, Maximo will be 40 years old.

I have been working with Maximo for over 28 years, but I heard the Maximo name 10 years earlier than that. When I started at PSDI in February 1987 as its 10th employee in Europe and 96th worldwide it was to work on the project control software, PROJECT/2 for IBM mainframes and DEC VAX mini-computers and a PC product called QWIKNET. There was a Maximo salesman who had started the year before and he said that Maximo had been launched a year before that, which placed it around 1985.

I was with PSDI for 5 years and knew nothing about Maximo during this period, only that it had a blue screen and lots of fields. We all knew that there were the occasional sales but the rest of PSDI in the UK office was focused on project software, Maximo contributed a small single digit percentage of overall revenue.

Project Software & Development Inc. (PSDI) to give its full name was a US company based out of Cambridge, MA, not that far from Harvard University. It had been started by Bob Daniels who had developed at MIT a mainframe programme called ICES (Integrated Civil Engineering System) which after leaving MIT he acquired the rights to. PSDI was founded in 1968.

PROJECT/2 was a command language for performing sophisticated project scheduling, cost control and graphics and was used for large construction projects, it was used by NASA and by many of the US nuclear power stations. By 1987 the user manual sat in a rack a little more than the width of my laptop. I started by learning QWIKNET as I had to wait for a passport before I went out to Boston for training, and then straight out onto my first assignment in Munich which lasted 3 months. Yes, I managed to get to the age of 28 before needing my first passport, times were different then.

Berkeley Square House – Photo taken 12-May-25

The UK office of PSDI was in Berkeley Square, in the west end of central London, the 8th floor penthouse suite of Berkeley Square House, above the Jack Barclay Bentley car showroom. I once read an article which placed Berkeley Square as the most expensive real estate in the world, this was a prestigious area to work in. My wife started at the same office one week after me, but apart from an introduction I never got to meet her properly until I returned from my travels in July. Before the end of September we were engaged, it took me 3 weeks to propose and we are still married today, my incessant talking all things Maximo has not put her off.

I started researching the history of PSDI and Maximo 7 years ago in 2018, I’m not exactly sure what triggered that, but I have found my original file. PSDI and Maximo has been a large part of my working life, I was lucky to have found PSDI and although I left after 5 years, I returned to it in 1996 to work on Maximo. 

Maximo is 40 years old this week. During my research I found an advert tucked away in a ComputerWorld magazine published on 13th May 1985 announcing the release of Maximo. I am attributing this date as its birthdate.

ComputerWorld 13th May 1985

For $25,000 (in 1985!) you could now acquire an IBM PC AT with a 20MB hard drive, 512K RAM, a color monitor and a single user Maximo system. Maximo provided work order tracking, equipment history and inventory control. Each work order could specify craft, crew and spare part requirements. Requisitions are automatically generated from a job plan and closed against the inventory control system.

This was a turnkey system, it came with a PC, there were no PC shops then, PCs were purchased through magazines. IBM compatible PCs from Compaq were just beginning to be created, and Dell didn’t start selling PCs until 1985. At the time of its launch it was difficult to obtain an IBM PC.

I think it worth giving a little history on the Personal Computer (PC).

The first pocket scientific calculator was launched by Hewlett Packard in February 1972. It used reverse Polish notation, 3 4 + would give the answer of 7. I can remember my father bringing home a beautiful white Sinclair Scientific calculator with blue buttons so that I could test out some trigonometry questions, reverse Polish took a while to learn.

In April 1975 Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They started out selling BASIC interpreters. BASIC and FORTRAN were the first programming languages I learnt. In April 1976 Apple Computers, Inc was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The Apple l was launched in July 1976 and Apple ll in June 1977.

In August 1981 IBM introduced the Personal Computer (PC). In March 1983 the IBM PC XT came along with a 10MB hard drive and the IBM PC/AT was launched in August 1984, the system provided with Maximo.

Incidentally, the first PC I used was in early 1983, the Intertec SuperBrain II QD running the CP/M operating system. It had two floppy disk drives with a total disk capacity of 680K (no hard disk), but this was enough to run a word processing software called Spellbinder and dBase II from Ashton Tate, a database. I was working at BP at the time, my PC, which looked more like a mainframe terminal was the first PC outside of the IS department of BP. I used it to produce a quarterly report of all the R&D projects being sponsored by head office engineering. It eventually got me a job in the Project Systems department where we evaluated a scheduling and project control system called Max, from a company called Project Software Consultants Inc (PSCI), out of Houston, TX. As BP was the first European site, PSCI offered to train me for 2 years to support the Artemis based system of Max and I was involved in extending it with three additional modules. A coincidence, Max – Maximo, PSCI – PSDI, and a huge stroke of luck being taught various aspects of a full development lifecycle of a large software product. It was this knowledge gained which got me the job at PSDI.

When Maximo was launched in May 1985 this was the second PC software product launched by PSDI, QWIKNET being the first. This was before:

Think of this, Maximo arrived more than 20 years before the first iPhone. Forty years is a long time, and for at least 30 of these years Maximo has been considered as a leader, first as a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), then as an Enterprise Asset Management system (EAM) and now as an Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) system.

As I wasn’t involved with Maximo, its first 10 years (1985-1995) is a little hazy, and as most of this period occurred before the Internet, to be honest, there isn’t much detail out there that I could find. But this is what I researched.

Maximo was the name of the favourite polo pony of Bob Daniels the founder of PSDI. I met Bob several times when we were in central London and on my trips to Boston, I can’t recollect him referring to this, but I have heard it from many sources, so I take it to be true.

In a ComputerWorld article of 23 September 1985, Maximo target sales were manufacturing sites, hospitals and universities. It had a mouse and menu driven screens that users could design by changing field lengths and field descriptions. It also had a report writer. Maximo was written in C, and it was now available software only (including mouse) for $17,900. The Turnkey system had dropped in price to $22,900. The optical mouse had a special aluminium mouse mat with a fine printed grid, it was the same one used with QWIKNET.

On 14 April 1986, in another ComputerWorld article, PSDI released a LAN version of Maximo supporting up to 25 users. Maximo LAN was another turnkey system with the workstation an IBM PC/AT, 640K RAM, with 1.2MB floppy drive (5.25 inch), colour monitor and mouse. The LAN server was a 3Com Corp. 3Server70 with 70MB hard disk and 60MB tape backup (launched in July 1985). 3Com were the first to create Ethernet Adapter cards for the early PCs. Sophisticated for its day, it came in at $41,450. It didn’t say how many workstations you got for that price. Maximo at this time was a file-based system and the LAN allowed the files and their records to be shared.

In the UK our first Maximo client was RARDE (Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment) in Cobham, Surrey, a tank testing establishment. Further clients were News International, Wapping, famous for a lengthy and sometime acrimonious strike that lasted a year after 6,000 print workers who had joined the strike were then effectively sacked, and Thames Television. I know of one other client from those early days of the file-based Maximo system, it was the Joint European Torus (JET). In 1998 in the run-up to year 2000 potential date issues, PSDI received a support call from a client using a blue background Maximo screen with no windows, and nobody believed it was true, but because I had previously been with PSDI and happened to be in the office they asked me, and I recollected seeing something like this 10 years earlier. I made the visit and there was this single user Maximo system still being used each day. It was not upgradeable.

Another Computerworld article from 2 October 1989, found Hughes Aircraft using Maximo to keep track of the maintenance of 10,000 PC’s, terminals and peripherals. Logging 100 work orders a week, scheduling jobs and keeping track of parts in inventory. Their system was using a network of 5 IBM PS2 Model 50s, running MS-DOS 3.1, with an IBM PS2 Model 80 as a file server. Inventory had min/max levels that automatically flagged when stock needed to be reordered. They were also keeping track of the parts used on each PC, so that technicians were prepared before they went out to site. It doesn’t say but I think this was still the file-based system. Interesting that within 5 years Maximo was being used in a variety of industries and with different types of assets, I think this is because Maximo had configuration capability built in from its first release, it allowed it to be adapted to different industries.

On 17 December 1990, a ComputerWorld article cited Ocean Spray Cranberries were using Maximo Series 3 on LANs on multiple sites. By this time Maximo was using Microsoft Windows 3.0 which had only be launched in the same year and a Gupta SQL-Base relational database. It had modules for equipment, preventive maintenance, work orders and inventory. Its price tag started at $14,480.

Maximo Series 3 was the first client/server system, the first architectural change of Maximo. It was now being used by 400 clients worldwide, those clients could upgrade at no charge. Maximo could run on a Novell or 3Com networks allowing for networked workstations.

I found a NASA paper called “Implementation of a Computerized Maintenance Management System” by Yonghong Shen and Bruce Askari, which has a few screenshots from MAXIMO Series 3. The NASA Ames Maintenance Management Office were already users of Maximo, v2.6, since 1990, and I have taken this to reference one of the last versions of the file-based Maximo.

I found a company profile that indicated at the end of fiscal year 9 September 1992 that there were 235 employees. PSDI had moved to 20 University Road and Bob Daniels was the President and CEO. The company had a 50/50 split between Project Management software and support and Maximo software and support.

Maximo had opted for Microsoft Windows in 1990 with Series 3. On the project software side, in June 1992 PSDI released PROJECT/2 Series X which was soon referred to as P/X, but while P/X was windows based, it was not Microsoft Windows. PSDI opted for a windows-based system that would run both on PCs and VAX mini-computers, and there were several windows-based systems from various providers, Microsoft was not yet dominant. Unfortunately, that was a mistake because as Microsoft Windows started to dominate, PC software based on anything other than Microsoft Windows would ultimately decline.

I left PSDI in June 1992 and went contracting for about 4 years. PROJECT/2 data could be downloaded to Oracle, and I had gained experience running an Oracle system version 3, and a file-based SQLForms, this was before PL/SQL. Back then, if you did not write SQL accurately, and you had to get the order of the tables in the FROM statement correct, then after 10-15 minutes of running, you terminated the process and, in some cases, rebooted the server. I did one contract on P/X and thought it immensely powerful, a halfway between QWIKNET Professional and PROJECT/2 and probably too complex for the average PC user.

In 1992 PSDI had subsidiaries in Canada, UK, Australia, France and Germany but was selling both products through 16 country-based agents across other parts of Europe and in Asia. Fiscal revenue for 1992 was $26.87m, there had been no growth over 1991. There had been increased R&D costs in 1992 in the run-up to the launch of P/X but the transition away from its mainframe product PROJECT/2 had begun. 50% of the revenue was derived from the US, 50% from international. In 1992 90% of revenue came from software and 10% from consulting services and training.

Microsoft Project had been around for about the same time as QWIKNET but when Microsoft Office was released in 1990 and Microsoft Project also supported Windows 3.0 then this started the decline of PSDI’s project software, but fortunately Maximo sales with Maximo Series 3 was beginning to accelerate.

Maximo Series 3 modules supported tracking of work orders, preventive maintenance masters, inventory control, equipment records, purchasing, job plans, resources, calendars, labor, notes, reports, utilities and integration to bar coding. By 1992 there were approximately 1000 Maximo Series 3 installations worldwide. By March 1993 PSDI had 300 employees.

The fortunes of the project software P/X released in June 1992 grew from $1.148m in 1992 to $3.604m in 1994 and then started to decline $1.622m in 1995 and $0.871m in the year I rejoined PSDI in 1996. Many factors were cited, performance issues, delays in releasing a new version, diminished demand for high-end planning and cost solutions, increased competition, and a change in focus towards Maximo. P/X did continue beyond 1996 as there was integration to Maximo, the first Maximo Scheduler product. By the end of 1995 PSDI supported its mainframe product PROJECT/2, but it was no longer selling or enhancing it.

Maximo Series 3 released in 1991 was PSDI’s first client/server product and P/X released in 1992 was its second. At the end of September 1991 client/server software was 11.4% of software revenue, five years later in 1996 it was 88.6%, 92.5% of this coming from Maximo.

While the decline in project software was undoubtedly occurring, total revenue was increasing nicely, 1992 $26.870m, 1993 $29.978m, 1994 $36,753m, and in 1995 $50,372m. The software/services split in 1995 was 59.7/40.3%, services had only been 10% in fiscal year 1992. There had been rapid growth in services during the period 1993-1995, much of this was Maximo based.

On 21 April 1994 PSDI was floated on the NASDAQ exchange. For my research, there was a lot more material to be found through to the IBM acquisition in 2006 as PSDI and then MRO Software had to now provide annual reports.

I found a UK software listing dated 1995 indicating Maximo Series 5 now has support for condition monitoring and failure analysis. There were 100 clients in the UK and 1100 worldwide. I couldn’t find a date when Maximo Series 5 was released. I know there was a Maximo version 2.11, and I am wondering whether that was the same as Maximo Series 5. By the time I rejoined PSDI in 1996 the version was Maximo 3.0a, but that is another story.

Bob Daniels passed away on 25th March 2016 having taken a fall from his horse on the polo field, he was 74 years old.

Postscript

This article was first published on LinkedIn on the 40th birthday 13th May 2025, the birthday being set by the first magazine article in ComputerWorld. But is that the correct real birthday?

It seems probably not. Jack Young who helped steer Maximo through its first 25 years of life, who was the Executive Vice President of MRO Software and a Vice President at IBM after the acquisition commented “Andrew, I love your posts and this one may be your best – what memories. I only have one suggestion, I hate to say it but I don’t think Maximo is 40 just yet. I started at PSDI on April 1, 1985, and the first release was maybe 6 months later. So it would have been fall of 1985. I suspect the Maximo ad you saw in ComputerWorld was the work of our colleague and great friend, Ted Williams, and Ted did have a history of selling a bit before the true releases! However, we owe a lot to Ted. If it weren’t for his leadership in the early days, I doubt Maximo would exist today. I’d say the date of the Sept 23, 1985, ComputerWorld article you mention would be a more accurate Birthday. Nevertheless, thanks for the memories.”

Every time I read this I just smile and chuckle. So, Maximo has two birthdays, just like British monarchs, the official birthday is 13th May 1985, but perhaps the real birthday is 23rd September 1985. Thanks Jack!