The flow of business information started with the interaction between marketing and the customer. Information originated from the customer when a technical description or specification (a “spec”) was sent to IMT for a new machine. The length of the spec could be from ten to several hundred pages. A marketing engineer would then read the spec and enter his or her interpretation of it into a mainframe negotiation program. The negotiation program (MDB), inherited from WILMEC, required the input of about fifty computer screens of data and was written in COBOL. For presentations, marketing used Excel and PowerPoint on their PCs.