Steve Frankel.

The results were in. Twenty-year-old Steve Frankel learned from his prospective employer, IBM, that he had aced its aptitude exam.

"I was excellent at abstract reasoning and logic," he sums up crisply, recalling that watershed day for him in 1966.

The student at City College of New York would never finish his master's degree in computer science, never return to selling men's clothing on 42nd Street in Manhattan, nor work again at his father's hardware store across town.

The world's leader of computer technology had just dubbed him a sharpshooter. So, computer work it would be. "From that day forward, it consumed my life," says Frankel, who recalled with youthful conviction that "this was the ultimate profession for me."

Frankel is 45 today and running a young software company called Retix that's growing up quickly. He is chairman, chief executive, president and chief operating officer of the Santa Monica company, founded in 1985. Its revenues have surged 13-fold since 1986, to $52 million in 1990. Its bottom line has always been black. Payroll has leaped from the nine founders to 430 today.

Frankel, who joined as president in 1988 and was later promoted to CEO, took it public last December and raised $35 million. In the next two months, the stock price doubled.

Retix -- the name harks to the Latin word rete meaning "net" -- develops and markets networking software and hardware that allow otherwise incompatible computing equipment and software to talk to each other. Customers like AT&T and Motorola Inc. bought Retix technology to put into their own products. Others, like Ford Motor Co. and Merrill Lynch, bought networking goods to link together strings of their computers at one location (local-area networks) or spread among cities and countries (wide-area networks).

Several executives who know him say Frankel has drawn successfully on his early software-engineer background and his more recent management stints to successfully "demystify" the esoteric world of software for Wall Street.

The Palos Verdes resident, who's married with three children, is a survivor from the computer-console trenches. He once did a near-non-stop stint on an IBM project for eight weeks that got him in hot water. Big Blue insisted young Frankel, who had rented a hotel room nearby to save time on commuting, stop racking up so much overtime. He didn't give in. IBM adjusted its rule on filling out time cards, according to Frankel.

But the soft-spoken New York native has avoided the trappings of computer obsession. He became an avid novel-reader and theater-goer, which have helped him become a better communicator to bankers and customers who can't think and talk computerspeak.

His personal investments stray from hi-tech. He co-financed, with actor/TV producer Henry Winkler, the chic Campanile bakery on La Brea, bought a piece of a Disney World hotel and took positions in four TV stations in the East.

"He's a more rounded, versatile individual than the classic CEO who is an engineer or technologist," says Andy De Mari, co-founder of Retix who hired Frankel in 1988 and left in 1991 to found another software company. "He's been out of engineering a long time ... and understands it enough, but is not involved deep enough to be harmful" to the mindset he needs as CEO.

Frankel got to Retix the hard way, the traditional engineer-pays-dues-and-becomes-manager route. He moved west at 22, with two years of IBM programming experience under his belt. He took engineering jobs at Hughes Aircraft Co., designing radar and fire-control devices for F-14 and F-15 fighter jets, and then wrote software for El Segundo-based Tran Telecommunication for seven years.

Marketing and management posts followed at Micom Systems, where annual sales grew from $5 million to $240 million and propelled it into a public share-offering. Then he took the president's job at $140-million-in-revenues Emulex Corp., a Costa Mesa communications-equipment maker.

By 1988 Frankel was eager to found a software company that would help computers to network using a budding communications standard called OSI, or Open Standards Interconnection. Retix already did just that. President De Mari snatched Frankel.

"Since there weren't that many people in the whole world who believed in OSI back then, and we lived in the same city, we said, 'Why compete?'" recalled Frankel. De Mari was itching to found yet another new company. He named Frankel president to groom him as a successor.

"He has the reputation of wanting to run the show, and that's what I hired him for," said De Mari of his protege, who wears black pinstripe suits to work but rejects the grand executive's desk as too intimidating for his office.

Frankel may need such touches. He's sometimes lacking in "people skills" needed to communicate best with his own staff, says an executive close to Frankel who asked not to be named.

Retix "needed to be tightened up" by someone like Frankel, says Alice Bradie, a communications analyst at investment banker Hambrecht & Quist Inc. in New York. "Taking nothing away from the original founders, but he's made it a tighter, more efficient, better-focused enterprise," says Bradie, whose firm managed the Retix IPO.

She said in three years Frankel cut costs, focused attention on promising lines such as internetworking products and de-emphasized less-promising products like controllers, which are channelers of data to disks, screens or other peripheral activities.

Despite his 25 years of blood and sweat building a computer-science career, Frankel isn't a household name. Neither is Retix. Maybe they're too new. Retix was unknown to Wall Street investors until December's share offering.

But the software biz ain't railroads. You don't need decades to build your empire: Before he was 35, Bill Gates wizarded Microsoft Corp. into a $1-billion-in-revenues company, and no one had made any money publishing systems software before Gates.

Software magic depends on timing, trade patents, moxie and marketing skill at what Retix's underwriters called "commercial acceptance."

Frankel and Retix have staked all their chips on the industry embracing the OSI communications standard. This technology lies at the heart of Retix's software and computer-system products, but it is nonetheless one of several competing standards envisioned to become a New Age language that all computer systems speak.

OSI fit the bill for many of America's most advanced companies, and Retix leaped out of the starting blocks. It sold its software to end-users and licensed it to manufacturers for incorporation into their proprietary computer systems. Few, however, converted entirely to OSI.

Other standards like the so-called TCP/IP or the "distributed computing environment" enjoy some manufacturers' acceptance. Some clients "are playing several horses at once," explains Frankel, who nevertheless plays just one horse, OSI.

Software CEOs need horse sense and common talk to sell their companies.

"No one in the investment community is really interested in listening to the details of technology," said Frankel in a December interview, a few weeks after his successful road show promoting the soon-to-be-sold shares to institutional investors and securities analysts. "They want to know about the problem (you address) and competitiveness."

Appealing to the money men "is all about stepping away from the hour-by-hour technical world that you live in," says Frankel.

Retix and Frankel prove the computer industry maxim that cleverness and absurdness have become bedfellows. Witness the stock prospectus for Retix, which features a super-complex flow chart of 167 bubbles showing the intricate interrelationships of OSI's seven-layered galaxy. It's so jammed with information that extra-tiny, headache-inducing typeface was used.

The chart was not "user-friendly." It was nearly illegible, yet it lay on the final page, offering a lasting image of confusion to the reader.

"It's a joke," says Frankel. "I didn't want you to read it."

Fine. Then why print it in a crucial, image-building company document?

He considers the question, ignoring morning coffee served to him in a Retix coffee cup emblazoned with the same unintelligible flow chart.

"This is on the walls in computer companies all over the world!" he blurts, suddenly animated. "Every securities analyst who saw it said, 'Wait a minute, I've seen that thing somewhere! It was at Amdahl, or IBM....'"

Indeed the colored maze hangs before hundreds of engineers around the world and is no trivial chart. Frankel & Co. expects it to become a road map for computer scientists worldwide, a la the venerable periodic table of elements for chemists.

In fact, Retix sells the charts for $15 a pop. Frankel chuckles, "It's our highest-volume/lowest-margin product."