Becoming a Software Company - Then

My specialized 3D CAD progam (I'm not naming it as the company is still going today, and may not appreciate my story of humble beginings) was just for my own use. But a trade magazine wrote an article about me, and mentioned that I had this program. It generated a few letters and phone calls which I pretty much ignored. I didn't intend to sell it, just use it myself.

That changed when a persistent Seattle firm insisted on visiting me for a demo, then demanded to buy a copy. I thought I would make them go away by quoting a high price. The most expensive program I knew of on a micro-computer was priced about $400. So I quoted $4000, ten times more. They agreed, as long as it ran on an IBM PC, which had just come out. All I had was the Trash 80.

Also, there was no user manual. Since I wrote the program I knew how to use it. So I hired a high school kid to translate the program to IBM-Basic and whipped up a manual in the Radio Shack word processor. I had to rent a PC for a month for the translation. We transferred the code through a serial port as the floppy drives were not compatible then edited it in the PC until it worked. We did have a working version in a month, and one customer. So it stayed for a year or so.