![]() From time to time Howard would say, “Well, Bob got a new laser printer” or “Bob got another computer yesterday.” For a while I thought Howard and Bob must be close friends. Over the next year, Howard and I followed the growth of Parsons Technology. (When I joined Parsons a year later I watched Bob write the code that would allow the customer database to accomodate six-digit account numbers.) ![]() A four-digit customer number of which I’m quite proud. With that transaction I became Parsons customer number 6553. (I later figured out that Bob was the only programmer and he just wasn’t home from work yet.) She handed me a copy of Mone圜ounts for $12, and didn’t bother me for sales tax. ![]() Martha Parsons met me at the door and said something about “the programmers taking off early” that day. I gave “Parsons Technology” a call and followed Howard home from work that night to pick up my first copy of Mone圜ounts 3.0. Mone圜ounts wasn’t shareware, but sold for only $12. Turns out that Bob Parsons was the guy who lived across the street from Howard. While discussing this with my friend Howard at Rockwell he said, “You really ought to try this Mone圜ounts program the guy across the street from me wrote. When I got the Compaq, I started re-writing my budget program in MS-BASIC. ![]() (It had two critical features: fund-based accounting and deposit templates.) I wrote a home budget program in BASIC that, in my opinion, was tons better than anything currently available from Intuit or Microsoft. Plus a 140KB floppy disk to replace the normal Atari cassette tape storage device. The average Atari 400 had 16KB RAM and a “chiclet” keyboard. My prior computer was an Atari 400 which I modified significantly to make it useful for development work. That project allowed me to buy my first PC-compatible, a Compaq Portable II (8MHz 80286, 640K RAM, 20MB HD). We wrote an image processing application that analyzed particle shapes from pictures taken from scanning electron microscopes. In 1986 I got involved in a custom programming project with two of my coworkers. ![]() And because it’s kind of interesting especially now that Bob Parsons and GoDaddy have become more widely known.Īfter graduating from the University of Iowa in 1981, I went to work for Rockwell International working on test equipment software for Air Force avionics projects. This is here because people ask me about it. Some people read this and accuse me of living in the past. I always intended to keep it up-to-date but never got beyond what you see here. I wrote this article back in 2002 to tell the history of my writing of QuickVerse and my time at Parsons Technology. ![]()
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