OK, I know there are a lot of guys here who once wore bell bottom pants. I'm not sure I did, well maybe I had a pair. It was a long time ago.
Today I spent some time scanning old photos. One envelope had some amazing pictures of the old days. I'm going to prove to you that I have no ego by sharing them.
The year was 1981. I was 37. I had been married three years. My wife and I had two daughters, ages 2 and 0. They were beautiful and hungry.
I had run a wood stove store, called Ironwood Stove Co, at 115 N First St, Minneapolis, for about 5 years. It wasn't working. I knew it. Worse, the bank knew it. I could feel their breath on my neck. I was sweating. I had to do something.
For about a year and a half, I had been trying to run the stove business accounting with an Apple IIe. It had, oh, say 16K of memory, but I had upgraded it to 48K. Life was good.
The software for the Apple was a problem. I couldn't find anything that worked for the business. After a lot of head scratching, I decided I maybe could write something.
The rest is a longer, even more boring story, but I ended up buying an Osborne and learning to write in mbasic (Microsoft's Basic, before DOS). The Osborne was a miracle. It had 64K of memory, two 92K floppy disk drives, came with Wordstar and Supercalc, and it cost $1795.
I wrote a General Ledger program and started on Accounts Receivable, but we needed a manual. These shots were taken (I was the only model I could afford). One of them dressed the cover of the manual for the first year until we could afford a better manual.
http://www.jriver.com/~jriver/other/ironwoodI wish I still had that much hair.
Bob Brose joined the company a year or so later, then Jim Nordgaard half a year after that. Both are still highly valuable people at JRiver, and it is an honor to be able to say that.
A lot of bridge over the dam since then.
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Topic: Daddy, where did JRiver come from? (Read 837 times)