In 1979, I had a wood stove business on First Street in Minneapolis. It was a crumby warehouse district then, with most buildings in disrepair and ten or fifteen big orange moving trucks parked out front. The building I had bought a couple years before for $29,000 had three floors of 2,000 square feet each, but it was rough. Unusable really. Now the neighborhood has a lot of apartments and it's considered a desirable place to live.
The business wasn't going very well then, so I was forced to learn more about accounting. Around the same time, a friend of mine came to visit from Boston. He was hot to buy an HP calculator. When I asked him if it was a computer, he said yes and explained that there were now a couple of small computers available. One from Altair in a kit form. The other from Apple. They were called
Microcomputers.
I'd had a college course in math that spent a couple weeks on programming, so I'd been exposed to the basics of punch card programming on an IBM mainframe. When I heard that I could buy a computer for $2500, I was immediately interested. That week, we went to visit a new store called Computerland. There we saw the new
Apple II. It was basically a big empty plastic box with a keyboard on the outside and a circuit board on the inside.
I asked the salesman whether there was an accounting program available for it. He didn't know. I asked what software they did have. They didn't have any, but he said they had a list of software available. He went in the back and found a xeroxed list of about ten pages. Maybe 50 programs. I asked if I could get a copy. He said no.
I bought the computer, and added a black and white monitor (24 lines of 40 characters), 16KB of memory (it came with 32KB) and a floppy disc drive. This added another $1000.
I realize now that Steve Jobs was just 24 then. I know that now because I'm ten years older than he was.
I used the computer in my business and discovered really quickly that the state of software then was pretty dismal. A year later Visicalc came out and the software industry got going. I thought maybe I'd start a software business, but I fooled around for another year before I did it. That was 1981. We did accounting software for the first six years, then switched to networking software.
In 1981, IBM came out with the PC. You bought it for about $2500. It had a floppy drive. The OS (DOS) was $100 more.
JRiver is 30 years old this month. Time flies.
