fact opened up my college accounting book and said, “Let’s start programming
this from scratch and build accounting systems for smaller computers.”
Livingston: Was this before personal computers were even out there?
Winblad: They were coming really fast. Hobbyist computers already started
appearing. Now the year is 1975—remember that’s the year that Microsoft
started and Microsoft was writing Basic for kit computers. We didn’t have as
good soldering skills as probably Bill and Paul did. And we, of course, weren’t
working at the systems level writing the operating systems and languages, so we
first applied ours to a minicomputer. They were not on commodity processors.
They basically were pretty much like a high-end PC would be today.
We skipped a whole small era of computers that all got wiped off the planet.
Microsoft talks about how their first 80 customers died. Well, we had some of
those customers but very, very few. We moved into the PC market as the
8080A—which was the first Intel commodity processor, came out on a computer
called CADO. The company was in Torrance, California, and funded by
Sequoia. This was about 1978, maybe ’77 even. They were using commodity
processors—the first Intel processors—but a proprietary operating system. As a
result, we had to go find a language vendor because Microsoft’s Basic was so
weak, we couldn’t program a robust accounting system in it. We worked with a
language vendor that we OEMed, so we sold our product with an interpreter. A
very fast interpreter, so it never had to touch Microsoft’s young languages,
which was good because there was not a salvageable application software business.
The application vendors that started at that time all died as well.
That 13 months at the Fed and the 3 years the other guys had really was
a lot of computing experience relative to most people who were the first
entrepreneurs in the industry. They really were programming on kits—they
were hobbyist programmers in their garage. Because it was a new generation of
people starting and we just happened to catch the tip—even though we weren’t
any different in age than these people of the last year of computing—so we got
some real computer science knowledge and that really did save our bacon and
allow us not to have to restart the company. We were on a steady growth path
from the beginning.
Livingston: Do you remember any major turning points?
Winblad: There were so many things that happened. Sometimes they almost
feel like acts of God.
We were doing all this work for these CADO computer guys. And there

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