"Your life is a vapor"
In the software world, history comes and goes very quickly.
I've captured just a little bit of it here to put our young niche
into perspective. It wasn't that long ago that there was no such
thing as Bible software.
Three generations of Parsons Technology logos. We replaced "Intuit"
with "Broderbund" but eventually gave up on keeping up with our owner du
jour and just went with the second logo, above.
The logo below is one I designed in 1997 when Intuit dumped us.
This appeared on my web page until I was kindly asked through appropriate
channels to remove it. Their lawyers were bigger than mine so I complied.
The ads scanned below are from late 1988. Most are from
Christian Computing Magazine; a couple are from Church Computing,
the predecessor of Christian Computing from Hewlen Inc.
Relics of Creative Computer Systems and my Past Life at
Rockwell
 | Creative
Computer Systems business card. I stole the name of
the company from the partnership that Howard Garrison,
Cam Luerkens and I created to do image processing
software. We already had the bank account… it was
easier than coming up with something new. Bob Parsons
thought the 'Logos Bible Processor' name was dumb and
made me change it. In retrospect I agree; it's overused
and doesn't clearly identify the nature of the product. |
| Rockwell
business card. You had to really beg for business
cards at Rockwell. Kind of a Dilbert place to work. I
thought it was pretty cool that just about everyone at
Parsons got business cards. Funny what will get a
programmer excited about a job. |
| Original Logos
Bible Processor ad. This was the first ad I did for
my Logos program. It ran in Pulpit Helps, a newspaper
that went mainly to fundamentalist pastors. |
| Second Logos
Bible Processor ad. This ran in Christian Computing
Magazine. By the way, I don't live at this address any
more. |
| My software
warranty before Parsons. If you find a warranty this
good anywhere else, let me know. This is the only
"no bugs" warranty I've ever seen. Parsons
didn't adopt my warranty, but I've tried to operate my
programming department with the same philosophy. |
| ComWORD ad.
ComWORD1… KJV and Strongs for $249.95! |
| CompuBIBLE ad.
CompuBible offered any one translation for $249. Strongs
was extra. CompuBible was the inspiration for many of the
features in QuickVerse 2.0, especially indexes. |
| GodSpeed ad.
At $100 plus another $200 for Strongs, GodSpeed was fast
but expensive. In fact, it was very, very fast. The only
problem was you couldn't do anything with it other than
find things fast. It was tough to print anything and you
couldn't compare passages or add notes. |
| MegaWord ad.
One translation for $79.95. MegaWord owned the back page
of Christian Computing Magazine for several years.
Kind of a cool ad especially for its time. This product was sold to Word, Inc.
and became "WordSoft Advanced Study System." Word had problems
with the software and actually shipped empty boxes to Christian
bookstores for some time. Word was purchased by Nelson and MegaWord
disappeared. |
| WORDSearch ad.
I think retail for WORDSearch was $179 for one
translation. "WordWorks Software Architects"
was the name of the company. They were bought by NavPress
but later bought themselves back. They were founding
members of the Bible Software Industry Standards Group
and co-architects of STEP. (I always had trouble exiting
from this program. It wasn't obvious. A reviewer told me
once he always had to just shut his computer off to exit WordSearch!) |
| Bible Library ad.
At the time, Ellis had the most content of anybody. But
at $595 it was no bargain. Their software was lousy, but
their early adoption of CD-ROM was ground-breaking. They
did a deal with IBM to create the "New Bible
Library." Unfortunately, they released it as a DOS
product at a time when everyone was looking for Windows. |