{"id":2809,"date":"2016-11-14T14:47:48","date_gmt":"2016-11-14T21:47:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/?p=2809"},"modified":"2016-11-17T15:43:29","modified_gmt":"2016-11-17T22:43:29","slug":"happy-30th-birthday-rootsmagic-part-6-the-rise-of-family-origins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/?p=2809","title":{"rendered":"Happy 30th Birthday, RootsMagic! Part 6: The Rise of Family Origins"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"RM-30th-Anniversary\"<\/a><\/p>\n

NOTE: This is Part 6 of\u00a0<\/strong>our ongoing series documenting the history of our company. If you’re just joining us, be sure to read Part 1<\/a>, Part 2<\/a>, Part 3<\/a>, Part 4<\/a>, and Part 5<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now that we were basically a software \u201cdevelopment\u201d company rather than a publisher, I devoted full time to working on Family Origins. \u00a0Our agreement with Parsons was that we provide a new upgrade once a year, and they handled everything else\u2026 sales, marketing, and tech support.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first couple of years were mostly uneventful. \u00a0We worked on new features that customers were requesting, and Parsons took care of the rest. \u00a0But there was always one item hanging over my head. \u00a0There was this newfangled operating system called Windows that customers wanted a genealogy program for. \u00a0The only problem was that I had absolutely no experience programming for Windows. \u00a0And it wasn\u2019t a simple transition. \u00a0Programming for DOS and programming for Windows were two different animals. \u00a0In hindsight, I realize how many programs just disappeared because the company couldn\u2019t (or wouldn\u2019t) make the transition to Windows.<\/span><\/p>\n

Realizing what a big job it would be to rewrite Family Origins to run under Windows, I decided on a different route. \u00a0Rather than cut my Windows programming teeth on a major project like Family Origins, I taught myself Windows programming while writing a much simpler program. \u00a0This little program started out as not much more than a calendar tied to a word processor control so that you could type in some text for any day past or future. \u00a0I tweaked it a bit more, and as it got stable, I approached Parsons to see if they would be interested in selling it. \u00a0We ended up licensing it to them, and they released it as Daily Journal.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"2016-11-14<\/a><\/p>\n

Although Daily Journal started out as simply a way for me to learn how to program for Windows, it became very popular, and we ended up releasing 3 versions over the years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Once Daily Journal was published, I began working full time on the Windows version of Family Origins. \u00a0Parsons decided to just continue the version numbers, so the last DOS version of Family Origins was 2.5, and 3.0 became the first Windows version. \u00a0Version 3 turned out to be just the first of several rewrites of the Family Origins software.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"2016-11-14<\/a><\/p>\n

After the release of Family Origins for Windows, it became clear that we needed to increase the limitations of the software. \u00a0Family Origins was limited to 32,000 people in a single file, which was sufficient for most people but was increasingly limiting to users. \u00a0The file format of the original Family Origins was a proprietary format that I made up myself but to handle larger files I decided to switch to a real database engine. \u00a0I settled on a dBase file format, which at the time was a safe choice. \u00a0Since this was going to be a complete rewrite anyways, I also switched programming languages from Turbo Pascal to Microsoft C++. \u00a0I didn\u2019t really want to change languages, but Parsons Technology had recently been purchased by Intuit (the Quicken people), and there were rumors that Microsoft was planning to buy Intuit. \u00a0I figured if Microsoft bought Intuit, then Family Origins would need to be written in a Microsoft language, and I didn\u2019t want to have to do yet another rewrite if they did.<\/span><\/p>\n

Once we had Family Origins 4 out, Parsons started testing out other markets. \u00a0One short-lived product was a German version of Family Origins called Ahnenforscher. \u00a0We translated the program, help files and documentation into German, but sales weren\u2019t sufficient for Parsons to want me to create any updates to the software.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"2016-11-14<\/a><\/p>\n

Another market Parsons wanted to test was the bargain bin CDs in office supply stores. \u00a0They had me modify an older version of Family Origins, which was then renamed Discover Genealogy and sold for $9.95. \u00a0Although sales weren\u2019t spectacular, the low price of Discover Genealogy did open up the world of family history to thousands of people.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"DiscoverGenealogy\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We continued to release a new version of Family Origins every year for 10 years, with several of those upgrades being rewrites to support things like multiple databases open at the same time, and dragging and dropping people from one file into another. \u00a0Over the years Family Origins became well known, but most users never knew anything about FormalSoft, the company that actually wrote the program. \u00a0B<\/span>ut no matter how much I enjoyed writing new versions of Family Origins and adding features that users requested, it was the behind the scenes issues that ultimately led to me “abandoning” Family Origins and starting back out on my own again.<\/span><\/p>\n

NEXT: Mergers, acquisitions, and fights for the rights to Family Origins<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NOTE: This is Part 6 of\u00a0our ongoing series documenting the history of our company. If you’re just joining us, be sure to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. Now that we were basically a software \u201cdevelopment\u201d company rather than a publisher, I devoted full time to working on Family […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[41],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2809"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2809"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2832,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2809\/revisions\/2832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}