on a cold and foggy day
the story of our founding
The concept of survey research software was first conceived nearly 50 years ago, and because CfMC played a significant role in the evolution of that history, we are proud of our heritage.
The use of electronic computers for commercial applications was just beginning to appear in the late 1950’s when our founder, Mr. Leif Gjestland graduated from UC Berkeley. Leif was intrigued by the idea of using computers for his work as an accountant but found no courses to satisfy his interest.
Leif finally landed a position in 1962 at a large egg processing plant that had plans to install a computer system for their accounting department and he was put in charge of converting their accounting documents and programming the new application on an early version of an IBM 1401 computer.
In 1964, the egg company was acquired leaving Leif without a position. A cross tabulation program called QUIP had been developed a few years earlier at the first software company, Computer Usage Corp (CUC).
Leif recalls, “I heard that CUC was offering a job in software. This had little appeal for me, as 'software' in those days meant ladies' underwear. Anyway, I decided to find out and discovered that it was like programming, and I could be my own boss. So I learned QUIP and introduced it to California in 1964, " said Leif. "The first thing I did (from an accounting background) was to develop a map of the data, which I called a holecount, because it counted how many '1' punches in column 1, how many '2' punches, etc."
Co-founder Charlie Yarborough, circa 1967
“Every company at first told me that surveys were too complicated to do by computer and needed to be done by humans. So I offered to do jobs for free. They gave me a duplicate set of the card data and described the tables they wanted. I could do in one to three days what took them about three weeks. Soon they were hooked.”
