on a cold and foggy day
the story of our founding, page 2
But CUC was not interested in Leif’s service bureau operation for marketing research, so he began the process of creating what eventually became Computers for Marketing Corporation.
After a lengthy country wide search for someone interested in starting a new company and programming a new system for processing research data, Leif finally located two friends who just happened to be right in his own back yard at UC Berkeley. Charlie Yarborough and Joe Weisman were finishing their PhD work and agreed to consider the opportunity, but only if they could do it together.
In Leif’s own words, “We decided to meet at a beach on the San Mateo coast. It was a cold and foggy day. Charlie and I left our wives and babes behind a sand dune, sheltered from the wind, while we walked along the water's edge. I outlined how a company would be formed and operated, and what I thought the software should do."
"Later we drove to our home in Redwood City, and I outlined on the blackboard some of the basic functions needed – card reading, ID, multipunching, cleaning, data generation and manipulation, row and banner labels, table titles, and, of course, table generation, with an edit card to control spacing, frequency, percent, etc. The only strange thing for Charlie was multipunching, which he described as column binary.” Charlie took no notes and by October 1967 Charlie and Joe had developed a functioning ("even if it had a limp") program called Surveyor.
So on 4 October 1967, instead of calling it Software for Market Research (because in those days, software meant ladies’ underwear), the trio called their new company Computers for Marketing Corporation. For four to five years, Leif was the only employee, while Charlie and Joe worked in Guatemala. Leif gradually built a viable business by purchasing computer time on the few machines available around the western states and hauling boxes of punched cards every where he went.
About twice a year, one of them would return to San Francisco to fix the most serious bugs and add the most urgent wishes. After CfMC's incorporation, the most important event in CfMC's life happened in 1976, when Charlie and Joe returned to San Francisco as full time employees and proceeded to develop a computerized (CATI) Entry program to Surveyor called Survent.
In the past 39 years a lot of software companies have come and gone. Only one other software company that existed when CfMC was created is still around, making CfMC the second longest surviving software company in the world.
CfMC introduced the first commercial CATI system and was one of the first to introduce a Web-based survey system.
