We've come a long way, baby!

I started working in the horse show industry almost 15 years ago. It's a little know fact that other than riding in camp when I was growing up, I've never actually shown a horse so I came in to this field fairly blind. I have learned so much about this business over these years; both from the co-workers I've programmed with and the users I program for.

The original version of this software was written as a DOS program for the Ohio Quarter Horse Association as their All American Quarter Horse Congress got bigger and bigger year after year. This was all before my time; Tony Lewis got it all started through his first company that I can't even remember the name of (it will come to me in the middle of the night...anyone else remember?...not CyberTech...before then even). When I first began working with Tony in 1994, he had 'remade' the Congress software to accommodate OQHA's weekend show managers. Word of the software to run horse shows easily spread from Ohio managers to surrounding states and Tony started selling his Horse Show System to managers across the country.

Over the years that I have been working with this program, a lot of changes have taken place. We've grown from usability for AQHA shows to encompass basically any breed or open show. We've moved from selling largely in Ohio to hundreds of users across the country and around the world. The development platform has changed several times along the way as we moved from DOS to Windows. We've been through several versions of Microsoft's Windows that has made the usage and technical support of our products a challenge (don't get me started on the issues we are still trying to work through with Vista).

Each of these changes has improved the software. I'm working through some new things now that will continue to allow the program to grow and help you run your shows more efficiently. As noted in a previous post, keep the comments coming...the software gets better because of them. I won't promise to incorporate every new idea but many items that we might not be able to add in lead us to others that are similar or just as important.