How TECSoft started

Apple profiled TECSoft for its Solution Experts program. This is the story it told.

TECSoft's founder, John Thorsen Jr., came to the Mac by way of a chocolate import business. In 1984 he bought a Mac 128k to run the company's accounting, found there was no accounting software for it, and built his own system by combining FirstBase, a relational database, with Multiplan, Microsoft's predecessor to Excel.

By 1986 he had sold the chocolate company and become a Mac consultant. Citibank was his first client, where he developed macros in Excel and then WingZ HyperScript.

When Apple launched AppleScript with System 7 in 1991, he saw it at Macworld and recognised it as a technology unique to the Mac, and an opportunity. He taught himself AppleScript and began automating tasks between programs for clients. One of his first jobs flowed text from a FileMaker Pro database into a QuarkXPress document to automate a catalog for Simon & Schuster.

TECSoft joined Apple's Solution Experts program, then the Apple Solution Professionals Network, in 1994. Apple's profile opened by calling him “everyone's favorite AppleScript solution provider,” noting his in-depth teaching and his flair for humour in the classroom.

Read more about TECSoft's training and the Developers Consortium.