I recently related some of the history of ACS Technologies to one of our technical partners, and he wanted to dig into how we sruvived for 30 plus years as a software company. It’s an interesting question and there are several components to the answer. I’ll stick with the development angle on things.
During the past thirty years we’ve created versions of ACS software on many platforms. Sometimes it was our desire to do so and sometimes the world changed so we had to change to survive.
Over the years versions of ACS Technologies’ CMSs existing on the following Operating Systems: Datapoint, CP/M, PC-DOS, MS-DOS, AIX, XENIX, Netware, Windows 3.11, Window XP and so on.
Some of these links lead to sites that are appropriately ugly – sorry.
Most of these worked out for us. Some did not. We spent a good amount of time in the early ’90s porting our DOS product to AIX and the IBM RS/6000. It was going to be the next big thing for us. It wasn’t. Here’s me with my old friend:
In more recent years we’ve worked to provide solutions on the web and through extension to the Mac world. The point is that we survived in this industry because we’ve always responded to changes in the world of technology with changes in our solutions.
Of course, the latest shift is upon us – the shift to mobile applications. This is especially true among the 18 to 29 year old age group. Some statistics from PEW Mobile 2010:
- 95% send and receive texts
- 65% access the internet
- 52% send and receive email
- 48% have accessed a social networking site
- 46% used instant messaging
- 20% made a purchase
- 19% made a charitable donation
Its clear that many users have already shifted to the mobile world and this shift will only increase in the future. You can be sure that ACS Technologies will continue to invest in developing these types of applications in 2011.
We’ll do this because it’s fun but also because it is necessary to satisfy the needs of our customers and their constituents.
