QuickVerse/Parsons Technology History

I wrote this article back in 2002 to tell the history of my writing of QuickVerse and my time at Parsons Technology. I always intended to keep it up-to-date but never got beyond what you see here. Some people read this and accuse me of living in the past. Those people can go sit on a nail. This is here because people ask me about it. And because it’s kind of interesting especially now that Bob Parsons and GoDaddy have become more widely known.

In the Beginning…
After graduating from the University of Iowa in 1981, I went to work for Rockwell International working on test equipment software for Air Force avionics projects. In 1986 I got involved in a custom programming project with two of my coworkers. We wrote an image processing application that analyzed particle shapes from pictures taken from scanning electron microscopes. It was quite cool. That project allowed me to buy my first PC-compatible, a Compaq Portable II (8MHz 80286, 640K RAM, 20MB HD). A screamer.

My prior computer was an Atari 400 which I modified significantly to make it useful for development work. The average Atari 400 had 16KB RAM and a “chiclet” keyboard. Mine had 52KB RAM and a real keyboard. Plus a 140KB floppy disk to replace the normal Atari cassette tape storage device. I wrote a home budget program in BASIC that, in my opinion, was tons better than anything currently available from Intuit or Microsoft. (It had two critical features: fund-based accounting and deposit templates.)

MoneyCounts and Trash Collectors
When I got the Compaq, I started re-writing my budget program in MS-BASIC. While discussing this with my friend Howard at Rockwell he said, “You really ought to try this MoneyCounts program the guy across the street from me wrote. I think it’s shareware.”

Turns out that Bob Parsons was the guy who lived across the street from Howard. MoneyCounts wasn’t shareware, but sold for only $12. I gave “Parsons Technology” a call and followed Howard home from work that night to pick up my first copy of MoneyCounts 3.0. Martha Parsons met me at the door and said something about “the programmers taking off early” that day. (I later figured out that Bob was the only programmer and he just wasn’t home from work yet.) She handed me a copy of MoneyCounts for $12, and didn’t bother me for sales tax.

With that transaction I became Parsons customer number 6553. A four-digit customer number of which I’m quite proud. (When I joined Parsons a year later I watched Bob write the code that would allow the customer database to accomodate six-digit account numbers.)

Over the next year, Howard and I followed the growth of Parsons Technology. From time to time Howard would say, “Well, Bob got a new laser printer” or “Bob got another computer yesterday.” For a while I thought Howard and Bob must be close friends. After asking a few questions I figured out that Howard was just checking out Bob’s garbage at the curb as he left for work!

When Howard got home from work the UPS truck would be backed up at Bob’s driveway loading up hundreds of copies of MoneyCounts.

In the Fall of 1987 we heard a rumor that Bob was leaving his day job and going full time into the software business.

I Meet Bob Parsons
Sometime in October of 1987 I gave Bob a call. I told him I was a little fed up with Rockwell and was looking for new opportunities. I had learned Pascal (Bob’s language of choice) in college, where I earned a 3.9/4.0 GPA, and I’d had a semester of accounting (more than any human should be subjected to). I figured I was a good match for any programming job he might want to throw at me.

Bob and I met one evening to go over my resume. We talked about lots of topics. I don’t think Bob had spent a lot of time talking to any “professional” programmers. He seemed somewhat embarrassed about his amateur coding efforts. I thought his results were extraordinary, and I told him so.

We met in Bob’s basement / office / warehouse. During the course of the evening the phone rang several times. Bob would pick up the phone and take an order for MoneyCounts, then we’d continue our conversation. At one of these interruptions, Bob picked up the phone, answering “Parsons Technology.” Then after a pause, “One moment please.”

Bob punched “hold” and sat their looking at me. He had a twinkle in his eye like he had just told me a joke and was waiting for me to get the punch-line. I smiled, wondering what he was up to. I could hardly contain my laughter when he hit another button on the phone, taking his caller off hold, and said, “Technical Support, may I help you?”

Low Cost, High Performance Software
Bob and I discussed his business model in depth. He had been impressed with Borland’s recent introduction of Turbo Pascal. At a time when other companies were charging $500 or more for programming language tools, Borland introduced Turbo Pascal at $49. By pricing the product so low, it became an impules buy for anyone connected in any way with personal computing. Whereas one might have thought that you could only sell a Pascal compiler to a programmer, all of a sudden it was like everyone was a programmer! Everybody with a computer had to have a copy of Turbo Pascal. Borland had stumbled onto a pricing model that (as much as we take it for granted today) was revolutionary at the time: Produce high quality software and sell tons of it at a low price.

Bob started out trying to sell MoneyCounts for well over $100. He sold a few copies, but still lost $15,000 in his first year of operation and $25,000 in his second. The third year he upgraded the program and, taking a clue from Borland, dropped the price to $12 โ€”ย well under the $49 to $99 being charged by his competitors. That year he grossed over $100,000.

As we talked, Bob’s philosophy became clear: Produce high quality software and sell it in volume – direct to the consumer – at an impulse-buy price. To ensure no obstacles to closing the sale, he’d spend the extra money it took to create top-quality, four-color, full-page ads to run in national computer magazines. Furthermore, the ads prominently featured a no-questions-asked, 30-day, money-back guarantee and a toll-free number for placing the order. (Parsons’ toll-free order number still contains Bob’s street address from those days.)

As a direct-to-consumer company advertising primarily through computer magazines, Parsons Technology appeared to the public to be a substantial, dependable company with high quality products. Nobody would have guessed from those early ads that the whole thing worked out of Bob’s basement – with hundreds of packages being shipped each afternoon from his garage… and Howard eyeing his garbage for signs of new toys.

Some Men Drink; I Write Code
Bob left me that night with the comment “I just hired the best programmer I can afford: Myself.” Having left full-time employment, Bob was stepping out on his own and offered little or no security for a young programmer with a growing family. It was pretty clear that if I expected to get a paycheck every week, Parsons Technology was not a good place for me.

I returned home, still reeling with the excitement of the conversation with Bob. He was so excited about what he was doing it was hard to just go to work at Rockwell the next morning for another day of the status quo.

I was growing increasingly depressed working at Rockwell. Working for a giant corporation has a way of sucking all the motivation out of a person. It’s too easy to “coast” and not get noticed. The work was interesting and challenging, but I could see it wasn’t going anywhere.

In the meantime I had finished the image processing application, and was looking for another programming project to fill my free time at home.

While browsing a catalog from Public Brand Software (one of the many shareware distribution companies that sprang to life during the mid-1980’s) I saw two items that caught my attention. One was a program containing the KJV New Testament, and the other was a set of eight disks containing the entire KJV text. I ordered both.

The KJV NT program was OK, but nothing to get too excited about. Searches were kind of slow. It was written by a guy who was a member of an end-of-the-world, gun-hoarding cult. A portion of the registration fee went to the organization, so needless to say I never registered my copy.

The real gem was having the entire text of the KJV Bible available on my computer. At the time, you could pay $50 to $100 for a set of disks like this that was just the Bible in sixty-six text files with a simple “grep”-type program that scanned the text for words and phrases. After trying to search for verses using my word processor for a couple days, I decided I could write a simple program that would make it a whole lot easier to search the Bible than loading it into a word processor.

QuickVerse is Born
My idea was to do some simple compression and indexing. First, I’d scan the whole Bible and make a list of all the different words I saw. After alphabetizing the list, I could assign a number to every word corresponding to its position in the alphabetic list. Then, making another pass through the Bible, I could replace each word with its number. I found there were about 12,783 words in my edition of the KJV.

Since, on average, a word takes about five or six bytes and any number up to 32767 can be stored in only two bytes, I instantly reduced the size of the Bible by about 60% by replacing words with numbers. Plus, since each word takes less space on the disk, I could read more words in less time – thus increasing the speed of access.

The next step was to be able to quickly find every occurrence of every word. I had recently used a really cool (at the time I thought so, anyway) storage technique which allowed me to store two values in one memory location. As long as you know one of the two numbers, you can easily extract the second. The idea is this: You have two numbers, A and B. You want to calculate a value, C, that embodies both numbers. Represented in binary, these numbers occupy 16 “bits” each, where each bit has a value of 1 or 0. Going from left to right (or right to left, it doesn’t matter) compare each of the corresponding bits of A and B. If both bits are 0 or both are 1, the corresponding bit in C is set to zero. If the bits from A and B have different values (0 and 1 or 1 and 0), set the bit in C to 1. The mathematical formula is C = A XOR B.

Now, given A, the value of B can be determined in the same was as C was calculated. That is, B = A XOR C. Similarly, given B, A can be found (A = B XOR C).

I numbered all the verses in the KJV (Genesis 1:1 was 1 and Revelation 22:21 was 31,102). For each word I stored the verse number of the first occurrence of the word in a word list along with the spelling of the word. Then, immediately after the first occurrence of that word in each verse in which the word occurs, I stored both the verse number for the next occurrence of the word and the verse number for the previous occurrence in one, two-byte, location on the disk. Given that you always know where you came from (either from the previous or the next occurrence), you could apply the XOR formula and find the next (or previous) place to go.

So on the whole, it took me four bytes to store a word. About 20% less than the size of the straight ASCII text of the Bible. Plus while I was saving storage space I was adding another piece of information: The location of the adjacent occurrences of the word.

It Sounded Good on Paper!
The beauty of this approach was that for any word, I could take you instantly to the first place that word occurs in the Bible. If you wanted to see the next occurrence, I could also get there instantly. The only problem was that if you wanted to see every place a word occurred in the Bible, I had to walk through the whole Bible finding each occurrence! While this was slow, it was still faster than a lot of other programs available at the time.

Where this approach really broke down was in phrase searches. With a phrase search, you have to find all the verses where all the words in the phrase occur together, then verify that the words occur exactly in the sequence in the phrase. With my approach I had to pick the word that occurred the fewest number of times and look at each verse that word was in for an occurrence of the phrase. For phrases like “John the Baptist” that works fine, because neither John nor Baptist occur very many times.

“Day of the Lord,” however, is a different story.

QuickVerse Takes Over My Life
I started falling into a habit of coming home from work, having dinner and waiting for everyone to go to bed, then programming until three or four in the morning. Start time at Rockwell was 7:30, so I wasn’t getting much sleep. I remember noticing at one point that on many days I was putting in eight hours at Rockwell, then working ten hours at home!

I also found that I was really enjoying working on my Bible program and really dreading going into work. In my performance review in January 1988, my boss pointed out that my night-time programming (at that time on the shape analysis program) was affecting the quality of my work. Not to mention the fact that I had met a couple of guys at work who were equally under-challenged by their work. We tended to take some pretty long breaks.

I applied for some different positions within Rockwell. At the time I was writing code in C and Ada (what a combination!). I applied for a position maintaining the system software that compiled our Ada programs, but the job went to someone less qualified but better “connected.” (She was also a little cuter than me.)

Meanwhile Bob’s comments from our conversation in the fall of 1987 were bouncing around in my head. I began to think, “Is there anyway that I could do with Bible software what Bob has done with financial management software?”

A Hole in the Market
As I looked for other Bible software all I saw were very high-priced, under-marketed products. GodSpeed was fast but incapable. $100 got you a copy of the KJV, and another $150 would buy Strongs numbers to go with the KJV. The program didn’t do much at all. It found words and phrases very quickly, but it was virtually impossible to print or save the results. The company had contracted with a fast-talking salesman who took over production of the product and eventually drove it into the ground – refusing to pay royalties to publishers or split revenues with the owners of the program because “God told him not to.”

WordSearch was idiosyncratic but fairly powerful at $179 for the KJV or NIV. WordSearch had a history similar to the beginnings of QuickVerse, being developed by Dr. Jim Sneeringer out of his home while he worked another job. Sneeringer faced the same problems I would face – that of effectively marketing the program. He would later market the program through NavPress, then buy the software portion of the company back from NavPress and run it fairly effectively on his own.

CompuBible had a well-engineered product with features that rivaled some of its competitors for several years. It was owned by a father and son team out of Texas who had contracted with a long-haired, hippy-type programmer to write the code, and a conservative Bible publisher to market the resulting product. However, at $249 it was just too expensive for most people and the Bible publisher just didn’t know how to effectively market it.

Bible Research Systems offered perhaps the most comprehensive product, but at $299 for a basic package and extra charges to add the most simple add-ons, people weren’t flocking to their door. Their marketing wasn’t bad; advertising in several of the major computer magazines with an ad showing a “ribbon cable” coming out of a Bible – an image they continue to use to this day.

It seemed obvious to me that there was an opening for a Bible software product under $100. My plan was to follow Bob’s model and try to make up in volume what I lost on per-unit margin. Furthermore, I’d spend some money and create some good-looking ads that would convey the idea that “Creative Computer Systems” was more than just my spare bedroom. (I hijacked the company name from the partnership that we had formed to do the image processing system. This made taxes simpler. By this time my partners and I were done with the image processing system and the partnership was just holding together until the end of 1988 when we’d do our final tax return and shut it down. Since I already had the letterhead and the bank account, I thought I’d just market my Bible software under that name.)

My Wife, the Software Sales Rep
QuickVerse began to come together fairly well in the Spring of 1988. I had formulated a plan to begin advertising in the September issue of Pulpit Helps magazine, which came out in late August. That meant I had to have camera-ready art by the first of July and pay the $400 for the ad shortly thereafter. By August 1, I’d have to decide if I wanted to run the ad in the October issue, long before the first ad had appeared. And of course I’d owe another $400. Within a week after the first ad actually appeared, I’d have to decide if I wanted to be in the November issue. It was pretty clear that I’d have to commit the money without knowing how sales were going to go. And I had to have the program done by September.

The summer went pretty fast. I was coding all night and “working” at Rockwell all day. My wife was wonderful about the whole thing. She could see that I was not happy with Rockwell and was deriving most of my job satisfaction from the work I was doing after-hours. We had an agreement that I could work late three or four nights a week, as long as she knew my schedule in advance and as long as we could set aside one night a week plus Saturday for family activities. This was a philosophy I would stick with through the years when work began to interfere with family; I always let her know ahead of time what my schedule was going to be, and I always set aside time as needed, without complaining. I think that did much to keep us both sane during those hectic days.

Late in the summer I went out and spent what little I could afford to have a little two-by-two inch ad done at a local graphic arts shop. I couldn’t afford a four-color ad, but I applied Bob’s philosophy of trying to look like a more substantial company than I really was. I lined up an 800-number that rang into our kitchen. I put a bulletin board up by the phone with a clipboard of order forms, a UPS map depicting delivery times to anywhere in the country, and a price list so my wife could take orders.

Sometime early in September I finished version 1.0 and we waited for the phone to ring. It seemed like an eternity, but finally the first orders came in. I couldn’t accept credit cards, so I sent the packages out on invoice. Getting that first check for $60 was a real kick!

My wife would answer the phone and take orders. Callers wanting technical support were told we’d call them back after 5PM. I paid my 5-year old twenty-five cents per set of disks to duplicate disks for me. I still remember her standing on my office chair, shoving disks into the drive and pressing “Enter” to copy the files from my massive 60MB hard drive to the 5.25″ low-density floppies.

I remember a conversation with my wife in which I commented, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could make just enough doing this that I could leave Rockwell and do this full time?” I would have been shocked to know that within seven years QuickVerse would support 70-80 full-time-equivalent Parsons employees in various capacities.

“Hello, Bob?”
In October 1988, with things now going fairly well, I had an idea. If I could get a list of churches that owned computers I could do some direct mail and hopefully sell some programs. I started by calling churches in Cedar Rapids and asking if they had time to complete a survey. This gave me an opportunity to find out how big the church was, if they owned a computer, and if the pastor used the computer – among other things. If they sounded like a good prospect I’d send them a letter and offer them a discount on the program. But that was a pretty small list of names and it was very labor-intensive. I needed a better source of names.

I decided it ought to be fairly straightforward to go through Parsons Technology’s customer list and pull out anything that looked like a church. By then they had less than 100,000 customers, but many were churches who were using MoneyCounts (like my church did). I called Bob, who by now had moved out of his house into an office building and somehow had managed to create several layers of secretaries to insulate him from people like me trying to leach onto his success. Bob invited me to visit the office and bring my program along. He asked that I also bring any documentation I had. That seemed weird, but not a problem. I fired up the dot matrix printer and printed off the 25-page QuickVerse user’s guide.

I showed up at Bob’s office at the appointed hour. Parsons Technology occupied a couple thousand square feet in a two-story office building. The front of the office housed about ten order-takers. A small room in the back contained a disk duplicator machine, which clanked out a couple copies of MoneyCounts every minute. A young lady sat on the floor surrounded by invoices and credit card slips.

The programmers occupied a small room in the back. There were two of them, answering Tech Support calls and squeezing in some programming between calls. All told it looked like about 20 people scurrying about.

Bob greeted me and took me to his office. We were joined by someone named Claudia who grabbed my “documentation” and ran off, probably to make an illegal copy. Boy, were these guys cheap!

We installed the program on Bob’s machine and he looked up a few verses. Having been in the corporate leasing business, he did a word search for “leasing.” We all chuckled to see Psalm 5:6:

Thou shalt destroy them that speak leasing: the LORD will abhor the bloody and deceitful man.

The more Bob played with the program, the more he got excited about it. He asked me what my intentions were and I told him my idea of scanning his customer list for anything that looked like a church. He asked me about the competition for the product and what I was selling it for. He seemed intrigued by the fact that all the other Bible software products available at that time were significantly higher than my $60 price. He asked how they were being marketed. I asked for a copy of PC Magazine and showed him the Bible Research Systems ad. It seems like WordSearch might have also been in there. (Both companies had ads in the “business card” section in the back of the magazine where a small 1″ x 2″ ad could be had for a few hundred dollars. The BRS ad featured, of course, the flying Bible with the ribbon cable.)

About then Claudia stepped back in. “How’s it look?” Bob asked. “Looks fine,” she replied. Bob explained that Claudia was his technical writer and director of public relations (I later found out that about everyone wore multiple hats — programmer/tech support, accounting/tech support/human resources, manufacturing/shipping/credit card processing, etc. Bob even once said that his best critic of new ideas was the kid who came in at night to clean the building.)

Bob and Claudia exchanged a few comments that were thinly-disguised efforts to evaluate the marketability of my program without me really catching on to what they were talking about. Finally Bob dismissed Claudia and turned to me. “What would you think of letting us market this product for you? We’d take the product pretty much as-is — we’d write the manual, manufacture the product, sell it, support it, and pay you a royalty.”

This caught me off guard. I wasn’t expecting anything like this at all. I had to quickly search my thoughts and feelings in order to put together some reasonable questions.

“Why would you be interested in Bible software?” I asked.

“Churches represent the largest group of small businesses in the country.” Where he came up with that statistic (an accurate one, no less) was beyond me. “If we can reach churches with Bible software, perhaps we can sell them a copy of MoneyCounts.”

How much input would I have in the marketing and direction of the product? What were the financial terms? The more I questioned, the more I realized that I wasn’t excited about just letting the product go. On the other hand, this looked like an opportunity of another kind, so I threw another twist into the conversation.

Escape from Rockwell
“Would you consider hiring me to continue development on the product and to direct the marketing? This is, after all, a very specialized niche. You’re going to need someone who knows the nuances of the various denominations and sects that make up the audience for this product.”

Now it was Bob’s turn to sit back and think. He didn’t pause for very long before he said, “We’d be willing to consider that. What did you have in mind?” I’d later learn by observing Bob’s negotiating skills that he was putting the ball in my court to make the initial offer in order to gain position in our subsequent discussions — one of many negotiating tips I’d learn from him over the next six years.

I was ready to leave Rockwell, but I wasn’t ready to give up the job security that working for a major corporation affords. I figured I’d be willing to give up a little security for a major increase in income, so I threw out a number that was about 25% higher than my current position, plus a percentage of the sales of my product. I must have been well under Bob’s strike price, because that seemed to light him up. He ended up countering with even more generous terms.

I told him I’d have to discuss it with my wife. Bob suggested I give him a call the next day to let him know what I decided. I reminded him that as it was Friday, the next day would be a weekend and I assumed the office would be closed. “I’ll be here. Give me a call tomorrow.”

Needless to say, my wife and I had a long talk that night. We recalled our conversation in which I had wondered if we’d ever get to the point where I could support myself from sales of QuickVerse. We talked about the security of working for a multi-billion dollar defense contractor versus working for some CPA with a copy of Turbo Pascal. We prayed for God to lead us into the right decision.

I’m Outta Here!
The decision finally came down to one thing: I could sit at Rockwell and wonder what life might have been like to have struck out with Bob, or I could take the challenge and see what I could do to change the face of computerized Bible study. In that light, there was no decision to make. I drafted a letter of resignation.

Monday morning I set up an appointment with my boss for right after lunch. Over the noon hour I drove over to Parsons Technology (which, coincidentally, was located right across the street), and Bob and I hammered out an employment agreement. With that in hand, I knew it was safe to go back and submit my resignation.

At 1:00 I went to see Neil Ennis, my supervisor. I brought along a copy of my ad from Pulpit Helps magazine and a brochure I’d had printed up. I told him how I’d been working nights to write this Bible software, and that’s why my heart had not been in my work. I told him the story of taking the program to Bob for the purpose of renting a mailing list, and how Bob had offered to hire me. Neil of course knew that I’d been applying for various positions within Rockwell, and suspected that I wasn’t challenged any longer by the work we were doing.

In what was to become a trend of bucking the system, I gave Rockwell only one week’s notice – I planned to start at Parsons the following Monday (technically, 6.5 days later). Neil wasn’t sure if Human Resources could process the paperwork that fast. I told him it didn’t really matter to me, I could come back a week later and sign some papers if that what they wanted, but I was definitely going to be at Parsons Technology on Monday.

Ironically, the manager who had hired the cuter programmer a few months before called me later that week and said, “I heard you’re leaving the company. Is there anything we can do to get you to stay? Maybe we could open something up for you.” I threw out a salary figure that was about twice what Parsons would be paying me. “If we can talk about numbers like that, I’ll give Rockwell a second chance,” I said. Needless to say, they weren’t interested. Idiots. They should have jumped on me when they had the chance.

A Rose by any Other Name?
One of the first orders of business upon arriving at Parsons was to name the program. The name I’d been using for the program was not one that Bob thought was very good, so we started working on ideas. At the time, search speed was about the only criteria that was used to compare Bible software. We wanted to convey the idea that the program was fast. Part of the name had to be something like “Fast” or “Quick.” This got me thinking about the verse that says that the word of God is “quick and powerful; sharper than any two-edged sword.” I sketched out a thumbnail of an ad with the name “Sword’s Edge” with the headline “Quick and Powerful.” I thought it was a pretty cool name.

Bob wasn’t as impressed. He thought it sounded to “churchy.” He wanted something cleaner; something that would extend the reach of the product beyond the well-churched crowd. I brought him a list of dozens of more names constructed from words implying speed combined with words related to the Bible (“word,” “verse,” “Bible”). I don’t recall that he liked any of them.

After I got home it really burned me that he hadn’t liked “Sword’s Edge.” I called him at home and we had a long heart-to-heart about how much of a role I was going to have in the company. It seemed like I should be able to pick the name. Bob assured me that he wanted me to be happy with it, but that he’d like to come up with something that we’d both be happy with. He managed to calm me down, and in the course of the conversation I threw out two or three of the best new names from the list. “QuickVerse” caught our attention.

After sleeping on it, QuickVerse was chosen as the name for the product. In retrospect, Sword’s Edge was even dumber than the original name of the program…

“Logos.”

A New Product is Born
Bob had a few suggestions to make the program better. He wanted enhanced printer support, so I wrote a reconfigurable printer driver. These were the DOS days, remember? Everybody had to memorize the binary code that turned an Epson printer into condensed mode. QuickVerse would remember those codes so you wouldn’t have to.

I worked on updates to the program through Christmas. In the meantime we wrote the manual and prepared the initial ads. “Instant Bible Access – Only $49” was the headline. A picture of about a dozen floppies scattered around a big Bible led the reader into copy that boasted of QuickVerse’s fast access to the entire text of the Bible and wildcard searches. (One customer returned the product because he didn’t get “the big book in the ad.” Another, upon seeing a different ad with a picture of QuickVerse running on a computer, bought QuickVerse thinking he was going to get the computer too. Once he figured out his mistake he called to say “I bought your program, but I don’t have a computer to run it on. What do I need to buy?”)

A friend of mine wrote the manual. It featured a summary at the beginning of each chapter that let experienced users get everything in about a paragraph that we were going to spend the next ten pages explaining. I think it was one of the best manuals we ever did. But then the program was so simple the manual really wasn’t even necessary.

QuickVerse was the first Parsons product to have enough disks that it needed a box. Previously, copies of MoneyCounts sold through software stores had just been two disks shoved inside a manual, then shrink-wrapped by Bob’s twelve-year-old daughter. QuickVerse had a smaller manual and about five times as many disks. The box featured a stylized dove. While it was a little more “charismatic” than I would have normally gone for, it did have a unique look.

QuickVerse was also the first Parsons product that really taxed the capacity of the little disk duplicator sitting in the shipping room. I went shopping for a system that could duplicate disks at about 150 disks per hour. It was driven by a PC. We quickly outgrew that system and within about three months had upgraded to a Unix-based system with three duplicators, bringing our capacity up to 450 disks per hour and giving us the option of duplicating 3.5″ disks. (Parsons currently operates about 36 such duplicators with a capacity of about 9000 disks per hour. During our tax season we run three shifts, for a total capacity of over 200,000 disks per day. Even at that rate we have to send a large number of disks to outside duplication houses.)

Bob told me once that we’d eventually sell 100 copies of QuickVerse per day. I would’ve been happy with 100 per week. QuickVerse started shipping in mid-January, 1989. By the end of January we had sold 973 copies – about 97 per business day. At the end of March, Zondervan told us we held 33% of the total market for electronic editions of the NIV. Three months later we had doubled our per-quarter sales rate. Zondervan released their own electronic product that quarter. Interestingly enough, they refused to give us market share information after that. But based on our calculations, we figured we were outselling all of our competitors combined (including Zondervan’s).

QuickVerse for the Macintosh
Kurt Hansen was the first programmer Bob hired. Kurt worked for the company that installed Bob’s first network. They got to know each other and Bob ended up hiring Kurt.

Kurt made an early attempt in the summer of 1988 to write a Mac version of MoneyCounts. He didn’t get too far before it became obvious that the project was going to be bigger than the company was willing to commit to. This would be the first of several times that Parsons would start and stop Macintosh development.

One of the assumptions I had been hired under was that I would write a Macintosh version of QuickVerse. The first ads said “for PC or Macintosh.” With the word already out that the Mac version existed, we had to hurry to put something together. Bob offered to have Kurt work with me on the Mac project.

Our plan was to have Kurt create a “framework” with all the “Mac stuff” pre-coded, then I would step in and code all the “QuickVerse stuff” (like the decompression and search engine). Kurt started with the code he had developed for MoneyCounts. Because we were in a hurry, many of the data structures and definitions from MoneyCounts were left in. As a result, QuickVerse for the Mac shipped with date calculation code and the definition for a double-entry accounting data structure still in place.

We shipped the Mac version in April 1989. It did fairly well, but never represented more than 10% of our sales. In a way that was good; the Mac software market was about 10% of the total PC software market. But with the shortage of Bible software for the Mac we thought we should have been able to do better than 10%.

But the real problem was Technical Support. We had a small group of techies, all of whom were hired for the knowledge of DOS and PCs. When the Macintosh came along, we figured we’d just show them where the System Folder was at and teach them to hold down the mouse button when they dragged menus down and that would be the end of it. Besides, the Mac was supposed to be so easy to use, who’d need Tech Support?

We had also heard that Mac users knew their machines better than PC users. The reasoning was that the machines were so much easier to use that they naturally learned everything about them. Plus Mac users bought 2-3 times as much software for their machines than the average PC users. It should be no problem to support these guys!

Boy, were we wrong. One of the problems with the Mac being so easy to use was that our techies could say, “Well, you need to add a mouse driver to CONFIG.SYS. Give that a try, then call me back if it doesn’t work.” These confident Mac users, not knowing that Macs don’t have a CONFIG.SYS file but figuring, “Hey, it’s a Macintosh – it should be easy!” would hang up the phone then sit there and stare at their monochromatic screens searching all over the place for the file. (What did that Tech Support guy call it? ‘Can figs date sis?’ Hmmm… must be here somewhere.)

A year or two later we discontinued the Mac version of QuickVerse. It was too hard to maintain multiple development and support teams on the limited income we were receiving from the program.

Those were the days….
That was back in the days when I was still writing code. Sometime between writing the Mac program and getting Membership Plus off the ground I re-coded the whole way that QuickVerse stored its Bible files. Version 1.21 shipped in May 1989 and had a much more efficient concordance structure, including a technology for doing Boolean searches that we don’t think too many other Bible software companies have figured out, even to this day.

“Oh, and by the way, Craig, we need a church management program!”

One of Bob’s marketing plans was to get churches “hooked” by selling them QuickVerse, then turn around and sell them a copy of MoneyCounts, too. The opposite would also work… churches already using MoneyCounts to track their finances would be very likely to be interested in Bible software.

So Bob tasked me with looking at MoneyCounts and coming up with a list of enhancements that we’d need to make it useful for churches. In examining the program I could find only one major flaw: The lack of fund accounting.

Fund accounting is a cash-based accounting system in which balances are maintained in several designated funds. Income and expenses are written against these funds, so that it’s obvious when you’ve overspent your “budget.” If an expense would cause the balance of a fund to go negative, it’s necessary to steal money from another fund to cover the expense. In a way, it enforces a budget: You can only spend what you’ve got.

I spent quite a bit of time explaining fund accounting to Bob and the other accountants at the company. I didn’t make much progress. (I’m not going to go into the topic of helping CPAs understand basic layman’s accounting principles. I’ll save that for another article.) I settled for writing an article for the customer newsletter (the MoneyCounts Ledger) describing how to set up fund accounting using equity accounts in MoneyCounts.

But my research uncovered another shortcoming in MoneyCounts. There was no way to track contributions – an important task for church treasurers who have to provide reports to their contributors for IRS purposes at the end of the year. In the course of designing a program to handle this task, it grew into a full-fledged database management program for churches that included membership tracking, attendance, pledges, label printing, reporting, and more.

Help!
Needless to say, I needed help. In January 1989 while coding the Mac version of QuickVerse I interviewed and hired Steve Spencer, a recent Computer Science graduate from Bob Jones University in Greenville, SC. Steve was a native of Rockford, IL, so I knew he’d be no stranger to Iowa winters (a significant job hazard for programmers relocating from Southern California). Steve was an expert Pascal programmer. I brought him onboard to work on the program that would become known as Membership Plus.

Simultaneously, work was piling up on QuickVerse. We wanted to do version 2.0 by Christmas 1989. Version 2.0 would be a full “terminate and stay resident” version of the program which would permit the user to use his word processor and QuickVerse at the same time. I was working on both the PC and Mac versions. Kurt and I wrapped up the Mac version in April and I put him to work with Steve on Membership Plus. I felt Kurt’s Pascal expertise and the fact that he had some more programming experience would help Steve wrap up Membership Plus within six to nine months.

I needed help if we were going to keep all this afloat. Back at Rockwell I had worked with an electrical engineer by the name of Jeff Wheeler. I was the only “pure software” guy in our 70-engineer group. As a result, I tended to get involved in a lot of tasks. I needed someone to move things on to once they were well established and everything was working well. We hired Jeff to take my programming tasks on a major Defense Department communication system so that I could move on to the Fun Stuff.

Jeff had proven to be a quick study. He was meticulous and thorough. What was most disturbing is that he actually listened to what I told him about programming and did all the things that most programmers talk about but don’t actually do themselves – things like using named constants, meaningful variable names, abundant comments, data abstraction and more. As a result he had turned into quite a gifted programmer.

Over the course of 1989 I had tried to get Jeff hired into every spot that came open. I think I offered him some real jewels; he remembers differently. I remember offering him a shot at being responsible for bringing third party software products into the company and perhaps also director of IS. He recalls me suggesting a janitorial position and something on the assembly line in manufacturing. One of us could be wrong.

Late in the summer of 1989 I convinced Bob to let me open a programmer position in my department and I hired Jeff. Jeff’s job would be to learn all that was learnable about QuickVerse and eventually take my coding responsibilities on that project. Jeff started in August 1989. Our goal was to ship QuickVerse 2.0 by Christmas, but it became obvious that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, Jeff and I dove into researching how to create a stand-alone TSR program we’d later call the QuickVerse Companion. That program shipped around Christmas of 1989.

The Rush to the Mad Summer of 1990
We had felt for a long time that Christian bookstores offered an excellent channel for church and Bible related software. Bob had very little interest in selling software through stores. Our emphasis was on marketing direct to the consumer through magazine ads and direct mail. Computer software was not yet hot at retail, though some larger cities had dedicated software stores. Most people bought direct from manufacturers and magazines like Computer Shopper were read cover to cover by these early adopters of PC technology.

But we had a niche product that was targeted to the same people who shop in Christian bookstores. (Or so we thought. Turns out most people who buy software are men; most who shop in Christian bookstores are women.) As we researched the market we discovered the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA). Most of the better bookstores were CBA members. We were told that the premier event of the year was the CBA International Convention, held each year in July. Our best shot at getting QuickVerse into Christian bookstores was getting space at the CBA convention.

In the Spring of 1989 we had contacted CBA to find out about exhibiting. It turned out space was limited only to members of CBA, and that the convention was full. To get on the waiting list we had to join the organization to the tune of a couple thousand dollars. It seemed like a waste of money to join the organization in order to get on a waiting list and potentially still not be able to exhibit. But it was our only choice. In September 1989 we joined CBA and got on the waiting list for the convention. Early in 1990 we were notified that we had a booth.

Our plan was to announce QuickVerse 2.0 and Membership Plus at the CBA convention in July, then ship the products as soon as we got home. By this time, development on Membership Plus had been going on for a full year, certainly we’d be done by July. QuickVerse was in pretty good shape, though we were trying to negotiate additional Bibles (since QV 2.0 would support displaying up to four Bibles simultaneously!) and implement Strongs Concordance at the same time. While all this was going on, I was busy learning everything that we’d need to know about exhibiting at the convention. We’d need to buy a display of some kind and we hoped to have some kind of evening activity during which we’d demonstrate and launch our new products in a flurry of trumpets, flags and miscellaneous hoopla.

I’m not sure why in the midst of this chaos I thought I needed something else to do, but events were about to conspire against me to turn 1990 into a nightmare.

Enter Bible Illustrator
Early in 1990 I was contacted by Tony Tooley, author of a program called InfoSeek. InfoSeek was a program containing stories, quotes, jokes, and news items that related to or conveyed biblical principles. He had offered the program to NavPress Software, a division of NavPress publishing, but thought it would be a good idea to get another player interested. Tony wanted to distribute the product through one or the other of us in exchange for a royalty on the sales of the program. Initially, there didn’t seem to be much of a contest, as NavPress was offering way more than Parsons would consider. But I think I convinced Tony that we could sell far more copies of the program due to our larger customer base and active direct marketing efforts. I gave him the sweetest deal Bob would let me put together but in the end he took NavPress’s offer.

The exposure to Tony’s program had convinced me there was a need for something like this. I had seen advertisements for books of sermon illustrations and subscription services that offered illustrations on a monthly basis, but nothing in software. I knew the software itself was no big deal — a simple database with some specialized search capabilities and that’s about it. But the secret to success would be in obtaining access to as much content as possible to put into the program.

Coincidentally about that time I received a “card deck” advertising pack (about 100 postcard-sized ads in a cellophane wrapper) containing an ad for Sermons Illustrated, a bi-monthly subscription service offering 60 new sermon illustrations per issue. I contacted Jeff Carroll, the author, and we began discussions of licensing his material for use in a software program.

Pastor Carroll had purchased Sermons Illustrated from another pastor, who had about 15 years worth of illustrative material and a small database of subscribers to the bi-monthly updates. Pastor Carroll was negotiating with Baker to publish the back issues in book form, but those negotiations had not really worked out. In the end we agreed to acquire the back issues (about 2000-3000 illustrations) and contract with Pastor Carroll to distribute his subscription service electronically. He said he’d box up the back issues and send them to us.

It would be impossible to describe my shock upon receiving this material. I had anticipated receiving a couple thousand index cards that I’d have to have someone type or scan in to my program. Instead, we received two large boxes full of what were literally scraps of paper containing handwritten notes, newspaper clippings, and typed illustrations. The task of converting all this into electronic form fell to a couple of the secretaries at Parsons, who began taking this work home to work on after hours.

In the meantime, it was my job to come up with a program to contain all this information. I was on the road a lot at the time, so Bible Illustrator began its life beside a swimming pool (somewhere in North Carolina as I recall). With my laptop in hand I donned shorts and a t-shirt and sat back to begin coding. Ahh, this was the life… not a cloud in the sky, my laptop computer on my lap, iced tea beside me, and… rain! Suddenly from out of nowhere, I was getting soaked! I knew my Toshiba 3100SX was rugged, but in that split second I didn’t have time to think about whether or not they’d tested it under water. I jumped up and ran for cover. Immediately the rain stopped. Only then did I realize that the sprinkler system was the source of the water. Seems they water their plants and guests at the same time here.

Undaunted, I relocated my makeshift programming workstation to another part of the patio and after checking carefully for hidden plumbing systems, went to work. Now I realize that programming is a lot tougher now, what with Windows and all. But back in those days we were expected to implement mouse-driven, windowed applications in a DOS environment. There were no “class libraries” to ease the implementation of fancy user interfaces. If you wanted a drop shadowed window you drew every pixel of the border and the shadow and restored the former screen contents under the window when you were done. Anyway, Bible Illustrator was born late in April and shipped on July 31. Hey, I couldn’t waste all my time on BI, I still had coding responsibilities on QuickVerse!

1990 CBA Convention
There’s a waiting list to get into the CBA convention. Lots of companies are vying for a small number of openings each year. The show is big enough that it only fits at some of the largest venues in the country. New exhibitors are allowed one 10′ x 10′ booth the first year, so we were faced with trying to make a big impression from a very small space. In typical Parsons Technology style, we did this by buying more ad space than we had floor space in the booth.

One of the unique advertising opportunities at this convention was a TV show that was produced on-site each day, then broadcast to all the convention hotels. Each day a different 30-minute show was produced, featuring news from exhibiting companies.

Little did the viewers realize, of course, that the companies featured in the news stories were actually paying for the time. We bought the biggest package we could and got a couple minutes of commercials each day and one news story during the week.

One of the main problems with being a new exhibitor among 450 companies was getting people to find your tiny booth. We played off that with a series of commercials in which a couple of bookstore managers sought to find our booth. We found a couple who owned a bookstore who volunteered to play the part of our frantic buyers. We shot the commercial on the show floor the day before it opened to the public. The harried attendees struggled to find our booth on the huge convention floor, often running into each other heading in opposite directions, until they finally found us. The commercial was great fun and produced a lot of traffic.

To launch our three new programs we planned a 2-hour event after one of the first days of the show. At the event we’d demonstrate each product, and of course there’d be food and drink. We sent invitations to all registered attendees in advance of the show, and received a surprising number of RSVPs. We booked a small ballroom at the Hyatt in Denver and ordered up some cookies, coffee and punch.

As we talked to buyers during the show we mentioned the event and were surprised at how many said they’d come. We handed out hundreds of tickets and began to wonder if we’d planned enough food and space. I got nervous and called the hotel. Yes, the Grand Ballroom was available, and yes, we could get more cookies and punch. I doubled or tripled our order and had the room set up for 700 guests.

About 50 people showed up. Had we thought about it we could have figured it out. The show starts at 9 AM and runs until 6 PM. Most people are on their feet the whole time, going from booth to booth placing orders for products for their stores. Our event started at 7 PM, so there wouldn’t be time for people to eat. We were offering cookies and drinks — hardly a meal — and two hours of boring product announcements.

Somewhere in Denver a homeless shelter received dozens of “monster cookies” the next morning, and each of our staff members took a pile of cookies back to their room. I didn’t want to see another M&M monster cookie for months.


Remember, this article is copied and pasted from an old version of my site. At this point, the old article said “I’ll be back to tell more,” and I used the space below to take some notes on what happened in the years that followed. As you can see I stopped updating the list in 2002. The ownership changes became too frequent and confusing and I couldn’t keep up with them. In the meantime I had started Laridian and my interest in what was going on with QuickVerse was rapidly fading. So here are my notes through 2002…

1990: The rest of the story of Bible Illustrator, Membership Plus, and QuickVerse 2.0. Christian Computing Magazine and conventions.

1991: GreekTools, HebrewTools and the inimitable Larry Twitty

1992: QuickVerse for Windows

1993: PC Bible Atlas, Holman Bible Dictionary (Sometime in 1989 I had the idea to write a Bible geography program which would feature a database of every place in the Bible, with the ability to create maps by selecting places from the database and dropping them onto blank map backgrounds. (Bob will claim that this was his idea. I’ve learned not to question Bob, so if it comes up, I’ll admit that it was his idea.) It wasn’t until August 1993 that the program became a reality with PC Bible Atlas for Windows.)

1994: The ill-fated “QuickVerse” for the Newton MessagePad, QuickVerse 3.0, Membership Plus 2.0, The Geography Division, Intuit

1995: STEP is born, Membership Plus 3.0, HebrewTutor

1996: STEP books, GreekTutor, QuickVerse 4.0, Walk in the Footsteps of Jesus

1997: STEP books, Membership Plus 4.0, Ministry Notebook, Bible Illustrator 2.0, QuickVerse Multimedia Life Application Bible, Broderbund, loss of PTE, RIF.

1998: Membership Plus 5.0, QuickVerse 5.0. Purchase by The Learning Company, PalmBible and Laridian, my departure from Parsons.

1999: PalmBible continued; working from home. Laridian acquires MyBible. TLC bought by Mattel, Mattel sells Church Software Division to Findex.com. Only 3 of 30 original employees remain by the end of the year.

2000: Laridian participates with Microsoft in the launch of Pocket PC with PocketBible; MyBible CD-ROM product introduced to Christian bookstores; Laridian hires its first non-founding employee. Mattel sells what’s left of The Learning Company to Gores Technology; Findex falters on QV7. Findex fires the guy who replaced me (Bill Terrill).

2001: Findex fires its CEO. Laridian acquires PrayerPartner for Palm OS.

2002: Findex re-hires Bill Terrill. Memorize! for Palm OS and Pocket PC. More reference books. PocketBible retail product. Laridian hires former Parsons employees Michelle Stramel and Jim VanDuzer. Four bucks will get you a cup of Starbucks coffee and 100 shares of Findex stock.

89 thoughts on “QuickVerse/Parsons Technology History”

  1. RE: The Kingdom of the Cults/Quick Verse 2.0

    I purchased a copy of The Kingdom of the Cults at a used bookstore. Enclosed in the back was an unopened disc for Quick Verse 2.0. There is an electronic version of the book enclosed that does not require a password; however, I have been searching high and low to find the password to access the Library.

    Is this something that you can assist me with? I am running the disc on an old laptop that I have with NT installed.

    Thank you so much.

    1. As I recall from TWENTY YEARS AGO when that was a new product, there were two types of passwords. One got you past the registration screen that keeps bugging you about registering (which of course you can’t do anymore) and the other unlocks books. The former was a single password that works for everyone. The latter is computed from information you provide when you would call in to purchase the unlocking code. It was tied to your Parsons customer account and information about your hardware, so it’s very unique to you. It is impossible to generate these unlocking codes these days, now that Findex augured QuickVerse into the ground then sold it for a few pennies to WordSearch.

      That being said, WordSearch also has Kingdom of the Cults, and since you have a QuickVerse copy they might be able to make you a deal. Or if not, you could just get their Bible program, which is a whole lot better than trying to run a twenty-year-old program on Windows NT.

  2. It was years ago I dropped in here, long after you were no longer associated with PT.

    FWIW (very little) I still use QV4! I managed to use it all the way thru XP, but with Windows 7 I have to use it in a virtual window. As a die hard WordPerfect user, I found QV and Dale Durnell’s macros to make my lesson preparation so much more efficient.

    Must say I miss those days even though the technology has improved and I’ve kept up with it.

  3. Hi. I found MembershipPlus for my dad’s church around the time of version 4.0. At some point I helped him upgrade to 6.0 and about 3 years ago to 7.0 for Windows XP. He is now having to upgrade his laptop (the previous one was just stolen right out of his house) and will most likely will have to buy one running Windows 8. From my little bit of research, looks like MembershipPlus has been bought by ACS and now carries an ACS sized price tag. Do you know if MembershipPlus 7.0 will run on Windows 8 or was there a version between 7.0 and the version 12 being sold by ACS?
    By the way, thanks for the history lesson…very interesting. I have used PocketBible and QuickVerse as well as MembershipPlus.

    1. Brenda,

      I have no idea what versions of Membership Plus run under what versions of Windows. The last time I installed it, I was running Windows 95. It works great there. ๐Ÿ™‚

      Craig

  4. Craig,

    I have had Quick Verse 2 – 7 and the most recent version is 2007. I love it. But I got a copy of that extortion virus. I was able to get out of it but, long story short I had to use my recovery software and put the computer back in it’s original state. I didn’t loose any data as it is all back up but I did have to reload all the programs. My problem is when I run QV 2007 it asks for a disk (doesn’t say which one) to continue, when I try and use the concordance. I can’t seem to register it either as I can’t find a web site to do so any more. Can you help?

    1. Brad,

      I haven’t seen a copy of QuickVerse in 15 years. I left Parsons Technology in 1998, nine years before QuickVerse 2007 came out. In 1999, Mattel bought Parsons. In 2000, Mattel sold QuickVerse to a former Las Vegas talent booking agency called Findex. A few years ago, Findex sold it to WordSearch. A year after that, WordSearch was purchased by Broadman and Holman. I think B&H still owns it. That’s where I’d start. A Google search turns up http://www.quickverse.com, which redirects to http://www.wordsearchbible.com.

  5. Watching the GoDaddy.com bowl, I got curious about GoDaddy, and that led to Bob Parsons, and that led to Parsons Technology, and that made me think, “Wait a minute … wasn’t that QuickVerse?”, and that finally led me here. Thanks, Craig, for this bit of history. QuickVerse was my first Bible software, and it opened my eyes to what computers could do in studying the Bible. I’ve since switched to BibleWorks (because I can afford it, and it provides more high-end tools for the type of research I do), but I’m still grateful for your work on QuickVerse. It was (and I hope still is) an affordable, accessible, and highly productive tool for studying the scriptures. I think we exchanged a few tech-support e-mails back in the day, and I was impressed with that level of service too!

  6. I use QuickVerse 2.0 nearly every day, and have been using it since I was dragged, kicking and screaming, from my 128K POLO MS-DOS 1.2 machine to that 64K machine that ran IBM-DOS. It has installed and run flawlessly on every machine I have owned, and is currently working on this T-42 ThinkPad running Windows XP. I haven’t figured out DosBox yet, but when I do, I’ll try to load it on the Windows7 machine. Thank you for the longest-lasting most trouble-free software I know about. Calendar Creator 5 won’t print from XP and I never graduated to Membership Plus from dBase III+. I wrote a conversion program to get from dBase to Membership Plus 5, and if I could find a copy of it, I’d set it up for the treasurer at the church. I happened on this article while looking again for a copy of Membership Plus 5. I have sworn that I will never use an ACS product and I am tempted to migrate the church’s web stuff to GoDaddy simply because of Bob Parsons. Thank you for the story about how this software came to be. And thank you, thank you, thank you for QuickVerse.

    1. Running QuickVerse 2 under DOS in 2014 and not asking me for tech support — that’s a man’s man right there. ๐Ÿ™‚

  7. I enjoyed reading this very much. I was a beta tester for an early version of QV and remember my name was listed in the credits. I thought that was pretty cool!

  8. This was was fascinating. I wondered what happened to Parsons Technology and it’s products. I have purchased many of them, but have “lost” them in the upgrading from computer to computer, and OS to OS. I purchased the Membership Plus Deluxe Version 6 package with the QuickVersion package as of 10/1/1999. I wanted to use it with my new church. They are using Servant Keeper. I pulled the program CDs from my “vault”. My customer #473173 – a 6 digit and I’m proud of it :-).

    Is there a more recent version? Will these run on Win 7.0? Who currently owns Membership Plus Deluxe an are they producing it?

    PS: I had QV 1.0 and each upgrade.

    Thanks, Craig

    1. Membership Plus was purchased by ACS several years ago. I did a google search and this popped up near the top: http://www.memplushome.com

      I wouldn’t recommend using any of the older versions of Membership Plus. You’re bound to run into problems and you won’t have any support. It’s not compatible with any of the new accounting programs. You’re way better off using something that has some current activity going on around it.

  9. Thanks for the link. Appears ACS has renamed the product to “Realm” and rather than selling the software, there is a monthly charge to use the software. Couldn’t find information about upgrading to Membership Plus 12. Think I’ll advise my church to stick with Servant Keeper 6.0.

  10. Hi Craig,

    I bought QV 2 some time in the 80’s, and then upgraded to QV for Windows ver 1 and then to ver 4 shortly after.
    I have used that to do all my researches up to Windows XP.
    Then I realize I could still used it with Windows Vista or Windows 7 32 bit versions. All I had to do was to copy the entire folder, with sub-folders, to the new PC. Then edited the QVWIN.INI file, changing the paths to reflect those on the new PC. For example:
    [TRANSLATION 2]
    abbr=NKJV
    name=New King James
    path=c:\Program Files\QVWIN\NKJV\
    installed=Y.
    I now have a new 64 bit laptop running Windows 7. I felt I could not do without QV, so I set up a dual boot of Windows 7, 32 and 64 bit versions. I would boot into the 32 bit when I wanted to do something with QV, and into 64 when I wanted to take full advantage of the 64 bit environment for other things.

    I wanted to see what was now available in QV, so I did a Google search and found a special on QV 10 upgrade for $19.95 (still on). I contacted Tech Support at Wordsearch and a gentleman name Mike assisted me in how to get all my books and bibles into QV 10. I tried it and was successful. QV 10 is not as simple and easy to use as QV 4, but it has some really good features. I am sure I will get use to it in time.

    Thanks for your contribution and for sharing the history of QV and PT. I believe your work has led to the winning of many soulsโ€”how muchโ€”we will never know until that glorious day.

    1. I came back this morning and changed the article so it wouldn’t say I’d be back to tell more. ๐Ÿ™‚

  11. Has anyone updated Bible Illustrator for Windows 8? I have poured years of work into creating my own database through BI. Help – I live and die by what I have poured into this database. All of my books have been indexed and tied to the program.

    1. Mike,

      I just ran into this comment in the moderation queue and realized I hadn’t posted it to the site. I seem to recall replying to you back in July but if I didn’t, just send me an email or reply here and let me know.

      1. I’m in the same boat as mike. I’ve tried in vain to get my computer to read it. I tried the virtual disc route to read 32bit software but somehow it didn’t work. do you have a work around? Thanks.

  12. Hi Craig.

    We have been using Membership Plus 3.0 at my church for about 15 or 16 years, until earlier this year, the computer bit the dust. The data is backed up on a USB key, but the disks have gone missing in those 15-ish years.

    Is there a way to retrieve the data?

    1. I can only give you three small tidbits of information from the dark corners of my memory. From there you need to do a lot of googling and maybe find a clever programmer to help you out.

      The program was written in Delphi.

      The database we used was the Borland Database Engine. Presumably, if you could find something that can read those database files, you could read the raw tables in the database. Whether or not you can make sense of them is another story.

      We created reports using Crystal Reports. It was able to access the database directly so it’s possible an old version of Crystal Reports could help you extract the data.

      All of these products are now owned by different companies, if they exist at all. However, if you can find a programmer in his 40’s or 50’s and hand them this information, they may chuckle and pull something off a dusty shelf and work a miracle. Unfortunately, that programmer isn’t me. ๐Ÿ™‚

      1. Crystal Reports, at least, is still out there. McKesson uses it in their proprietary pharmacy software package to generate reports of patient profiles.

        I’ve still got MoneyCounts 6.5c (filedate 4/14/1990) installed here; each time I get a new hard drive it gets copied along… it works (somewhat) under DosBox, but it won’t recognize any date after 2000.

  13. As I sit here going through years and years of stuff (I am an infomaniac and computer nut)I see that all the Parsons software I bought now has to be consigned to the trash bin. I think I bought just about every product that he came out with. What a waste. Enjoyed your article.

    1. I assume you’re implying there is some reason to throw it out other than the fact that it was developed for DOS and Windows 3.1/95/98. Just want to let you know if you’re trying to make a statement of some kind, it hasn’t been received.

  14. I have 1999 Quick Verse, three disks, I am trying to get it work on my new computer, but it stops, with one second to go. How do I sovle that problem? David

    1. I left Parsons Technology in 1998. And that was 17 years ago. There have been six new versions of Windows since 1999 (you were probably running Windows 98 back then). Your PC had about 32 MEGAbytes of memory (the MacBook I’m typing on has 40 times that much RAM) and a 10 GB hard drive (this MacBook has 50 times that much hard drive space). You were using dial-up to get to the internet; this laptop is connected via WiFi to broadband which is running a little slow this morning and is only 92 times faster than your 1999 dial-up connection – normally it’s closer to 150x-200x. Your computer screen was probably 800×600 pixels in 1999; this MacBook is 2880×1800 and my PHONE has an 1136×640 display and fits in my pocket.

      There are programs like PocketBible that are way better than that antique copy of QuickVerse and are free.

      But… if you want tech support for QuickVerse you need to contact the company that sells it, not me.

  15. Ahhhh – to be in the right place at the right time (Quick Verse might have not happened in 1876) with the right talent.

    You have done alright for yourself – former partner – Cam

  16. Hi Craig,

    I purchased QuickVerse 6 Deluxe probably back in 2000 and still have the CD’s. I thought I would see if I could get it to work on my Windows 7 machine, and so I installed it, and it works!! All I had to do was set it up so that it runs in compatibility mode for Windows 98/ME. It requires admin permissions to run, but it runs. The only thing I can’t get to work on it are to be able to view any of the illustrations in books that have them — they just won’t show up. At any rate I thought you might want to know that I am still a happy and satisfied user of Parsons QuickVerse 6, even though it is 15 years old. Thanks for a great program!

    1. I didn’t work on version 6 – that was after I left. And it was after most of my programmers left. In fact, if you look at the version number in the About box it will have a “b” in it, which stands for “beta”. The person you want to thank for version 6 so mismanaged the programming staff that they all quit before the product shipped, so they just shipped the beta version as the final version of the program. Eventually he himself was fired and all the development was done by faceless, third-world, contract programmers.

      To me, version 6 represents the failure of my successors to take a wildly successful product line and a group of competent, knowledgeable developers and keep it running for even a year after I left. This is the management team that so undervalued me and my team that they cut my compensation package as soon as they had the chance and unnecessarily threatened to move the development team to Chicago to be closer to their new boss, so they all quit. Then the new boss was fired. Then re-hired. Then fired again.

      So the fact that version 6 runs on your old Windows 7 machine doesn’t quite do it for me. Sorry. ๐Ÿ™‚

  17. Oh dear. I didn’t know my post would bring up such bad memories and events surrounding it. I’m so sorry. I guess it is The Learning Company or Findex.com that you had to deal with that made these bad management decisions (the CD says “(C) 1999 The Learning Company, Inc. and its affiliates and licensors and Findex.com, Inc. All rights reserved. The Learning Company, Parsons Technology, QuickVerse and STEP are registered trademarks of The Learning Company….”).

    You’re right — when I go to “Help” — “About QuickVerse”, it brings up a dialog box that says Version 6.0b2.

    I suppose whatever version of the program I use is built upon the framework and architecture (for example, STEP) developed beforehand, and you and your team would seem to be the ones to thank for that. I have been a software developer and have experienced what I consider to be bad management too, so my heart goes out to you and your team.

    1. No problem, David. ๐Ÿ™‚

      “6.0b2” means it was the second beta release. We would often go through a dozen or more beta versions before wringing out the bugs. So think about that for a while. ๐Ÿ™‚

      You’re right that 6 was built on 5. 5 was the first version that integrated the old QuickVerse Library program (for reading STEP books) with the QuickVerse program (for Bibles). 7 was also built on that code base, but I don’t think 8 and beyond were. I don’t remember. I think I stopped looking at QV after 7.

  18. My 3.0 version will not work on my new computer – windows 10 & 13. How can I get one that works on my new computer. I use it every week as I teach Sunday School as I like the Scripture to be in my notes.

    Thanks for your help.

    Richard Hyde

    1. Let’s see, QuickVerse 3.0 — I think version 4 came out in the spring of 1998 maybe. So we’re talking 20 years ago probably for version 3. I’d be surprised if the floppy disks are still any good. ๐Ÿ™‚

      QuickVerse as you knew it has not been available for about 17 years. The authors of QuickVerse (Jeff and I) left Parsons technology in 1998 just as version 5 came out. We have a program called PocketBible for Windows Desktop and for Windows Store. Either one will work on your Windows 10 PC (I don’t know what “Windows 10 & 13” is!). You can read more at .

  19. My son drives for Uber and made a comment about GoDaddy buying up all the cabs in Phoenix to drive employees home after the Christmas party last night. That got me started talking about Parsons Technology, MoneyCounts and QuickVerse with all the add-ons that came later. Except I couldn’t remember the name for QuickVerse. Google is the portal I used to get here.

    This was a fun trip down memory lane for me as a customer. Smiles as you mentioned various stages and I remembered ordering many of them. One laugh out loud moment when you mentioned Sword Edge and how it was dumb, but not as dumb as the original…..

    Thanks for doing this.

  20. I like PocketBible from http://www.laridian.com for Android. It is free and comes with a number of Bibles and reference books at no cost. You can add hundreds of other Bibles and reference books at nominal prices. The program does not require you to be online once you’ve downloaded your books.

  21. Iโ€™ve been using 2 Bible programs since the early 1990s. They are: Quick Verse for Windows 4.0f and Bible Illustrator for Windows 3.0f.
    My computer genius grandson (no brag- just fact), Terry, helped me keep them with Windows 7 (Professional), with a Windows XP add in.
    When I switched to Windows 10 on my laptop the other day, poof – they were gone. I have a number of newer Bible programs, but these editions are two of my favorites, containing the footnotes of the Believerโ€™s Study Bible (formerly the Criswell Study Bible, Ryrie Study Bible and Disciples Notes, also Scofieldโ€™s notes). Newer editions of Quick Verse do NOT contain these.
    Anybody got a idea for me? I feel certain that Iโ€™ll have to upgrade to Windows 10 at some point.
    Thanks in advance.

  22. My children gave me QuickVerse 4.0 Deluxe Bible Reference Collection-Standard Edition, I forget the year as a gift. I used it every day and even used it to help me with my book, “My God Makes House Calls” Amazon.com. It’s simple and I’m eighty years old now. I misplaced it and was lost without it (I am handicapped with arthritis so have difficulty typing,, fingers twisted. I then purchased an update, but too advanced for me. My original surfaced, so I gave the new one to my son.(He would have gotten it in my will. ) I have a new pc, too hard for me, but I’m plugging along…but I can’t put it on my pc. They told me to contact my software technologist? I am using Microsoft Windows 8.1 (+10) an hp lap top. HP TouchSmart 15. (Much too smart for me…but I’m trying…praying the Lord won’t use these in Heaven! Mine is a Standard Edition Softwared Collection on CD-ROM includes New International Version. I am using Microsoft’s Office Home & Student 2016

    1. Glad to hear you’re enjoying QuickVerse. Sorry I can’t help you with whatever problems you’re having.

  23. Craig,

    I have followed your posts for years. Your ride has been an interesting one. Although I have never commented or emailed you until now.

    I have been a huge fan of QuickVerse 4.0. Like most who have used it, I found that no other Bible program works near as efficient, simple, or intuitive. I have used it to study Scripture almost daily since I purchased it in the 90’s. I bought upgrades to QV (7.0 and 2007), and they stunk. The problem is that I have some 3600 pages of notes from QV 4.0 that will not convey to any other program.

    I contacted the WordSearch folks and they just shrug their shoulders. They could not care less. I asked them why they did not make a converter for QV notes and they just said “I dunno…” I realize that I am probably SOL here. Do I have any options of which you are aware? Do you have any advice?

    If I have to pay someone to cut and paste each of my notes into another Bible program, which one is the best (or least bad)?

    Any help at all is greatly appreciated.

    Thanks for any help and for (back in the day) writing the best Bible software….

    Patrick

    1. I had to bring up QV4 here to see what the options were.

      You can select “Export” from the notes menu to export your notes into an ASCII file that could be somehow used to import into another program if you know that program’s input format. That’s the real trick. That’s about all I can do for you.

      Of course I like PocketBible from http://www.laridian.com but that’s just me. ๐Ÿ™‚

      Craig

  24. Thanks again for documenting this. I’m doing some researching on the history of Bible software, and it’s helpful to have the inside story (in addition to helpful comments you made on my blog a while back).

    I didn’t get a chance to use QuickVerse, but I did use Laridian software for my first PocketPC in my youth pastor days, and it was just amazingly helpful.

  25. Hello Craig, Thank you for the history.
    In 1991 I entered the PC world in a Houston retail computer store [Computer Post], and quickly adopted the entire Parsonโ€™s line of products to sell, talking to Bob on a regular basis. Was a big fan of Quick Verse for Widowsโ€ฆ at least until STEP came along. Simple and elegant, even if it was hours installing from floppyโ€™s all the different translations and add-ons then doing the Windows install and hacking the INI and INF files to get it all to play nice together or unlocked. By 2000 I disliked the new versions, and never even installed my last purchase QV 8.0.3. None-the-less I loved the early QV versions.
    Sheldon Makusec

    1. We were just integrating STEP into QuickVerse when I left. QuickVerse 5 shipped before it was really ready, due to pressure from our new owners (The Learning Company). Your experience with STEP was subpar for this reason.

      I don’t remember it being necessary to edit the ini files, but it was possible and there were things you could do if you knew what you were doing. You obviously knew what you were doing. ๐Ÿ™‚

      Glad to hear you enjoyed QuickVerse.

  26. Hi Craig. I have been sitting here reading this post for so long, I cannot even remember how I stumbled upon it. I really want to take the time to tell you thank you…for the product you gave to pastors and other ministry people at a price we could afford, especially in the beginning days of our ministry. QuickVerse was such a powerful program and excelled others that were selling at heftier prices with less or inferior features. I was intrigued to follow the history of the program as I was one of the first to purchase it when it hit the market, upgrading along the way…until, of course I hit a snag. Your post helped me to understand what was going on at that time of that snag…and I am grateful I did not have anyone around at the time to levy my extreme disappointment when the program eventually became useless for me. I really want to say THANK YOU for the price you paid to keep ministers encouraged in their pursuit of biblical technology. In those days, there were still ministries without electric typewriters…and in my circle of friends I was the only one with a computer and actually using it. As these ministers saw my use of QuickVerse it was a motivating factor for them to, at least, get aboard and begin learning technology, if only at the word processing level. You created more than you know and the fruit is far reaching. Thank you for staying the course…and thank you for providing this history.

    1. Glad to hear you enjoyed QuickVerse. Someday I’ll have to sit down and write the history of how things fell apart in 1998. There are fewer and fewer people around these days who care, though. ๐Ÿ™‚

  27. I was cleaning out one of my drawers today and found a box with old copies of Parson’s software. I am staring at an invoice from 1996 where my wife purchased QV Strong’s Concord for $29.
    I did a search to see what ever happened to QuickVerse and found this article. I am so glad you took the time to write it. I really enjoyed the story and remember back in the day when I wrote software in the Pascal.
    Sorry to hear it came apart in 1998; but sounds like you had a great time while it lasted.

    1. Nice to hear from you, Chuck. Glad to hear you enjoyed QuickVerse. I continued to have a great time after QuickVerse. I had sold my interest in the program in 1997 so it wasn’t that hard to walk away. ๐Ÿ™‚

  28. I’m wanting to have Quickverse available on my website. Anytime I list a text, the user could click on it and load the Bible location from Quickverse. Is that possible? Thanks!

  29. Thanks for writing about the early days with Bob Parsons. I read most of it and found myself transported back in time. I used to look forward to those Parsons Technology catalogs arriving in the mail. I would ravage through them the same way I used to ravage through the Christmas toy catalogs of the late 1950’s when I was a little kid.

    There’s something special about those earlier days when I would use “Personal Tax Edge” to do my taxes on a 33 Mhz screamer – as you say – of a computer. I paid something like $2800 for it.

    Thanks for being a part of all that. It means a lot… even after all those years.

  30. I also remember when “Personal Tax Edge” was sold to Intuit. I knew then that it was a said day… for me anyway. And here I sit doing my taxes and your article popped up during a google search. How ironic.

    Thanks again.

    1. Eliminating PTE was the dumbest idea Intuit ever had. The Personal Tax Edge team all got laid off on the same day. They went down the street and founded Second Story Software and wrote TaxAct. Recently they got bought by H&R Block. So yeah, good move, Intuit. ๐Ÿ™‚

  31. I loved stumbling upon, and reading this article. I’m from New Zealand and have bought many of the listed products over time. I loved QuickVerse, and many of the add-ons & associated programs mentioned.
    In 2001 I migrated to MyBible, then PocketBible (thanks Craig Rairdin). I now enjoy PocketBible on the 3 platforms I use. I use it everyday.
    It is the quickest, and most intuitive Bible software I’ve seen. It lets you get right to work studying the Bible without any hassles.
    I’ve also done some Beta testing for you in the last few years too. Love PocketBible.
    THANK-YOU Craig for your commitment to an outstanding program.

  32. My name is Chris Epps and I’m the “long hair hippy type” that wrote CompuBible. To correct the record, I’m am not and never have been a “hippy”. I was also an owner in the company NassCo the publisher of CompuBible. The software sold for an average of $99 dollars for a single Bible. I have no idea where you got your information!

  33. Thanks, Craig! I loved Parson’s software and it’s focus on usable tools for Pastors. It was a leap forward for managing church business affairs and for replacing those big concordances on my bookshelf! I miss Parson’s. The innovation and attempt to fill unfulfilled niches made it exciting. You guys!

  34. I loved QuickVerse . . . and hated the divorce once it was no longer easy to use or updated. (I forget which.) Never did like the substitute(s). WordSearch is OK but just not QV. Every once in a while I go back online to see if it might have experienced a resurrection. Still disappointed, but have bought everything I can from Laridian . . . just because I like whatever Craig does. As a retired minister/college teacher I spend a lot of time in more academic programs with access to lots of original language resources . . . BUT PocketBible is my goto app when I need to look up something quick. Keep up the good work.

    1. Thanks, Mark. QuickVerse is gone. Lifeway made WordSearch buy QuickVerse to eliminate a competitor before Lifeway bought WordSearch. They don’t have any way to “resurrect” it, and have no motive to do so. I’m pretty much 100% Mac now and WordSearch is positively unbearable on a Mac. ๐Ÿ™‚

  35. Hi Craig
    O my goodness! Embarrassingly I only just now discovered your Pocketbible and am loving it! When did you launch this and how was I oblivious to this till just now.
    So fast and easy to use and ….. the Boolean search feature is back…. YES. I was up an searching in less that 15 seconds from the moment I opened the program.

    You wouldn’t remember me, a church planter from the 80’s & 90’s, who missed the original very quick and very easy to use Quickverse. I think I was still using the Version f or was it Version g that someone directed me to. I eventually installed a pre-Windows XP compiler so I could still run it. Yup that’s the length I went to to keep using the original early Quickverse version. It was fast, loaded in seconds, took little HDD space and had Boolean search features.
    My church then provided me with various monolith Bible software programs running into the thousands which consumed mass HDD space and took “forever” to load and were just not easy to use and had no Boolean.
    As time went by and for various reasons, I just did not have access to it anymore.

    Next step is to put in on my iPhone

    Thank you you kindly Sir Craig.

    Ernest

    1. I left Parsons Technology at the end of 1998, right after forming Laridian and launching PocketBible. Good to hear from you again!

  36. Craig, I have always wondered how Bob Parsons got involved in distributing Bible software.

    Some brief Google spelunking for GoDaddy history … and then Bob history… and then Parsons history… brought me to your blog. I enjoyed the Craig and QV history. Thanks.

    1. Hi Jim,

      As you probably read, Bob surprised me with his knowledge of churches as small businesses. Personal Bible study and church attendance may not have been as important to Bob and others in the company as it was to me, but he was always very supportive of what we were doing in my division. I never felt like an outsider in that respect; I always felt like he and I were on the same team. I think part of that was that we both always treated QuickVerse and the Church Software Division like a business. A lot of Bible software companies try to convince themselves and others that they are a ministry. As a result, they don’t necessarily make good business decisions. I always thought it was important to make sure we were going to be able to pay our bills and invest in ourselves for the future. Bob was a great mentor in that respect. I think we both would say that your “spiritual” or “kingdom” goals are fine and dandy but will be irrelevant if you can’t pay to keep the lights on. And QuickVerse was always very successful — we were #1 in the church and Bible market — and it’s hard to argue with success. ๐Ÿ™‚

  37. Craig,
    I really appreciate this article you wrote about the history of your project and how you and Parsons got together. What a nice read. It took me down memory lane and was quite a nice read…thank you!
    In other articles you mentioned writing in many different languages. Have you ever tried Hypercard which is now supported via the same (almost exact) type of coding found in Livecode which I use to this day. It’s really easy to learn and can be quite powerful. Not as powerful but gets the job done and done well. Do you have any thoughts on Livecode (the next Hypercard)
    Thank you

    1. I did some things in Hypercard back in the very early Mac days but haven’t thought about it for a long time. I’m not familiar with Livecode.

  38. Craig, Thanks for the history lesson. I was given a bootleg copy of QuickVerse for Windows 3.1 in 1993 or so. A friend of my wifes’ was so excited about it that he wanted me to try it. I was hooked and bought a copy of it soon after that. I kept it up to date while when Parsons still owned it. I wanted better software but there was nothing out there that worked better than the old QuickVerse so it stayed on my computer for years. Then I found WORDsearch and I bought and used that and found out that they bought QuickVerse. While still looking for better software, since then (about 2014) have been using Logos and ironically they have bought WORDsearch and now QuickVerse is Logos again. Funny how things work Out?

    1. I sold my interest in QuickVerse to Intuit in 1997 prior to the purchase by Broderbund. After I left, Mattel sold it to Findex. Findex was run by guys who believed they knew how to do everything better than everyone else. The proceeded to destroy the product. They stopped paying royalties. They farmed out the development to Eastern European contractors. Meanwhile, WordSearch founders were looking for a way to cash out. They found a buyer in Lifeway. Lifeway demanded that WordSearch first buy the competition (QuickVerse) to get it out of the way. Whey they didn’t realize was that Findex was getting QuickVerse out of the way on its own and didn’t need any help. WordSearch bought QuickVerse (best thing that happened to Findex) and discontinued it. Lifeway bought WordSearch. The lesson we have learned from history is that print publishers should stick to printing books. They have never successfully managed a software company. Lifeway was no exception. They unloaded WordSearch on Logos, who promptly discontinued it.

      When you seek to improve your product through acquisition of competitors and accounting tricks, you never succeed. You’re not looking in the right place for the source of your failure. QuickVerse never became WordSearch; it died of mismanagement long before WordSearch bought it. WordSearch didn’t become Logos; it was killed by Logos in order to get at some key relationships that WordSearch had. So I disagree with the premise that “QuickVerse is Logos again”. QuickVerse was QuickVerse, Logos is Logos.

  39. Hello,

    Grateful to reach this passage when I’m finding a way to use Bible software in places that lacks electricity.

    Wondering if QV3 (even QV4) can run in a DOS mini-laptop with 80186 CPU with around 8MHz, which runs DOS, or in windows 3.0 real mode at most.

    And if I purchase a CD with QV3/QV4 can I install, register and use the QV3/QV4 today….

    I managed to find some sub-notebook runs Windows 3.1 needing 4 AA batteries to power-up, but it’s still a “power-hungry” option for me, and then I find some DOS-palmtops require only 2 AA batteries to fire for some hours, but the hardware is just merely a 80186…

    Anyway it’s grateful to discover the early-edition-QV that seems to be a viable candidate, in particular for missionaries who serves in location that lacks electricity…

    1. QuickVerse 3 and 4 are Windows products. They won’t run on the machine you describe. I believe the latest version of QuickVerse for MS-DOS was QuickVerse 2. It would have been released in 1991 as I recall, and it was pretty much immediately obsoleted by the public up-take of Windows over DOS. So its been obsolete and unsupported for 30 years.

      QuickVerse was sold to WordSearch sometime in the late 2000’s. They promptly discontinued it. WordSearch was bought by Logos last year, and Logos promptly discontinued WordSearch. So there’s no way to register an old copy of QuickVerse for DOS. You may or may not be able to use it without registering. I don’t remember what kind of digital rights management we were using at the time.

      I think maybe I’d be coming at this from one of a couple different directions:
      1. Consider a carefully curated set of print reference books and skip electronic entirely.
      2. Look for a reliable solar or mechanical generator. But bring a printed Bible for back-up. ๐Ÿ™‚

      1. Hi Craig,

        Thanks so much for your quick response. Then I need to focus on QuickVerse 1 or 2, wondering if CD version exist, and for QV2 a large number of floppy disks would be required.

        I may opt for other “freeware” for DOS but may be difficult to find one with Greek/Hebrew.

        Of course for locations lacking electricity, hard copies seem to be must, but wondering if some technology can be adopted even if only applicable for limited duration that can in use.

        Also, for my 4-AA-batteries subnotebook, it does use Windows 3.1 while wondering if only 2MB RAM would have some hope to run QV3 or even QV4โ€ฆ

        Thanks again

        1. I don’t recall any CD versions of QuickVerse for DOS, but I could be wrong.

          I doubt there is any Hebrew or Greek Bible for QuickVerse for DOS. There is Greek for QV/Windows but I suspect it is for QV5 and might require at least Win98.

          If I were you I would be looking for an old DOS version of the Online Bible.

          If you can find an old, old version of QV/Windows, perhaps pre-3, it stands a chance of running in 2MB RAM under Win 3.1.

          You’re well past the limit of my memory and knowledge. I would be strongly looking at low-powered, current devices instead of 25-30 year-old obsolete hardware that will only run 25-30 year-old obsolete software. I would rather schlep a couple marine batteries and solar panel charger into the wilderness to power my up-to-date laptop than fight some ancient, unsupported hardware/software with no support from the Internet. And frankly, I would rather pack water purification equipment, antibiotics, toilet paper, and a paper Bible than any of the previously mentioned items. ๐Ÿ™‚

          1. Haha.

            Just visited laridian.com and I find “PocketBible” software…

            Knowing that those HP 300LX series, which use 2 AA batteries as well, with Windows CE 1.0 / 2.0 installed, then if the PocketBible software for Windows CE is available with support, then it’s cool.

          2. We don’t actively support the old Windows CE devices. None of our more recently released books and Bibles would work there, and you’ll need a PC connected to your Win CE device to install the few that do. You’ll have to contact tech support to get access to the app itself. They’ll end up asking me how to do it because nobody there was here when we did Windows CE. And I don’t remember anything about it. But yeah, we might be able to get you going assuming you’re very Windows CE savvy. ๐Ÿ™‚

  40. Craig, I have been using Bible Illustrator and QuickVerse for many years now. I started with the DOS version of QuickVerse and the Windows version of Bible Illustrator. I have been so impressed with these two products I have kept an older computer (now running Win XP, upgraded from Win95) and use it every day for sermon preparation and personal bible study. I remember in the DOS days trying a database program and after laboriously typing in 10,000 entries from 3×5″ filecards it crashed very time I tried to type in entry 10,001. Not so with my Bible Illustrator program which has proved itself so reliable I use it to store copies of my sermons (Although I rarely use a sermon more than once, I have been preaching for over 60 years). Bible Illustrator also safely stores and easily accesses over 80,000 illustrations, plus my wife’s cooking recipes. I have also used Bible Illustrator to store a medical dictionary and multi-language glossaries. I want to say thank you for such a reliable product that has enhanced my ministry and helped me to grow personally. — Dr Lionel Hartley, Australia.

    1. You’re definitely one of the last Bible Illustrator users. ๐Ÿ™‚ I always thought the basic functionality would be useful for a number of other things but we never got around to implementing any of them. FYI, Bible Illustrator suffers from a universal bug among software of its era that will cause it to fail or act in unexpected ways for dates beyond either 2036 or 2038 (don’t remember which). So just keep that in mind going forward. ๐Ÿ™‚

  41. Just wondering if QuickVerse 2.0, by 3.5″ floppy, requires just 1 single blue 3.5″ floppy for installation + KJV by three 3.5″ floppy disks……would be adequate to install a usable QV2 program.

    1. QuickVerse 2 came out 30 years ago. I haven’t worked at Parsons Technology for 23 years. I don’t recall the precise number and contents of the individual 3.5″ or 5.25″ floppy disks on which the program shipped by mail in the days before the Web.

  42. Oh, what fun, reading this history! It took me right back to my old programming days and my first couple of computers–happy times, those were! I had QuickVerse (don’t remember which version) and was using it to research a book I was writing, a novelized (is that a word?) version of the Genesis account of the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I was getting on pretty well with it, when suddenly life intervened, the small software company I worked for went belly-up, and my next employer lasted six months and then they went belly-up, too, and I was a poor student with three part-time jobs that together paid just enough to cover my tuition and books at community college. Luckily I had a very understanding mom who supported me while I trained for a career shift to teaching computer-aided design. So while I scrambled to get back to financial freedom, the book got shelved, as did the Parsons software. Now, more than thirty years later, I’m retired from teaching and about to commence work on that book again–but no more QuickVerse??? Thank heaven I found this article and got pointed to Laridian! My inner author is back in her comfort zone. Thanks a million.

  43. Craig, I stumbled on to this site today and wondered if there is any way that Bible Illustrator could be picked up by someone and updated for current use with Windows or on a Mac. I currently run a Mac but use fusion to keep Windows 7 running so that I still use Bible Illustrator. As a pastor, I believe there is still a real market for this among people who preach or publicly speak. I am not a programmer but was wondering if it would be allowed to be upgraded if someone knew how to do that?

    1. Briefly: no. Details: First, I don’t own any of the code, so I’m the wrong person to ask. Second, I’m pretty sure the app was dead and no longer supported by the time I left Parsons over 25 years ago. Third, it would be significantly easier to re-write it than to find the code and update it. Today it would be better as some kind of Web app. Finally, there’s not much demand for it.

      Just FYI: Bible Illustrator suffers from what’s known as the Y2K38 or Year 2038 bug. The dates on illustrations will do weird things after that date. When I coded it that way back in 1991 or 1992, I didn’t figure anyone would be using the app in 10 years โ€” let alone 45 years โ€” so while I knew it was vulnerable, I wasn’t worried about it. But here we are 25 years later and at least one person is still using it.

      If you’ve been adding illustrations, you’ll want to export those and bring them into some other database sometime in the next 15 years. ๐Ÿ™‚

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