The story of FileMaker begins in the early 1980s with four individuals originally working at Wang Laboratories, based in Lowell, Massachusetts: Spec Bowers, Alan Albert, Dan Chadwick, and Jega Arulpragasam.

For those interested in learning more about Wang, you can visit the English Wikipedia entry on Wang Labs. At its peak, Wang Labs was one of the major players of the Massachusetts Miracle, employing over 30,000 employees. The company was owner-operated, and due to its internal structures, it was challenging at the time to advance new product ideas within the company, especially if one was not Chinese.

Wang was active in both software and hardware development, with a particular emphasis on word processing.

IBM Starts PC Marketing

Circa 1982, IBM began marketing the personal computer, just as the four set out to explore other fields of activity. At this time, computer conferences for businesses focused on minicomputers and larger devices. Spec and Dan attended one of these conferences.

Outside the hall was a tent with a small area dedicated to PCs. They looked around and saw that a number of other companies were already working on word processing products. They concluded that it would be too difficult to break into this market.

So, they looked at database software. In their opinion, the existing databases were simply terrible. dBase was one of them. The user interface was a command prompt that consisted of a single small area on the left side of the screen. One had to know all the commands and enter them correctly to do anything.

The records all had a fixed format with fields of fixed length and fixed type. Everything had to be decided in advance, and once you started entering data, the design of your database was essentially frozen in place. After that, nothing could be changed.

Nutshell

Well, they knew from their work at Wang what a good user interface looked like, so they decided to make something better. At this time, they founded Nashoba Systems. It started in their own homes. Soon they rented space in a building in Concord, Massachusetts, at 175 Sudbury Road, right next to the railroad tracks.

Spec Bowers designed the initial concepts:

• Fields are variable in length; you can enter as much data as you want.
• Every word in every field is indexed.
• You can add or delete fields at any time.
• You can display your data in different layouts.
• The user interface would be menu-driven (a mouse came later).
• It would perform well even with very large databases.
• Initially, it supported date, number, text, and formula field types.

Nutshell was programmed.

This journey from Wang Labs to the creation of Nashoba Systems and the development of Nutshell, which would evolve into FileMaker, highlights a story of innovation, determination, and the pursuit of creating a user-friendly database solution that stood out in a market saturated with less intuitive products. This legacy of innovation and user-centric design continues to define FileMaker’s development and success.