The Tech Giant of Hiawatha
Note: This story is largely derived from newspapers, Wikipedia, online news stories, a fantastically detailed blog, and my user experience. Though I wish I could’ve been able to talk with the original team, alas a personal story will have to await another day.
I suspect that someday I’ll dig into Gateway Computer in much the same way.
I first encountered Parsons Technology’s products in one or more computer magazines in college. Although I can no longer recall if PC Magazine, Byte, PC World, Computer Shopper or one of the dozen other publications was the gateway drug, but the attractive, full-color advertisements for affordable software were a welcome sight. I became a customer soon after.
Hiawatha, Iowa feels like a suburb of Cedar Rapids today, far from any place one might credit for creating significant disruptions in technology. Parsons Technology was headquartered there where its founder created the recipe for affordable software and distributed it through a diminutive catalog and magazine advertising.
Bob Parsons was born in Baltimore, MD. Although high school didn’t speak to the young man, he found discipline and rigor upon enlisting with the United States Marine Corps during the Vietnam war. He was seriously wounded during combat, airlifted, and upon his return awarded the Purple Heart in 1969. His service entitled him to GI Bill benefits, and he enrolled at the University of Baltimore to earn a degree in accounting, setting the stage for the company he would soon create.
Work brought him to Iowa where he taught himself programming and began writing software focused on personal finance. The world of checkbook registers was beginning to give way to software tools and Quicken (for MS-DOS) was a popular program of the day. He ultimately created a software product called MoneyCounts while working from his basement, placed ads for it in magazines, and began selling to interested customers from around the country.
It took him a while to incorporating the company, however, as state records show that he incorporated Parsons Technology on December 29, 1987. It found it fitting that Shuttleworth and Ingersoll law firm represented the company in that incorporation effort. The firm, then and now, supports startups in the region and across Iowa.
Early Software
Bob wrote MoneyCounts and experimented with different price points, attempting to sell it for as much as a $100 per copy until realizing a formula adopted by the publishers of his favorite programming language. Borland International, the publishers of Turbo Pascal had found incredible success selling their compiler software for $49. Learning from Borland’s success, he chose to license for $12/copy.
This was the era of Shareware, but Parsons eschewed that business model in favor of commercial software from the beginning. Unlike other Shareware which was sometimes limited in features or time-bombed to only run for a certain period, MoneyCounts achieved legitimacy with a stated yet affordable price.
Around this time, Craig Rairdin, then an employee of Rockwell International was frustrated with his corporate programming job. Seeking challenge and inspired by programming, he was looking for something more. He had also heard of the MoneyCounts software and decided to buy a license to manage his own finances.
When Craig picked up (yes, physically transacted the $12 for the software) from Bob’s home, he was already customer #6553, a remarkable marker for a young company that had yet to incorporate. That and a subsequent meeting with Bob would be transformational in paving a way out for Craig from Rockwell International and into Parsons Technology.
Craig, meanwhile, had purchased Shareware versions of various Bible software and underlying data. He had at least two realizations as he attempted to use the then current Bible software - it was so rudimentary it was unusable, and that he could do better. His blog post about a history of Parsons Technology, his employment there, the development of his own Bible software and more is a fantastic read at his blog, https://craigr.com. The blog isn’t just chronological and historical; it is also fascinating in the deep technical detail (more below).
The Complementary product
In the months that followed Parsons Technology’s incorporation in Dec 1987, Craig completed his version of the Bible software and called it Logos. He attempted to find a partnership with Bob but Bob had a different idea. Craig left his “safe” Rockwell job and became a Parsons employee. His commercially viable product was soon named QuickVerse, itself a venerable addition to MoneyCounts. By the time Craig joined Parsons, he had tested the available technology in the market, researched and discarded pricing strategies, sales approaches, user experience, speed, and fit for purpose. He understood the church software market, its size, needs, and opportunity.
Bob and Craig were both professional programmers and attracted others with similar caliber to the company. A poignant section of Craig’s blog provides a peek into the programming culture that must have permeated through the company. In this section, he describes his exact method of storage, computation, and reference mechanisms.
The general approach described feels eerily similar to tokenization that has brought excitement to Generative AI nearly 40 years later. He tokenized the entire KJV Bible, each word represented by a number and position, with a corresponding algorithm to efficiently locate words and phrases, thereby providing vastly more efficient search1.
Developers are likely to enjoy reading the tokenization approach Craig describes in his blog. Search for the section “Some Men Drink; I Write Code”.
QuickVerse was a hit and instrumental in Parsons Technology’s growth. The company continued to imagine the complementary potential for QuickVerse and MoneyCounts for churches. As QuickVerse continued to mature, Craig brought the concepts of fund account to MoneyCounts, a necessary means of accounting for churches.
Parallel Developments
Home users gravitated to Parsons’ software - for usability, price, and user-experience. (I must’ve started using their tax-preparation software in the late 1980s). Other products such Address Book, a contact management system, a will-preparation utility, Image libraries and Clip-art management utilities, fonts and much more formed a library of products sold through the catalog.
The magazine advertisements of 1988 became a nearly 40-page catalog by 1995.
The catalog above is a time-capsule, one worth the click-through. It is mislabeled as a 1985 catalog, however, at the Internet Archive but as the cover above shows, the above catalog is actually from Spring 1995. It lists a significant number of products priced affordably for the home-user at $19.
Tax Software
Personal Tax Edge, another flagship product for Parsons, brought the interview-styled tax preparation to the market. Its step-by-step guidance, ability to jump to the digital rendition of IRS forms, in-line support and low cost all made it a formidable asset for the company. As the company grew through the late 80s into early 1990s, it also ported the software to Windows, itself a fast-growing phenomenon.
California based Intuit, then the producer of equally popular Quicken for DOS and Windows, was primed for growth with a newly acquired war chest. It had enjoyed healthy growth with Quicken and its founder/CEO, Scott Cook began to look for a complementary product. Finding one at Chipsoft, it spent $225 million on acquiring TurboTax from Chipsoft Corporation2.
The software industry was still young, and the FTC had not turned toward antitrust reviews of this new wild west. Ignoring significant history of the US government breaking up monopolies, and that of companies such as IBM “behaving” by decoupling software (DOS) from hardware (PCs), younger software publishers were seeking to increase market share at all costs. They organically grew through rapid feature-set expansion and inorganically through acquisitions.
Though the world would soon begin to change with an antitrust case against Microsoft, timing was just right for Parsons.
Acquisition
Intuit recognized a worthy competitor in Parsons Technology. Acting quickly on the heels of its TurboTax acquisition, within three months it bought all Parsons assets. The transaction closed on Jan 1, 19943 with the consolidation strategy revealing through the acquisitions : Chipsoft for TurboTax in September 1993 and Best Programs for their “Professional Tax Preparer” engine in April 1994.
Although Intuit bought the entire suite of Parsons assets in 1994, it didn’t find long-term strategic alignment its many products. The QuickVerse Bible-study program, Legal, Genealogy, and utility software needed a new home, one that would be found in 1997 at Broderbund Software.
Intuit’s speed and prescience continues to be visible today. New and updated personal and business versions of TurboTax and Quicken continue to appear on retail shelves after Thanksgiving each year and remain the leading revenue source for the company.
The all-cash transaction was for $64 million. Intuit’s market capitalization on June 30, 2025 was nearly $220 billion.
The Diaspora
Parsons was an entrepreneur’s playground where hard work and market dominance appear to have blossomed along with the computer industry. Bob went on to create Jomax technologies in Phoenix, AZ, a domain registrar that later rebranded in 1999 as GoDaddy, Inc. Craig Rairdin launched Laridian®, a privately owned company that develops and markets Bible-related software, primarily for mobile devices. You’ve read the story of Cammie Greif, Lance Dunn, Jerry McConnell and Alan Sperfslage who launched “Second Story Software” in February 1998 and created TaxAct. Laura Taylor owns Woofables Gourmet Dog Biscuits, Kim Lehrman was President of Communications Engineering Company, and several others who continue to build, employ, invest in the region and beyond.
I am a proud member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative and the Iowa Startup Collective. Each writer is independent and publishes via Substack across Iowa and I hope you are able to explore my fellow amazing writers’ work.
I had heard of Parsons Technology, but nearly all of this was new to me. Thanks for sharing!
You bring us such fascinating stories, Tej. Thank you so much!