Murray Haszard
| Murray Haszard | |
|---|---|
Haszard in 1991
|
|
| Born | 11 May 1954 |
| Residence | Auckland |
| Nationality | New Zealand |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur |
| Known for | Developer of Ghost |
Murray Hayden Haszard (born 11 May 1954) is a New Zealand entrepreneur and businessman who founded the companies B32 Software and Binary Research and is the chairman of Ilion Technology.
Haszard married Kris MacPherson, and they had two children. The marriage ended in the mid-1990s.
In 1983 he was contracted to convert Kiwi Packaging's corrugator scheduling package Kiwiplan from Data General Business Basic to Fortran 77 on a Data General MV computer. He found that Fortran had fast number-crunching but slow disk access, difficult debugging and inability to share files without using system calls, and Business Basic had slow arithmetic and limited memory space, but easy debugging and convenient handling of file sharing. After leaving Kiwi Packaging he attempted to create a language which shared the virtues of both.
B32 Business Basic took three years to write, but it was technically superior to Data General's Business Basic. Haszard expected that the world would beat a path to his door, but potential customers were conservative about using a new product, and doubtful that it could be supported from New Zealand. With the help particularly of George Henne and Maxon, a Toronto-based software reseller, B32 established a customer base and developed a reputation for performance in the Data General world.
Selling and supporting B32 required frequent exhausting trips to North America and Europe. Haszard expanded his company with an extra support programmer, but B32 continued to grow and was ported to the Unix operating system. A sales and support branch of B32 Software opened in Blue Ash, Ohio in 1990, but the demands of running a business only increased. Haszard wasn't having fun any more, and when his chief competition, Transoft offered to buy him out, he accepted. B32 sold for US$800,000 in February 1992.
Haszard's next venture was Binary Research, a company composed initially of former B32 employees. Binary Research's first product, a parallel file transfer utility, failed to reach break-even in the market, but led to the concept of a disk cloning program, Ghost.
...
Wikipedia