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About DHA — Douglas Haylock
Bio |
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Doug Haylock has been writing software for printers for since
1980. Before that he had been involved in almost every phase of the printing business so
he pretty much knows the industry
outside in and inside and out. |
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His first 'printing' job was shoveling huge piles of linotype slugs into
the lead melting pot at the local newspaper after school. |
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He worked on an analog computer navigation system in the Air Force.
After the service he did graphic design, editing, and supervised
production of marketing materials, catalogs, and magazines and even
published a book. He also worked as communications director for an
equipment distributor. |
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Doug initially developed ideas for manual job tracking and job costing
systems during several years managing a full service print shop. He further refined
these ideas managing a turn-around for a troubled printing plant. |
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He spent several years doing management training and development. He
eventually bought a small graphics company and built it into a full service
graphic design, production, film house, and print broker. |
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Doug started using computers for typesetting
back in the '70s and learned to program by reverse
engineering machine
language on punched paper tape. He bought a used mini-computer and wrote a
text editor for editing and data conversion. When microcomputers first appeared a
few years later,
he started writing software to automate operations in his own
printing business. |
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When he mentioned
what he was doing to a long-time customer-friend who had a folding and gluing
company, the friend asked Doug if he would fix his payroll program. One thing
led to another, and Doug ended up writing an estimating and then accounting
program for him. He figured he’d polish up the whole thing and sell it to
printers. |
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While he was working on
finishing up the system, he pulled together all the mailing list stuff he had,
and created a retail package called FastPak Mail. Sold a bunch of copies (in
those days 250,000 was a lot). Eventually he struck a deal with a publisher
who sold several million copies. About once a week we get an email from
someone who is still running an old version of FastPak Mail. |
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He eventually sold the printing business to his then
partner to focus on software. |
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Just before the Y2K excitement (remember that)
he
converted the printer system to Windows (well, most of it). At the same time a
couple of clients were embarking on large projects and he got much more
involved in custom software and even designing and building hardware
— a digital satellite audio downloading
system. |
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Since the beginning, making
modifications for customers has been a priority. At first we did it for
free as an
inducement to buy the system. After a few years, we had more
features than anyone, and began to charge money for custom features.
Now we've come full circle, and are back to offering customizing as an inducement
to buy. See the Charter Customer deal. |
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Doug has belonged to the PIA as long as he can remember, and served as
President of the local Craftsman's Club. |
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When he's not busy building high-performance software to bring the very latest technology to
his clients, Doug likes to restore old houses and old cars. He and his wife
Nancy have devoted time over the years to giving marriage prep weekends for
engaged couples in the
Church. |
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One of Doug's current goals is to help end poverty by finding ways to
bring everyone into the free enterprise marketplace of this great
nation. |
