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ABC: A Short History, Part 1
ABC was founded in 1980 by Grant Shaw out of his home in San Jose, California. When he quit his job as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard, he had one client signed up for his new business. The original computer used for payroll and other processing was an IMSAI 8080, a hobby computer which was mostly thought to be an expensive toy.
Unsatisfied with the software available for his IMSAI, Grant programmed an operating system from scratch and a compiler for a self-designed programming language. He used this language to write a suite of data processing applications, and ABC was born. ABC was an online service from the beginning and many years before the term "online" became synonymous with Internet. Grant's customers would connect to his IMSAI computer using computer terminals connected via modem.