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Geoff Perlman

An interview with Geoff Perlman, Founder and CEO of Xojo, Inc.

Issue: 23.2 (March/April 2025)
Author: Tim Dietrich
Author Bio: Tim uses Xojo to develop custom software for businesses that run on NetSuite.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 33,289
Starting Page Number: 79
Article Number: 23209
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

For this issue, I had the opportunity to interview Geoff Perlman, the Founder and CEO of Xojo, Inc. We spoke about Geoff's background, Xojo's origins, evolution, and future, his work on DBKit, and much more.

Your Background

When did you first become interested in technology in general, and software development in particular?

Without realizing it, it was one of my brothers who got me interested in technology. We went to different high schools, and as a result, he was home earlier than I was. I would arrive home to find Doug watching Star Trek reruns. I wanted to watch M*A*S*H reruns, which came on after Star Trek. I probably should have sat down to do my homework, but instead, I sat there watching Star Trek, waiting for it to end so I could watch M*A*S*H. I became a fan of Star Trek as a result. Computer technology was the closest thing in the real world to what I saw on Star Trek. Had I just done my homework instead, I'd probably be a medical doctor today.

My dad was an electrical engineer. He worked with computers so early that he told me he had to flip eight switches and then press a button to enter a byte. He literally flipped bits. He would bring home programmable calculators, and then one day, a Texas Instruments Portable Terminal. It was a keyboard and a thermal printer for output (no screen) with acoustic couplers in the back for the telephone handle. It used a telephone connection (much like a fax machine does) to communicate with a VAX minicomputer at his office. Initially, my interest was in playing the original Adventure game, which was on that VAX (though it could only be played outside of work hours). Mom and I would stay up very late on weekends trying to make our way through the game. The VAX also had the BASIC programming language. I started teaching myself that and found it wonderfully liberating to be able to tell the computer to do complex things. After all, as a teenager, I had control over very little. Programming gave me a world, the control of which was literally at my fingertips.

Later, Dad bought a Franklin ACE 1000, which was an Apple II clone, as he didn't believe in paying for a brand. He learned the hard way that there's value in a reliable brand. That Franklin broke several times. I'm quite sure that in the end, Dad spent more on it than he would have had he just bought an Apple II. One day, he brought home a programming book published by Apple. I looked at the cover. It was all about 6502 assembler. Yuck! I turned it over to find that it was two books. On the other side was a book about AppleSoft BASIC. With my experience using BASIC on the VAX, I dove into AppleSoft BASIC.

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