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Founded in 1976, THE IDEAGETTING STARTEDA START IN UTILITIES Amidst the potential provided by the microcomputer revolution, Nigel Harris had an idea so big that he decided he had to build a company around it. The idea was a computer-operated automated accounting system. Today, these are taken for granted, but in 1975, this was a revolutionary idea. At the time, Harris was a district manager for Litton Electronic Business Systems (LEBS), which was a unit of the McBee Company, which was itself part of Litton Industries – a US-headquartered conglomerate. Harris’s idea was to build an automated accounting system, but McBee was a manual systems company that had no experience in or appetite for change in this direction. As luck would have it, the leaders at McBee also recognized the disconnect in both understanding and ambition and they arranged for LEBS to be reassigned to Sweda International – the cash register unit of Litton Industries – in late 1975. By then, Harris and his LEBS team had an embryonic product and some customers. These customers were charged in an unusual way: they were asked to pay recurring fees to LEBS for hardware and software support. With some early successes, Harris knew that the next challenge was funding the cost of developing products that could work with the often antiquated hardware and software that their customers owned. But Sweda’s management was focused on cash registers and couldn’t see a future for Harris’s outsized ambitions. So Harris decided to stay true to his vision, and made an offer to purchase LEBS from Sweda and Litton. A new company – owned by him – would take responsibility for all of LEBS contracts, employees, and inventories. This time his ambition paid off. After months of work, his offer was accepted and in July of 1976, LEBS became the N. Harris Computer Corporation. And Nigel Harris became its first CEO.