History of Interpex Limited
Interpex Limited was formed in May of 1986 in Golden, Colorado, USA
by Charles Stoyer and Bridget Taylor. Crude oil prices had dropped to around
$8 per barrel and jobs for Geophysicists in Denver, Colorado had fallen
to an all-time low. The IBM PC had become firmly entrenched as a
"standard" machine available to all geophysicists,
particularly those working in the field. We had seen
a need for software products in the mining, engineering, environmental and
groundwater markets and decided to form a company dedicated to software
development in these areas.
Ron Bell joined Interpex as a partner several months later
as our marketing director. At this time we were all working from
home. Ron's ties were mostly to the mining industry although the
engineering and environmental industries were coming along and
utilizing similar tools.
In April of 1988 Interpex had become successful enough to begin to
expand. Coincident with the second SAGEEP meeting held at the Green
Center at the Colorado School of Mines, Interpex began moving into a
building about two blocks away in downtown Golden, which would soon become known as
"Interpex House" after the English custom.
Within a few years, Interpex grew to 12 employees and boasted almost
30 different software products, selling to almost all corners of
the world. Ron Bell was instrumental in the direction of many of these
product's development, in particular the ones pertaining to Seismic
Refraction and to the MaxMin and similar frequency-domain
electromagnetic instruments. We received the Colorado Governor's award for excellence in
exports in 1991. Gradually the number of employees settled to around 6 or 8 as
the worldwide market grew and Interpex realized its labor needs.
In 1991, Ron decided to leave the partnership and pursue
his own instruments in the geophysical world, leaving us without a
marketing director. The next sales and marketing personnel were not
good.
In 1993, Christo Slee came from his native South Africa to join
Interpex as Director of Marketing. Interpex had been searching for
several years and Christo was the best agent for Interpex worldwide.
Christo contributed greatly to the design of some of the later DOS products.
He became a partner in 1999 and was mostly responsible for the design of the early Windows
development. Christo left in the Summer of 2004 to pursue his Off-Road
business, which had become much more lucrative to him at that point than the
geophysical software market..
In the late 1990's it became obvious that Interpex products needed to
move to Windows. Being written in FORTRAN 77 and running in DOS was not
good enough anymore, for most people. Interpex embarked on the IXeTerra
"Workbench" which was to be a container for all different
kinds of data and the tools with which to manipulate, process, model and
interpret it. In mid 2004, it became obvious that IXeTerra had been
designed beyond what could be built and was abandoned. Interpex had sold
Interpex House and moved to smaller quarters in mid 2001.
In the meantime, however, several Windows "shareware"
products had been developed. These emulated the early DOS products in
their simplicity but were designed with Windows functionality, look and
feel and ran totally in a Windows setting. Some of these were expanded to full-blown
software products and new product development began, in a new effort to
replace the DOS products.
The philosophy of the Windows products differs from those of the DOS
in that, rather than having a separate product for every conceivable
type of method, each Windows product addresses as many different methods
as practical in a single package with different licensing of capability
as required.
Interpex celebrated it's 5th anniversary in 1991 on the rooftop in La
Torre, near Ponte Veccio in Firenze (Florence) Italy in conjunction with
the EAEG meeting, and again at Interpex House in Golden. The 10th
anniversary party was at Grant Humphrey's Mansion in Denver, coincident with the
SEG in 1996. The 15th anniversary party was at the Buffalo Rose
in Golden, CO, in conjunction with the SAGEEP meeting in 2001. Our 20th anniversary party
was celebrated at the 19th annual meeting in Bellview, WA in April,
2006, where we hosted the bar for the icebreaker. Apparently this set a
precedent as Zonge hosted the icebreaker bar for their anniversary party
in 2007. Our 25th anniversary was celebrated at the 24th annual SAGEEP
meeting in Charleston when Interpex hosted the wine for the conference
evening dinner. The 30th Anniversary at the SAGEEP in Denver was
celebrated by
distributing 30th anniversary pint (beer) glasses.
