Computer Golf was founded in 1985 by Dave Mathews of Spokane County in Eastern Washington state and Bob Holmes of Monterey California.
It all started in Pebble Beach California when Dave and Bob Holmes who was then director of golf at Monterey Penisula Country Club and one of the world's coolest guys, had a breakfast meeting at the club. Bob needed some software and Dave could write software so they set out to do so. The first priority was some tournament programs as Bob had to put on 50+ tournaments per year for his members . Then the point of sale was written along with a credit book to post credits for all those tournaments, and then inventory and member billing.
The system was written on an old at&t computer that sat on a card table over in a corner where John Geertsen (head pro and Johnny Miller's teacher) held court. There were lots of great stories from John who won the Crosby in the early 40's and played with all the old greats of the Hogan and Snead era. He was a nice distraction from the task of grinding out thousands of lines of programming code. We played a few rounds with John who could still beat us even though he was over 80 years old.
The way this system evolved was very colorful and exciting. It took a couple of years to fully develop and is still developing. One guy who was around at that time was Laird Small who is one of the country"s best golf instructors and is at Pebble Beach. He was head pro at Carmel Valley Country Club and knew that computers were going to help improve the golf business. We spent some time with him and got some insight about what golf pro's wanted from computers. Affordable computers were pretty new at the time and everone was trying to see how they would bennifit their business. Laird is also a very cool guy and a world class golf instructor.
So CGMS is a golf company that has golf in its roots. Jim Dobbins is a programmer who has helped Dave with ideas and methods. Jim and Dave go back many years to the days when they wrote world class mainframe programs. They played a lot of golf with the guys down at Pebble Beach and learned a lot about computer needs in the golf business.
One of the finest gentleman we met was Ed Haber who built, owned, and ran Quail Lodge and the Carmel Valley Country Club. It is important to mention Ed because he got Bob Holmes started in the golf business. We consider it a great priviledge to have known and played golf a few times with Ed.
So Computer Golf was built from the ground up as a golf management system with the head pro and the needs of the proshop as the priority. We may bend a few accounting rules to let the pro have a little more control over things, but it needs to be flexible and easy to use. Our main goal is to do the best we can to have happy customers and provide good software and support.