Digital History of Seaside Software askSam Systems

Seaside Software, Inc. incorporated in 1984 was co-founded in 1983 by Dr. Mack McKinney and Belitha "Bea" McKinney to promote the freeform information storage and retrieval database named askSam developed by Dr. Mack McKinney that employed fully flexible fields with text and numeric manipulation along with pure text for the DOS environment. It included its own highly user programmability. In 1988 Seaside Software, Inc. began doing business as askSam Systems for clarity. The DOS product was highly acclaimed with development continuing until 1992 when a subset version for Windows began development. The Windows version capabilities remained a subset of the DOS capabilities for the life of the company, however the expanded hardware and software of the Windows environment allowed numerous new capabilities. Bea McKinney served as the Vice-President and Press contact until 2001. Dr. McKinney resigned from the company in 2006 and the company went out of business in 2010.