While working toward a PhD in Economics at Rice University, Les Pinter began consulting to local oil companies in Houston, Texas.
Software soon became more important than teaching credentials, and the company began to grow. In 1979, Les teamed up with two friends
(Mike Griffin and Bill Radding) to help develop the Magic Wand, the fourth word processor ever written for the CP/M operating system.
In September of 1980, Les took a call from a 23-year-old Bill Gates, and the next day met with the Microsoft founder and sold him the
source code that became Microsoft Word.
Les soon abandoned the mainframe world and became one of the country's top experts on Lotus 1-2-3, publishing "The Real Estate Guide",
the first add-on for 1-2-3. Shortly thereafter me expanded to include first dBASE, then FoxBASE. By the time Microsoft bought Fox Software,
Les was publishing a monthly newsletter, the Pinter FoxPro Letter, which continued for 10 years. Les was ultimately named a VFP MVP by
Microsoft. Les recently wrote a book on migrating from FoxPro to .NET, and was named a Visual Basic.NET MVP.
Les has recently partnered with the StrataFrame team, and will be working with them in developing the future of StrataFrame! The first fruits
of this new partnership are a series of articles by Les detailing some of the more interesting applications of StrataFrame, ranging in subject and
complexity so that they will be usefull to both a new and veteran StrataFrame users alike!