Three partners started J.D. Edwards in Denver in 1977, a long way from Silicon Valley, and spent twenty years building it before they sold a single share to the public. The company wrote the software that ran a business's ledgers, payroll, inventory and factory floors, mostly on IBM's sturdy midrange computers. By 1997 thousands of companies used it. That September, J.D. Edwards went public into a market hungry for enterprise software and nervous about the year 2000.

Accountants Who Wrote Code

Jack Thompson, Dan Gregory and Ed McVaney had worked on business systems for clients, so they wrote software that matched how companies kept their books. They built it for IBM's System/38 and later the AS/400, machines that midsize manufacturers and distributors trusted for decades. The initials came from the founders' first names. J.D. Edwards stayed private for twenty years, adding offices around the world and a new client/server product called OneWorld.

A Prize in a Software War

J.D. Edwards priced its offering at $23 a share in September 1997, above the $15 to $17 range first filed, and raised $417.9 million on Nasdaq as JDEC. Morgan Stanley led the deal. The company stayed independent for six more years. In 2003 PeopleSoft agreed to buy it, just as Oracle launched a hostile bid for PeopleSoft. The merger closed that year. Oracle won PeopleSoft in 2005, and J.D. Edwards lives on as an Oracle product line.

Cover: Green River, Wyoming Territory, Thomas Moran. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for the Rocky Mountain West (Denver headquarters).