ranger: how long has panic been around? could you describe the events that led you to launch panic and how panic has evolved since then.

cs: we might as well go all the way back - we probably created panic, truly, when i was 13 (?) years old. i was looking for a specific piece of music software for my amiga computer, and begged and pleaded on the message boards of all the local bulletin board systems. (a bbs, for those unfamiliar, is just like the internet, but with only 34 bearded people using it, very little clicking, and lots of 16-color farrah fawcett nudes.) this guy named steve answered my question, and we decided to meet at the beaverton library to trade disks.

sf: we chose the library because there was an amiga user's group meeting there that day, and we wanted to check that out. i was fifteen, and a raging geek at the time, even worse than now. by the way, i feel compelled to add that it was freeware music software that i gave him, lest you get the wrong impression. you should always pay for your favorite shareware and commercial music software. (cough)

cs: i remember impressing steve with my ability to shoot lemonheads, out my nose. suffice it to say our brains worked together in a very rare way that couldn't be ignored. when i was 21, and completely unable to focus on college, the web showed up. you couldn't set the background color of web pages at the time, but i was already a deep believer that the internet could enable a couple of guys to be a company, a big deal, to make neat stuff and reach customers without eccentric rich uncles or a gold watch from ibm. it sounds like a bad commercial now, which is sad, but remember this was before the army of dot com wankers arrived. i returned to portland, and steve and i decided it was time to do something, you know, for real.

sf: i was panicking (which inspired the name) at the thought of having to work for someone else for 40-50 years. didn't sound like fun. so in 1997, with apple's stock at 12 and falling, we decide we're going to write mac software and incorporate ourselves as panic. to this day i don't know what we were thinking. anyway, i didn't even have a mac at first, i had to borrow one of cabel's to program on. cabel and i got an apartment, and we worked through the evenings in our living room...

cs: ...and we had no life. and believe it or not, panic is still just the two of us, after all this.

sf: man, we seriously should think about hiring someone.