Happy 1st Birthday Tenseg!
It was one year ago today that we brought the Tenseg website online and with that gave birth to Tenseg as it is known today. That first day all the website consisted of was your average raw WordPress installation. The appearance of this site today was not yet conceived for use here. However, it was pure hours that the site showed off its powerful WordPress core before we put a theme that Eric had recently designed for another site to use. After a couple of days we finally decided upon the theme that you see in use today.
The original push that led us to forming Tenseg was, as is well documented earlier on this Tenseg News page, my senior project at Avalon High School. We needed to have a company with which we could register for the iPhone Developer’s Program. Yes, individuals can register, but since both Eric and I wanted to have access to the vast resources Apple provides with the program, we needed to form a company. On top of the work for my senior project, we’d house all our existing and future software development projects under this company. Hence the basic working plan for Tenseg was born.
But we needed one final important thing before we could register it as a formal sole proprietorship company, a name for this company. Here’s what I remember of the path that led us to Tenseg as the final name. Over the past couple of years my dad had tentatively been using the name Appropriate Technology as a baseline. He’d started using it in product identifiers, created a logo, and also built a stub for a website. As you will notice the logo he designed is now Tenseg’s logo, and WebPDF is now a Tenseg software product for Mac OS X. I don’t quite remember what snag we hit when we tried to just use the name Appropriate Technology (it may have been that in Minnesota that name was already being used, or that the domain was unavailable), but we had to come up with another name. So how did we fall on Tenseg? Tenseg is short for Tensegrity, a term meaning tension with integrity. It is from this definition that we brought out the tagline “Software with Integrity” for Tenseg. My mom had already started using Tensegrity in her blog, Tensegrities. So we decided Tenseg was a good, and available, name for this company.
Once we had set up the website we needed some starting content beyond the “Tenseg is Born” post. We needed some actual software to publish here. So what we did was move a bunch of software that had been hosted on other sites of ours to Tenseg. I, personally, was maintaining most of the software that are now Tenseg software products. I’d linked a simple downloads page from my own Apple Home Page (this page now just links to the Tenseg website). As you can tell from the link above, Eric had been maintaining (and clearly still does maintain…) WebPDF at the old Appropriate Technology website. So between those two sources we immediately could publish software through Tenseg.
In this first year of life Tenseg has fully taken over the development projects we brought to it a year ago, and has started projects purely of its own (SubCalc and the two Useful but Random Scripts and Such). Further development on the existing software projects, and some new software products, are in the works, so there is definitely still improvements to come! This first year has been great, so lets see what this next one, and the ones to come beyond October 2011, bring us. Happy 1st Birthday Tenseg!