The history of iCash and Peggy Première

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I projected the development of iCash in the late eighties but I actually started coding the software for real in the early nineties. I released the very first version by the end of 1991. At the time, I built it for Microsoft Windows 3.1 and IBM OS/2. I coded the project using the Pascal language. The development of the application continued up to the release of version 2.0 in May 1995.

Peggy Première​


The application wasn’t known as iCash but as ‘Peggy Première’. Peggy because of the Muppet Show character and the analogy with a piggy bank. And ‘Première’ refers to the shooting of the first scene of a movie (it means ‘First’ in french). Peggy Première was supposed to be the best Personal Finance software at that time. Well at least in Spain, where I was leaving. The software was only available in Spanish, not even in french my mother tongue nor English. There were no international sales projected.

I spent a decade selling Peggy Première, sending 3’5 floppy disks by mail with cash on delivery as the only payment method. I managed to get the software listed into the Softmail directory, a third-party shareware company based in Barcelona. That did not make me rich, it provided some spare money and a lot of satisfaction. Back then, I was just a vocational self-taught software engineer, and being part of that world was what I always wanted.

Other developments​


In the early nineties, I was working for an important Macintosh compatible hardware dealer mainly doing support. Thanks to that, I had full access to Applelink, the Apple Computer’s online service for dealers and third-party developers. I had an email address and access to development newsgroups. I later got a private Compuserve email address and something similar to a web page. Very few people knew what the internet was at that time so I used my internet connection for development purposes only.

At the end, I completely stopped Windows programming in 1995 and started with Pascal on Macintosh, then C++ with CodeWarrior until I decided to start developing in Xojo, a cross-platform development environment that was just released a year before or so.

I started coding a bulk email software at work, MaxBulk Mailer, in order to send offers to the company customers, I was then in charge of marketing. Then I developed several other email tools I needed, eMail Extractor, eMail Bounce Handler and eMail Verifier.

Why I developed a Personal Finance software​


I started selling software by myself in 2001, thru the maxprog web site and Kagi as the payment processor. I left the company I was working for and I created my own.

As a result, I needed a Personal Finance software. It comes out that at the end of 2002, I had to spend long periods of time without being connected to the internet so I took my laptop and I decided to resurrect ‘Peggy Première’. Since I no longer had the source code, I started from scratch.

In a few months I had a working version, using Valentina, a SQL-like relational database management system, rather than a proprietary file format as before. I called it iCash, a contraction of ‘Family Cash’. The ‘i-‘ words started to be popular so it made sense. Note that I even own the familycash.com domain!

iCash 1.0 was released on February 11, 2003. The day before my 34th birthday. That first version was in English and for MacOS 9 and MacOS X. Two months later a German version was released, then French, Spanish, and up to the current 14 languages. I have released more than 100 updates in the last 17 years. The Microsoft Windows version was released in mid-2014.

Peggy Première / iCash / Family Cash​


So yes, the concept of Peggy Première, is 30 years old and the current iCash is 17 years old. iCash has gone from 68k to PPC, then to Intel, from MacOS 9 to MacOS X, from Carbon to Cocoa, from Windows XP to Windows 10, and from 32-bit to 64-bit. I have no problem to continue for another 25 years. By the way, an Apple Silicon version in on the way.

In conclusion, I have always created software because I needed it in the first place. In other words, I know my software works because I use it. That includes iCash since I run the company with it, despite iCash was originally developed as a home accounting software.

iCash / Family Cash


[UPDATE] You can download Peggy Première 2.0 here. Note that it only works on Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98 and OS/2. Have fun!

The post The history of iCash and Peggy Première appeared first on Tips and tricks.

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