Is MISys a company or a product?

On a regular basis, I'm asked whether MISys is the name of our company or our product. The short answer is both, but the State of Vermont has no record of a company called MISys. That's because MISys is a "dba," that is a nickname for our official company name which is Manufacturing Information Systems,  Inc. Looking at this name, you might think "oh, I get it. MISys, short for Manufacturing Information Systens," but you'd be wrong.

The actual birth of the name MISys happened about 25 years ago when a company called Microcomputer Specialists, Inc. became the first third-party developer for Basic Software Group, the company that invented Accpac. The way it worked back then (and we're talking about the era of MSDOS) was that in order to function as an Accpac add-on, you installed your programs in a folder named xxSYS. Basic Software Group (BSG) awarded each developer a 2-character "application prefix." When BSG spun the wheel for us, we won the prefix "MI." From that time on, our programs could be found in the MISYS folder.

Before we had adopted an official name for the product, Accpac dealers around the world started referring to the product as MISYS. A few years later, we joined the crowd (but we diddled with the capitalization just to help people pronounce the word correctly).

For the next 10 or so years, we hung on to the company name Microcomputer Specialists, Inc. even though callers would ask "Is this MISys?" Over and over we would reply "No,this Microcomputer Specialists" but our product is MISys.

After a while we began to realize the futility in trying to maintain our old corporate entity. So one day we sat down and tried to figure out a new name for our company, one that would fit better with the nickname "MISys." When Manufacturing Information Systems was suggested we jumped on it because the name very well described how our corporate mission had evolved. As an added bonus, people assumed Manufacturing Information Systems has been our name from Day 1.

So now you know the Real Story of how the names MISys and Manufacturing Information Systems were born.

Today we don't care whether you call us Manufacturing Information Systems or MISys -- as long as you call us. We love it when you call us. Or visit our website at www.misysinc.com.