David Kelly
Austreng

Generic Software, Inc.

Washington · 1986 – 1987

The lesson came early. It came with a price tag on it.

Austreng joined Generic Software in 1986 as systems and operations manager. He built the software the company used to run itself — accounting, sales, shipping, inventory and customer support.

The company’s product was Generic CADD, and it sold for $99. At the time, computer-aided design meant a package that cost thousands of dollars and a workstation to run it on. Generic CADD carried drafting out of the licensed expert’s office and put it in the hands of anyone with a PC and a hundred dollars.

From inside the operations desk, he watched what happens to a whole profession the moment an expert skill becomes something anyone can simply buy. He has been looking for that moment ever since.

Photographic color on the Macintosh

Truvel Corporation

Torrance, California · 1987 – 1988

(Technology acquired by Vidar; subsequently acquired by 3D Systems)

Color came next. He was the one holding it.

Truvel had five people when Austreng arrived as Engineering Projects Coordinator. He wrote every piece of interface software the company shipped for as long as he was there.

Truvel built among the earliest CCD-based high-resolution digitizing image scanners. It held two US patents on rotating multi-segment filter color capture and digitizing scanning apparatus — 4,937,663 and 4,910,601. During his time there the company produced TrueScan, the first professional color scanner for the Macintosh.

Now consider the problem in front of him. The Macintosh gained color with the Macintosh II in April 1987. That built-in color was eight-bit — 256 colors. Truvel’s scanners were capturing real photographic color. The Macintosh had no way to show it.

So he built the display himself, upstairs in the lab. He daisy-chained four video cards. One carried the standard eight-bit screen. The other three drove red, green and blue on their own. He turned 256 colors into 16,800,000 hues to a pixel — true photographic presentation, and the first such presentation known to have been achieved. A consultant, John Zigrang, worked the chaining problem with him.

It was running roughly six months ahead of the first announced 24-bit card for the platform. Keith Sorenson founded RasterOps that year and shared their intention to deliver one; the RasterOps ColorBoard 104 began shipping in volume to retail customers in May 1988.^{[1, 2]}

Then he took it to the show.

In January 1988, at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, his display stood in Truvel’s booth beside the scanner. People walked up expecting a scanner. What they saw instead was a photograph on a Macintosh screen in full, true, photographic color — on a machine that was not supposed to be able to do that.

The photographic color stunned the attendants. Word moved through the hall, and it moved out of the hall. The race was on.

Two months after the show, Apple invited Truvel to launch TrueScan into Europe at CeBIT Hannover.

Apple was paying attention in another way too. Laurie Girand — who had helped him obtain the video registers from Apple that made his photographic invention possible — brought him into Apple’s invitation-only “Jackson Pollock” forum. Jackson Pollock was Apple’s own internal code name, chosen for the painter’s splashy color. It was the release that became 32-Bit QuickDraw, and it gave the Macintosh native photographic color in May 1989.

The work also made him a source. Aldus had built TIFF in 1986 to carry scanner output in black and white. It added uncompressed RGB color in April 1987 and palette color in August 1988. While that was being worked out, Steve Carlsen — the Aldus engineer who created the format and is credited as its author on the published specification — telephoned Austreng to understand how Truvel was handling color space. A color TIFF had to carry what the scanners were actually producing. The format is still in use today.

He gave the Macintosh a way to see before the platform had one of its own. He built it upstairs, out of four cards. Then he was in the room when Apple made it native.

Truvel’s line reached well beyond graphic arts — X-ray, 35mm transparency and three-dimensional capture, alongside the flatbed and drum work. It was on the company’s X-ray scanner that he first met the public-domain medical imaging code he would later build a commercial product upon. It is worth marking that 3D capture was on his bench in 1987. The delivery half of that problem is what he returned to eight years later at Net VR, and again thirty years after that.

He left to build the next thing. Greg Minter, a colleague from the same company, left with him.

Vidar Systems of Herndon, Virginia acquired Truvel’s scanner technology in October 1990 and built a business on it. Twenty-two years later, in January 2012, 3D Systems acquired Vidar for $135.5 million in cash — a price paid for engineering first done in a Torrance lab in 1987. Truvel itself reorganized under Chapter 11 in June 1990, two years after this tenure closed. That is the ordinary arc of a hardware company that arrives ahead of its market, and it is a comment on timing rather than on craft.

The work outlived its maker by twenty-two years and two owners. Few products of that era can say the same.

Photographic colorization from darkroom chemicals to a Mac

Blue Solutions, Inc.

(Formerly Orange Solutions, Inc.)

Thousand Oaks, California · 1988 – 1991

Then he built the product himself.

PhotoPress was an early Macintosh application that put the darkroom on screen. Dodging, burning, tonal correction and color separation — done with a mouse instead of under an enlarger, at a moment when the hardware to display the result properly was still rare. Austreng founded the company, served as its chairman and chief executive, and wrote the whole of the application himself in Object Pascal. Greg Minter wrote the manual.

It began as a crossing between two worlds that did not yet talk to each other. Dr. Wayne Rasband, at the National Institutes of Health, had written imaging software for scientists reading X-ray and MRI plates and placed it in the public domain. It was real, Macintosh-native, written in Pascal, and first released in 1987.

Austreng had met that class of software from the other side, on Truvel’s X-ray scanner. He saw what the two ends had in common. The steps a radiologist uses to pull detail out of a plate are the same steps a photographer uses to pull detail out of a negative — and the second market was far larger than the first. He carried the code across, wrote the application on top of it, and shipped it in August 1988. Building on it is exactly what the public domain exists to invite. The language is the tell that the lineage is real: NIH Image was Pascal, Object Pascal was its Macintosh dialect, and an Object Pascal codebase is what that inheritance produces.

The company first traded as Orange Solutions, incorporated in California. At a trade show, the chief executive of an established company holding that name came to the booth and asked for it. Austreng handed it over on the spot. The logo was fine work and expensive work, so he kept the design and rebuilt the identity in a new name and a new color. Blue Solutions is Orange Solutions wearing a better coat.

PhotoPress shipped from Macworld Expo Boston in August 1988. The dates around it are worth setting down plainly, because they are all public and all settled. The first public release of Thomas Knoll’s code, in any form, was version 0.65, bundled with Barneyscan slide scanners as Barneyscan XP — March 1989, seven months later. The earliest date any published account places on Adobe’s involvement is September 1988, a handshake with Fred Mitchell described in Jeff Schewe’s history of the program; final agreements followed in April 1989. Adobe Photoshop 1.0 shipped in February 1990, eighteen months after PhotoPress.

The two were applications of the same kind, made for the same work, for the same machine. The comparison here rests on two ship dates — and two ship dates are all it needs.

The darkroom moved onto the screen in August 1988, eighteen months before Photoshop. It has stayed there ever since.

Teaching a computer to read a drawing

Computer Image Technology, Inc. (Dimension4)

Seattle · September 1991 – 1994

Here he took on a harder problem: teaching a computer to read a drawing.

A scanned engineering drawing is a picture of geometry, not geometry itself. A CAD system can display one, but editing it requires the real geometry underneath. As chairman and chief executive, Austreng built a semi-automated raster-to-vector conversion on non-uniform rational B-spline mathematics to recover exactly that.

In 1993 he drove the acquisition and merger of CATCO, extending the company into the microfiche data-acquisition market. That same year the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest selected the company as its case-study presentation, under the title Keeping the Wheels On — an honest description of the challenge, because demand was abundant throughout.

He stepped away in 1994 to get well. A series of surgeries corrected a congenital autosomal chromosome disorder, and a hospitalization beginning that February had his full attention by June. He states it plainly here so the record is complete and the reason is known — in his own words, rather than anyone’s assumption.

He got well. He came back.

Packard Bell Corporation

Interface Division · 1994 – 1995

He came back to the highest-volume consumer computer channel in the United States.

As director of the Advanced Technology Group, Austreng created the object-oriented analysis for Welcome Home — the shell interface that shipped on Packard Bell machines. It presented the computer as a house, with rooms that matched the things a person might actually want to do.

Packard Bell’s buyer was, more often than not, someone buying a first computer and opening the box for the first time. Welcome Home is an early and commercially serious answer to the question that has occupied him since 1986: how do you hand an expert’s tool to somebody who has better things to do than become an expert?

Photographic 3D in a browser

Net VR Corporation

1995 – 1998

In 1995 he put photographs in motion inside a web browser.

Net VR, which Austreng founded and led as chairman and chief executive, built one of the first systems to deliver interactive photographic object rotation across the open web. A product or a property was photographed from every angle, then reassembled in the browser so a viewer could turn it in their hands.

The method was filed as an international application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty and published in 1998 as WO1998015920A1. That publication is the lasting asset — a government-issued document that fixes the date permanently. The company put its resources into the market rather than into national-phase prosecution, and the published record stands today exactly as filed. A date, once fixed, stays fixed.

Apple’s QuickTime VR reached object movies first, in 1995. The distinction at Net VR was delivery. The system was built to run across ordinary browsers on ordinary connections, using nothing but what the visitor already had — a demanding constraint at the time. The company sold and deployed directly with national apparel and outdoor retail brands at the worldwide executive level.

Every property tour you have ever clicked through, and every product you have ever spun around on a retail page, is that interaction. Within a decade it had become the standard mechanism for real-estate virtual tours and e-commerce product spins, and the same interaction model is the one that street-level photographic navigation later made familiar through mapping products. That is offered as resemblance and sequence.

The claim made here is narrower and stronger: he was doing it first, and there is a dated publication to prove it.

The standard that is still in force

IBM Corporation

Software Group · 1998 – May 2005

Seven years inside IBM’s Software Group, in three roles, at the altitude where standards are written rather than followed.

As strategic alliances executive he led alliance work on the Java initiative between Sun Microsystems and IBM.

As market manager for WebSphere Business Components he owned the market for IBM’s reusable enterprise component middleware. He was elected chairman of the Reusable Asset Specification effort — the work of defining how enterprise software assets are packaged, so that teams who did not build them can find them, trust them and use them again.

That specification is still in force. The Object Management Group adopted it in May 2004, promulgated version 2.2 in November 2005, and it remains published at that version today, more than twenty years later, in a catalogue that also holds UML and BPMN. The portfolio has since changed hands — the EDM Council acquired OMG’s standards in a transaction that closed on 24 November 2025, and has since renamed itself the EDM Association — and the standard carried through unchanged.

He was elected by peers to chair a specification that has outlasted the division that produced it, the decade that produced it, and the standards body that adopted it, giving all credit to Grant Larson, who was the genius behind the specification.

As technology manager for NexGen he supported dot-com companies west of the Mississippi and owned ServerProven certification. In that period he built a complete enterprise call center application in three days, using IBM’s confidential automated Java code generation technology out of the Boston laboratory. He was selected for private 3D market segmentation education delivered by a specialist group brought in from London. He is an IBM stock grant recipient and an IBM retiree.

Patent filing — US 2020/0060241 A1

Image Technology Laboratories, Inc.

Founded Seattle, WA (1994) · Headquarters: Vancouver, WA (since 2005) · 1994 – Present

Image Technology Laboratories has been a Washington corporation in continuous good standing since January 1994 — thirty-two years — with Austreng as founder and president. It is a research and development company, and it is a separate legal entity from Intelligence Technology Laboratories, LLC.

It is also his laboratory. It holds a body of invention work kept in confidence pending patent filings. Its current programs are in machine vision for robotics and in virtual reality — the same problem he took up in 1995, returned to with thirty years of hardware progress underneath it.

That return has a dated public record standing behind it. The method he built in 1995 was published as WO1998015920A1, and what it described — a photograph a person could turn in their own hands, inside an ordinary browser, on an ordinary connection — is now simply how the world tours a property and spins a product on a page. He made that ordinary once, from a standing start. The work under way in this laboratory is aimed at doing it again.

What appears here about that program is deliberate and complete: its existence, its fields, and the reason for its discretion. Disclosure discipline is what preserves patent rights. Publicly describing an unfiled invention starts a twelve-month clock in the United States, and the many countries applying an absolute novelty standard reward the inventor who waits. A document circulated to investors is a public disclosure.

He protects the invention by protecting its timing, and shares specifics with a counterparty under a non-disclosure agreement.

Intelligence Technology Laboratories, LLC

2025 – Present

Agentic AI is the sixth act, and the thesis is the one he formed in 1986.

Intelligence Technology Laboratories builds and deploys agentic AI systems for small and mid-sized businesses across sales, operations, workflow and customer-facing processes. The platforms span machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision and the internet of things — together with the implementation consulting that decides whether any of it survives contact with an actual business. Austreng owns strategy, solution architecture, agent and workflow design, and client implementation.

The thesis is narrow and worth stating plainly. The companies with the most to gain from agentic AI are the ones best served when someone else brings the packaging to them. Adoption is therefore a problem of packaging — and packaging is a problem he has solved five times.

That is the $99 CAD package. That is the darkroom on a screen, the photograph that turns inside a browser, and the component standard that let strangers reuse each other’s work. It is the same move, for the sixth time, made by someone who has now made it in five technologies before this one.

He is the author of Checkmate — AI vs The Labor Market (2025), on labor-market displacement and enterprise AI adoption.

Four decades of being early. Every one of them the same bet: take what only experts can do, and make it ordinary.