The name
Why Moab
My father spent forty years building this software. He died seven months before it came to market.
Ken Stavast
Forty years on one thing
Forty years is not a figure of speech. He started before most small businesses had a computer at all, and he kept going through every change in how a business keeps its books, and every change in the machines it keeps them on.
That is a long time to give to something. It came out of evenings and weekends and holidays. It came out of years he could have spent on easier work, or on nothing at all.
He did it because he thought a small business deserved better books than it was being sold. Not a cut-down version of what a large company gets. The real thing, on hardware they owned, at a price they could justify.
He died seven months before it came to market. Close enough to know it was nearly there. Not close enough to see it arrive.
The older story it echoes
Forty years, and the last step
There is an older account with the same shape, and I could not stop seeing it.
And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah … And the Lord said unto him, This is the land … I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither.
So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab … and he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab.
Deuteronomy 34
Forty years of walking. The destination finally in view. And the man who carried the work that far does not take the last step himself. He hands it to the people who will.
Moab is where that walk ended. It is where he was buried, in sight of the place he never entered.
Why the company carries it
The name is for him
Moab was chosen in remembrance. It is named for my father, and for what the work cost him.
Nothing here was built from nothing. Where we are today is the distance he already walked. They are his shoulders we are standing on, and the name is there so that nobody forgets it — least of all us.
He spent the forty years. He got the destination in view. Somebody else takes the last step, and other people get to use the thing he built. That was the point of it for him, and it is the point of it here.
Everything on this site is the finishing of what he started.
In memory of
Ken Stavast
1947–2026