BUSINESS PULSE : SMALL BUSINESS IN ORANGE COUNTY : SMALL BUSINESSES, BIG DREAMS : Staying Just So Far Ahead of the Pack

It’s taken a few years, but C. Shannon Jenkins has learned that a little innovation can be a dangerous thing.

Consider the first software package manufactured and marketed through TouchStone Software Corp., the Seal Beach company she founded with four colleagues and now runs nearly single-handedly. It was called Mimix, and it was, to put it politely, a real problem.

The second product was less of a problem, though not that much less. But with the third, Jenkins thinks TouchStone finally has a chance for a best seller.

“The mistake we’ve made repeatedly is being way ahead of the market,” said Jenkins, who is TouchStone’s president and main product designer. “Mimix was 5 or 6 years ahead of its time. . . . Nowadays, when I feel it’s particularly urgent to get a product to market by a certain date, I realize I’m about a year or two ahead.”

And she slows down.

But Jenkins hadn’t learned that yet when TouchStone was founded in 1982. Mimix was a software package for computers equipped with UNIX, an operating system designed by AT&T.; Mimix made UNIX machines compatible with older operating systems.

That’s all well and good, but UNIX didn’t take off until 1988, and machines using the CP/M operating system and the Z80 processor chip were turned into dinosaurs when the IBM personal computer was introduced in the early 1980s. TouchStone’s first market disappeared.

Jenkins, however, hung on. What else was there to do for a woman whose only ambition was to be a computer programmer--it said so in her 1965 high school yearbook--and whose greatest gift was an affinity for those machines that confound us all.

But Jenkins, 41, is more than just a computer whiz. She is a classic example of that rare breed of entrepreneur who sees a need, creates a product to satisfy it and makes some money in the process.

Her first job was as a computer operator at Cerritos College, a job she took because she “needed something to do” when her husband was sent to Vietnam in 1969. Later career moves took Jenkins to Honeywell Inc. and then to MSI Data Corp.

Jenkins left MSI in 1980 at the urging of Larry Dingus, a friend at MSI who wanted to start his own company.

Jenkins, Dingus and a third partner started a consulting firm but soon tired of the enterprise.

“Larry and I decided that we didn’t like being in the service business,” Jenkins said. “We made good money, but in growing that kind of a business, the payoff is . . . lots of unending personnel supervision.”

So, along with three colleagues, they formed TouchStone. Jenkins created her emulation software, dubbed it Mimix and saw it languish.

“It became obvious to us that the market was changing, and the IBM PC was the important product,” Jenkins said.

So they designed PCworks, TouchStone’s second product, which lets computer users connect an IBM PC to a UNIX computer system, allowing the two very different kinds of computers to communicate. It was 1984. But while analysts went crazy over the product, no market materialized until 1988.

Today, the software package is making increasing amounts of money.

TouchStone got through some lean times in 1985 by teaming up with a company called Fifth Generation Systems Inc.--the very firm to whom they sublet office space. TouchStone modified a software program developed by Fifth Generation and got enough royalties to regroup and start work on Check*It.

Check*It is a diagnostic software package that, among other things, can tell you what’s wrong with your personal computer when it starts acting up. Marketing efforts are currently aimed at computer dealers, and there is no real competition.

So Jenkins is holding her breath. So far, the outlook is promising. The company was profitable for the first time in 1988.

“I love computers,” she said. “But if someone had told me of what I was embarking upon in 1982, I wouldn’t have done it. It’s incredibly difficult. . . . I’m not sure exactly how (TouchStone’s) story will end. But I would like it to be a little easier.”