Christian Desbourse wrote his first lines of computer code in 1968 as an engineering student (Faculté Polytechnique, Mons, Belgium). He graduated in 1971 as a civil engineer in electricity.

He joined the engineering department of a large power generators manufacturer where he wrote many computer programs in Fortran for electrical, thermal and mechanical calculations. He was also in charge of designing, supporting and troubleshooting voltage regulation in thermal and hydraulic power stations.

After he carried out his military duties at the electronics laboratory of the Belgian air force, he joined a publishing company as managing editor of several technical publications. This job helped him discover the world of advertising, communications and marketing. After he had organized the editorial production, improved readership's feedback and helped launch a new magazine on computers, he felt it was time for him to go back to the industrial field.

The European logistics of a multinational company producing medical supplies, hired him as coordinator of the European purchases of equipment. This is where he worked with a PC for the first time and he started immediately writing applications in Lotus 123 and dBaseII to support his own projects and those of several project managers.

A few years later a young high-tech Belgian company, also in the medical field, called him to set up the purchasing and logistic functions. He continued developing applications for his own use and to support his department.

In the meantime he kept an eye on another promising high-tech company, planning to build particle accelerators for the medical and industrial markets. He joined that company as project manager to take charge of a technology transfer project the 35 people company had just signed with China. This is where he started using Fox and later Foxpro to develop applications to support his project, the engineering department and to allow the production of bills of materials. A second project led him to manage the manufacturing and testing of an accelerator and the installation in the USA. The company had then grown to about 100 people and needed to get more structured. Christian's skills made him the right person to tackle the organization of the company logistics. He developed several applications in Foxpro to support the logistic and purchasing departments, interface with accounting, inventory control, and project management.