Thirty-seven years.
Two generations.
One family.
MicroFour wasn’t founded in a garage or a dorm room. It was born from a grandfather’s advice, a chiropractor’s question, and four siblings who believed that the right software could change how healthcare worked. This is where we came from.
A sailor, a drafter, and a woman who kept the records.
Before MicroFour, before PracticeStudio, before any of this — there was J.N. Taylor, a young man from West Texas with a remarkable gift for technical drafting. The drawing below was completed on November 1, 1941. Thirty-six days later, Pearl Harbor changed everything.
They married and he shipped out almost immediately — gone for more than two years, 26 months on a ship in the Pacific Theater, while Mimi stayed home in Iraan and waited. When the war ended and his ship came in through the Columbia River, nobody gave him a ride. No transport. No ceremony. He hitchhiked home — across the desert, roughly 1,800 miles, all the way back to a small oil town in West Texas. That was how the war ended for J.N. Taylor.
He came home, went to the oil fields, and eventually operated one of the largest oil wells in the world — Yates Field in West Texas — largely on his own, until oil was discovered in the Middle East and changed the economics of everything.
His wife, Alma Gwendolyn White — Mimi, to the family — worked in the medical records office at the hospital in Iraan, Texas, a small oil town in the Pecos County desert. She kept the records. She knew where everything was. She made the system work.
J.N. told his children one thing about the future: “Computers are the wave of the future.” They listened.
Alma Gwendolyn White and J.N. Taylor — newlyweds, before he shipped out.
Taylor Management Systems, Inc. — oil industry accounting software, early 1980s. John Britton (left) would later bring his talent to MicroFour.
Four siblings. West Texas A&M. Computer degrees.
J.N.’s children — Cynthia, Steve, Jay, and Brett Taylor — took their father’s advice to heart. They headed north to West Texas State University in Canyon, Texas (now West Texas A&M) and came out with computer degrees.
Steve landed at Burroughs Corporation and was moving up fast. But the entrepreneurial pull was stronger. He left to start Taylor Management Systems (TMS) with his brother Jay — a software company building accounting solutions for the oil industry. Cynthia and Brett came aboard. The family was already in business together.
TMS was serious software for a serious industry. And the people who built it knew what they were doing — which is exactly why, when a new question came along, they were ready to answer it.
“Do you think we could put these records on a PC?”
The Taylor siblings were regulars at a chiropractic office here in Amarillo. Personal computers were just beginning to find their way into small businesses, and their chiropractor had a question: could these paper medical records be moved onto one of these new machines?
For a team that had spent years building sophisticated software for the oil industry, it was an interesting problem. They said yes.
In 1989, MicroFour shipped its first product: DCez — “The Chartless Office with the Magic Touch.” A chiropractic EHR built for a world that was still largely on paper. The name MicroFour reflected exactly what it was: a software company named after four siblings.
That chiropractor’s question is the reason we exist. It is also, decades later, why chiropractic is still in our DNA.
The original DCez User’s Guide, 1989. A product that predated the term “EHR” by more than a decade.
John Britton at a PracticeStudio trade show — years after the TMS booth photo above. Some people become part of the story.
The second generation grew up here.
MicroFour was never a company where you clocked in at 9 and left at 5. Trent Taylor joined the family business at age 14 in 1991 — largely at Steve’s insistence. The logic was straightforward: the closer Steve kept him, the harder it was for him to get into trouble. It helped. Somewhat. His cousin Dustin followed around 1996. The second generation had arrived.
John Britton was one of them — at the TMS booth before MicroFour existed, and still at PracticeStudio trade shows years later. He was the kind of person every company hopes to attract and rarely does. He is deeply missed. But John was not the exception at MicroFour. This has always been a place where people come, stay, and build a career. A younger generation is coming up now, and the culture is the same.
Over the decades that followed, DCez grew into PracticeStudio. A chiropractic-only product became a multi-discipline EHR and practice management platform serving an expanding range of outpatient specialties. The company opened its own clinics. It built its own AI. It never stopped being a family business.
Cynthia Taylor — Cissy to everyone who knew her — was one of the four siblings who founded MicroFour. She was there at the beginning, shaped everything that came after, and left her mark on every line of code this company ever shipped. She retired in 2019. She passed away in early 2026.
Cynthia ran Quality Assurance at MicroFour — which meant that the software that went out the door was software she had approved. She had a gift for finding the things developers convince themselves are acceptable. She was not convinced easily. The developers who worked alongside her are better for it. They still hear her voice.
She is deeply missed by everyone who knew her, and by the company she helped build.
Still family. Still Amarillo. Still building.
37 years after DCez shipped, MicroFour is still owned and operated by the Taylor family. The same family that started with a chiropractor’s question now builds AI-powered EHR software used by thousands of providers every day — running on servers we own, in a state we never left.
The second generation is running the technology side. The first generation built the foundation. And after 37 years, this company has never had more in front of it. Alma AI is in active development. StrataFrame V2 is shipping. PracticeStudio has moved to modern .NET. The infrastructure is in place. The team is here. We are just getting started.
Named for the woman who
kept the records in Iraan, Texas.
Alma Gwendolyn White worked in the medical records office at a small hospital in a West Texas oil town. She organized patient information by hand, long before anyone imagined software could do it. Decades later, her grandsons named an AI after her — an AI that now manages clinical records for thousands of practices across the country, running on servers in the same state where she worked.
That is not a coincidence. That is the whole story.