Three and one-quarter miles off the shore of Key Biscayne, Fla., exists one of the world’s most unusual cemeteries.
Cremated remains rest under 45 feet of seawater as fish of all colors swim by amid ancient Greek- and Roman-style architecture that forms an artificial reef.
Human visitors with scuba gear arrive occasionally, too, sometimes to place an addition to the cemetery as loved ones and other mourners observe from a glass-bottom boat.
From far away, San Antonio plays a role with each addition. The accounting software used by operator Neptune Memorial Reef was written by and is supported by CrisSoft LLC of San Antonio.
The software’s story goes x back even further, though, into San Antonio computing history. Its roots are in long-gone Datapoint Corp., where CrisSoft founder Paul Criswell started his software career.
Criswell met his wife, Geri, when both were Datapoint employees. Like many other Datapoint employees, the Criswell couple started their own computer-related company, launching CrisSoft in 1982 to write medical industry software.
Despite Geri’s death a few years later and having to stop and to start over several times, CrisSoft produced an array of software used today by doctor offices and medical service bureaus nationwide, mainly for billing, scheduling and electronic medical record keeping.
Today, CrisSoft, with partners Criswell, Lowell Good and Ursula Hensel, brings in nearly $1 million a year in revenues. The company retains three contract software writers, employs two support personnel and plans to add marketing and sales staffing soon.
In 2000, CrisSoft was hired to write trust administration software to handle prepaid funeral and burial accounts by a division of Houston’s Service Corporation International, a large funeral chain. Prepayments are held in trust accounts, governed by state laws that are incorporated into the software to ensure compliance.
The funeral home chain shifted its trust accounts to India in 2003, using different software. CrisSoft’s trust software was revived from the dead last summer when Jerry Norman, president of the cremation-only services company Neptune Society, contacted Criswell. Norman asked to use the software formerly used by SCI.
Because Criswell builds flexibility into his software, it was simple to translate the accounts from land-based funerals and burials to cremation and the reef. The software also handles sales leads for Neptune’s sales force.
The Neptune reef began operations last fall and has almost 1,200 placements to date. The 16-acre sea bottom site can accommodate 125,000 plaque-bearing urns, which contain ashes mixed into a cementlike compound.
The reef’s marketing materials stress the reef’s “life after life” aspect. Crustaceans, crabs and other sea life covering the artificial reef, by federal regulation, must remain undisturbed, Criswell said in an interview at his Leon Springs home office.
Datapoint itself died some years ago, the name disappearing through numerous acquisitions of its remnants after a 1985 takeover by New York corporate raider Asher Edelman.
In its early 1980s heyday, Datapoint was known for its pioneering advances in desktop computers, networks and teleconferencing. Alas, Datapoint was too far ahead of its time. “It couldn’t take advantage of its innovations,” Criswell said.
Datapoint’s software and hardware legacies live on, thanks to spinoff companies such as CrisSoft.
Datapoint may not have left behind any ashes, but a plaque ought to be placed at the Neptune Memorial Reef.
It should read:
)DATAPOINT
)1967-1985
)SAN ANTONIO
)R.I.P.
dhendricks@express-news.net