Judy Lewis left high school and El Paso, TX when she was 17 years old to get married and move to Germany with her husband stationed in the Army. She would come back the next year to finish high school, and thet was the end of her formal education.
Judy would travel with her husband in the Army and ended up in Bloomington, MN.
Judy would go on to raise two boys on her own. While working at Burroughs Corp. cleaning offices at night, she asked if she could bring a computer home to learn how it works. Judy taught herself to use the computer for wordprocessing, spreadsheets when the world worked with paper. She was soon hired full time at Burroughs as a computer trainier and no longer cleaned the offices.
Burroughs and Sperry merged to form UNISYS, which would dominate the mainframe comuter space as banks and military began moving into the digital world. Judy traveled the country, collecting rave reviews as a terrific teacher and computer troubleshooter. It wasn't uncommon for Judy's students, while learning to navigate and use these new machines, to say, "Wouldn't it be great if you could just talk to the computer and it would do what you say?" Which was absolutely the stuff reserved for science fiction at the time.
Judy would go on to work with the computer department at the University of Minnesota, helping to install the very first email service on campus. Judy's expertise and people skills served her well until the day she first saw Dragon Naturally Speaking. Soon thereafter she left her job to go into business for herself.
In 1999 Judy started JR Consulting. Judy built the company to simplify help professionals integrate speech recognition into their life. While training a chiropractor in the Twin Cities, the chiropractor suggested that she should get a booth at the upcoming Northwestern Health Sciences University homecoming. Known to chiropractors across the country as "The Dragon Lady", Judy found a great partnership helping doctors use Dragon to tell the story of the patient encounter.
On her travels, Judy would meet the husband of a chiropractor that had created a small database application using the Dragon software development kit, the software was called DC Talk. Judy started selling Dragon and DC Talk at the chiropractic tradeshows she went to. A couple years later, Judy bought the source code to DC Talk and brought in her own programming team to keep improving the software.
Later, Judy's son would join her as the business grew. DC Talk became Chart Talk when the EHR stimulus for demonstrating meaningful use affected the chiropractic profession. Following Judy's general guidance of simplifying complexities and great training, Chart Talk was able to help the first chiropractor attest for menaingful use successfully, and have the first chiropractor recieve their stimulus payment.
Not too bad for a high school dropout from El Paso, TX who loved to make people smile. Judy passed away in August of 2021. She was a great woman, wife, mother, boss, granmother, mother-in-law, aunt, and friend. She is greatly missed and we are blessed to have known her.