Jo Carol Porter

Jo Carol Porter has a long and varied history with Information Technology going back to an experiment at Ohio State University to see if middle school children could learn to program a mainframe with only 200 bytes of storage and only machine language. They could!

She went on to graduate from Ohio State four times, finishing with a PhD in Mathematics Education. While a graduate student, she was the liaison from the Math Department to the Business School as it built its new math and computer curriculum. She has taught math and computer science at Ohio State and the University of Alaska, Anchorage as well as Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Texas Utilities. She was a systems engineer at EDS and managed the Information Center for Texas Utilities Services, which was in charge of personal computers when they were first used in the corporation.

In 1994 Jo Carol and her husband, Jim, foresaw a potential disaster in the data change issues to the coming millennium: Y2K. Together they founded Harvard, Porter & Associates (HPA) and Jo Carol founded P&M Software, which wrote software to analyze software for potential Y2K problems. When Coopers & Lybrand acquired HPA in 1997, Jo Carol completed work for other clients and in the fall of 1998, rejoined Jim in Virginia. P&M Software was shut down in 2000 having completed its mission.

In 2009, intrigued by the promise of Valspresso, Jo Carol came out of retirement to join Valspresso.