For years Scott recorded a lot of information about each fishing charter he took out. This included weather, tide, location, fish caught, bait used, and so on. When taking out a new charter he tried to find information about earlier successful charters that closely matched current conditions. This became more difficult as his logs got bigger.
Shortly after Radio Shack released released their first computer, the TRS-80 Model I, Scott bought one.
His goal was to convert the information in his collection of paper log books to a format that would allow him to more easily search for previous charters where conditions matched a current day.
Scott taught himself how to program in BASIC and then entered all the information into a database that he could search.