This is a brief profile of Sue Rugge, founder of Information On Demand, who made a fortune with a business she originally ran from her home.  The book was targeted for women with little or no experience with computers, much less with working at management levels. The object was to convince women that no matter how meager the place they started from, they could use a computer to become independent.

Sue Rugge was not allowed to graduate from high school because she was pregnant -- not an unusual thing in the 1950s, when abortion was dangerous and illegal and unmarried pregnancy was considered a disgrace. At seventeen, she married the father of her baby – the usual thing to do in those times -- and by the time she was eighteen she was struggling to survive, picking prunes for twenty-five cents a box.

In the fifties single women who got pregnant were usually prevented from continuing their educations, trapped into marriage too young, forced to work too young, and robbed of the fun and adventure of young adulthood. This would have been handicap enough for Sue if the story stopped there. But things got worse. Her husband was killed in an automobile accident in the early sixties, leaving her with two small children to support.

Sue had found a job as a clerk typist for General Motors when she was twenty (before her husband was killed) and she was assigned to type acquisition slips for the technical library. Based on the three years experience she gained in that library, when Sue decided to leave Santa Barbara after her husband’s death she looked for a position as a corporate librarian. Because she could type, she was hired as a typist/librarian and continued at this work for a decade, helping engineers and scientists with their research. She became a skilled technical librarian, but in 1970 her job was phased out as a result of a corporate takeover.

Sue decided that the only way she could have security and make the kind of money she felt she deserved was by working for herself. "I set out not to make a company, but to make a living," she recalls. "I was just trying to keep myself together. I had two kids to support."

Sue and her friend Georgia Finnigan, a professional librarian, put together the organization that would eventually become Information On Demand. Running the business out of her bedroom, Sue Rugge physically visited libraries to search out technical information in directories, indexes, and abstracts for corporate clients, engineers, and scientists.

When Sue first started her business she did the same dreary job that reference librarians have always done: she painstakingly searched directories, abstracts, and indexes, compiling lists of references for her clients and providing them with copies of articles in which they were interested. Changing over to computers in the mid-1970s allowed her -- by means of computer networks and databanks -- to process in minutes information that previously would have taken her days or weeks to chase down by searching laboriously through printed indexes. Computer networks also offer more complete and wide-ranging indexes and lessen the chance of missing something important through human oversight. Computer searches are highly accurate, provided that the user knows how to use key words effectively.

Doing her research more efficiently enabled Sue to earn much more money for the time she invested. Doing her work more quickly also enabled her to take on more clients, which again meant more money.

Today, the clients of Information On Demand (IOD) include such companies as Amoco, Chevron, Exxon, General Electric, Westinghouse, and Xerox. IOD uses Texas Instruments terminals to access more than three hundred data bases, providing information from all over the world. But small clients are served as well; for instance, IOD furnishes cancer research information for families of cancer victims.

About 50 percent of the company's work involves delivery of documents to clients. IOD maintains personnel in major research libraries throughout the United States and has established working relationships worldwide, including one at the Lenin State Library in Moscow.

Rugge and Finnigan went into business by putting up $125 each for letterheads, business cards, and a listing in the Yellow Pages. In 1978 the partners split due to a disagreement over whether the company should grow by seeking outside investors. Rugge took over, and with no investment capital increased business 100 percent over the next few years. IOD is now one of the largest as well as one of the oldest information brokerages in the country. In September 1982 Rugge sold her interest to the Pergamon Group of publishing companies. At their request, Rugge stayed on as president. The company did a volume of $1.5 million in 1982.

Not bad for a high school dropout, unwed mother, and twenty-five-cents-a-box prune picker.