Stephen Paterson graduated from City College of San Francisco in Computer and Information Science in 1985. He also studied Computer Science at San Francisco State. During the late Eighties and early nineties he had a business consulting people on MIDI devices and computers which mainly involved synchronizing digital computer tracks with analog tape tracks using a technology called smtpe. (In those days computers didn't have the capability to deal with large analog files which were best left on tape.) From 1998 until 2001  he was on the development team of  Spa Index  . He formed Webmesa in 1996 as a small company to promote and design websites.