Gilbert Hakim and the company that outgrew the living room

A living room is an awkward place to put five departments. Gilbert Hakim managed it anyway. When he started SCC Soft Computer in Queens in 1979, he wrote the software, designed it, sold it, installed it and maintained it. Development could hardly complain that sales had promised something unreasonable. Sales and development were the same person.

The business began with three people and roughly $1,000. Its early equipment came from Radio Shack. Those details give the story a useful scale: a small group, a small budget, and a founder whose responsibilities stretched from the first line of code to whatever happened after the customer began using it. The distance between making a promise and having to keep it was unusually short.

SCC eventually became an international software business based in Clearwater, Florida. Hakim remained its founder and CEO. Yet his story has another address, away from corporate software: Ocean, a digital library for reading and listening to religious literature. Across these two projects, information is something people must be able to use, revisit and understand. The settings could scarcely be more different. The practical questions are surprisingly familiar.

Before the living room, the telephone

Hakim studied physics at Stony Brook University, then pursued graduate qualifications in computer science and applied mathematics. His working life before SCC included technical and management positions at Periphonics, a telecommunications company. He arrived at his own business with experience on both sides of a familiar divide: how a system works and how people organize work around it.

That background matters because the early SCC job description was so broad. Writing a program was one responsibility among several. Someone also had to explain it, get it running and deal with its continued operation. Hakim occupied each position. A customer could encounter the designer again as the installer; the installer would also know whom to blame for the design.

There is a temptation to decorate a business origin with retrospective inevitability. The concrete details are more interesting. Queens. Radio Shack equipment. A name initially spelled Sopht Computer, which developed into Soft Computer Consultants. Even the spelling was still settling down. The initials preserve part of that early business name: Soft Computer Consultants. A little naming history survives inside the abbreviation customers use today. The company that became SCC began as a piece of work that its founder had to carry through several different stages himself.

Two brothers, six years apart in the business

In 1985, Hakim’s older brother Jean joined SCC. Six years separated the founding from that arrival. An archival photograph shows the brothers long before either had an executive title: Jean on the left, Gilbert on the right, both wearing buttoned coats and solemn expressions. The coats are more formal than many modern boardrooms.

The photograph offers a small, human interruption to the corporate chronology. Business history usually introduces people at the moment they become useful to a company. Here they already have a history together. Jean’s later responsibilities included the financial and operational side of SCC, while Gilbert continued to be identified with its software and direction.

As a company grows, the collection of jobs once held by a founder must become an organization. Finance, operations, development and customer service acquire their own responsibilities. SCC’s leadership roster reflects that division of work. The brother who arrived in 1985 became part of a business that had to make the living-room arrangement function at a very different scale.

The customer gets another turn

By 2009, SCC had more than 1,200 employees. Hakim was still closely involved in product development and the company’s direction. The contrast with the original staff of three is considerable, but the useful detail is his continuing attention to the work. Thirty years into the business, the founder was still concerned with what the software should do next.

His advice about changing systems began with an unglamorous requirement: decide what you want to achieve. Goals first, then the choice of system and the implementation approach. It is the sort of instruction that sounds obvious until a project has started without it. Software can be demonstrated in an afternoon. Agreeing what a whole organization needs from it takes rather more patience.

Hakim’s public career descriptions repeatedly place him at customer sites, listening to users and carrying what he learns back into product planning. That gives his hands-on reputation a concrete meaning. A visit can expose the difference between the process imagined by a programmer and the process someone actually follows at work.

The same emphasis appears in his December 2023 message to clients. He wrote about the privilege of making software that supports clients in their everyday work. The emphasis is modest enough to be revealing. Daily work is where a product’s promises acquire a schedule, a queue and a person waiting for something to happen.

“Software that helps support your daily work.”

Gilbert Hakim · December 2023

A library with the sound switched on

Then there is Ocean. Hakim is also the founder of oceanlibrary.com, a reading project devoted to sacred literature from multiple religious traditions. Its subject matter takes him beyond the business for which he is usually introduced. The reader can move among texts associated with Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, Bahá’í and other traditions.

Ocean combines written text with recorded narration. Many books align the recording with the words, so readers can listen and follow the page together. It also offers full-text search and tools for making and organizing notes. The software runs on the web, Android and iOS. A reader can approach the material as a listener, a searcher or someone preparing notes for a discussion.

These are quiet design decisions. They determine whether a long work feels navigable, whether a passage can be found again, and whether a reader can carry a thought from one session into the next. An electronic library can contain a great many books and still leave its visitor feeling stranded. Ocean gives the visitor several ways to proceed.

The catalogue has room for Confucius, Maimonides, the Upanishads and the Gathas. Browsing it involves crossing traditions as well as opening titles. The interface puts those choices within the same reading environment. Whatever a reader brings to the books, the practical invitation is to spend time with the words.

In August 2023, Hakim appeared on a discussion programme titled Artificial Morality. The conversation connected his work on Ocean 2.0 with questions about artificial intelligence and ethics. It is a revealing extension of his public interests: making software is one activity; asking what people should do with technology is another. He has made time for both.

The presentation comes with questions

Hakim also presents in the Clearwater Bahá’í community’s Roadmap for a Moral Society series. The format includes religious texts, slides and discussion. It places a software executive in a setting where the subject is how people should live together, and where a successful session may produce another question rather than a finished specification.

A March 2024 session considered discord and unity. Its discussion included difficult conversations, empathy and consultation, with time devoted to questions about community relationships. Here the concern was how people handle disagreement. A shared room, physical or digital, does not automatically produce agreement; the conversation still needs care.

In September 2025, Hakim presented a session on the procession of the human spirit from God. Its programme moved through emanation, manifestation, interpretations of religious texts, and the relationship between spirit and mind. These are theological discussions, presented within a Bahá’í setting. They show the range of material he chooses to engage with outside his executive responsibilities.

His public speaker biography also identifies charitable work through the Golden Age Foundation. Put alongside Ocean and the discussion series, that work adds another dimension to his public life. The executive title explains his role at SCC. It leaves room for a reader, a presenter and a supporter of projects beyond the company.

Still there when the users arrive

In April 2026, Hakim helped welcome attendees to the annual SNUG user conference, alongside its president, Becky Schran. The gathering included more than 60 sessions, customer presentations and opportunities to talk with SCC staff. Forty-seven years after the company began, its founder was still appearing where its users assembled.

The conference had the familiar apparatus of an established business: workshops, product sessions, a town hall and receptions. That is a considerable journey from a room in Queens. It also makes the original arrangement easier to appreciate. The tasks Hakim once performed himself now support an entire programme of people comparing experiences and asking for improvements.

Other responsibilities have accumulated too. In 2024, his signature appeared on SCC’s carbon-reduction plan and its statement against slavery and human trafficking. These documents belong to the less photogenic side of running a company. Longevity means inheriting obligations as well as collecting anniversaries. There is paperwork after the ribbon cutting.

Hakim’s career now contains a software company, a religious reading library and a continuing place in public discussion. The first venture started small enough for its founder to know every job personally. Ocean offers another kind of proximity, bringing a reader closer to a text. Both leave him involved with the practical business of helping somebody get from a question to the material they need. The living room has long since been outgrown. The work continues.