This was our address for Citrix between 1990 (?) to 1997. In 1997 we moved to a building off of Cypress Creek in Ft. Lauderdale.
Why did we have an office in Coral Springs? Well, the rumor was that Ed Iacobucci lived in Coral Springs and being that he was the founder it made sense to have the business in Coral Springs. For those of you not familiar with the location of Coral Springs, let me fill you in. It is way out west of the south eastern part of Florida. From a map, it probably would not look too far out compared to the west coast of Florida. It didn’t make it any easier to get their from locations closer to the coast.
As you probably already know, Citrix started in Florida because IBM had a major site in Boca Raton, Florida. Many of the people, including me, came from IBM Boca (as it was called). Boca Raton is probably about 30 minutes drive from Coral Springs. I supposed it wasn’t that far really.
The building we were in was called the upside down building. It looked a little bit like an upside down pyramid. Black glass surrounded the building and it did look very modern (and a bit sinister). It had at least 8 floors and Citrix had all of the seventh floor (If I remember correctly). Even in the early days, it was fairly crowded. As we grew, it became nearly impossible to find places for people.
We used to get quite a few storms out in Coral Springs. Two things I remember about this. One time I watched as a tornado crossed the horizon. It was probably about 10 miles away but up until that point I wasn’t even sure this part of Florida got tornadoes. The second things is that one time the building got hit by lightning. It wasn’t at first obvious since the noise was weird but then we saw smoke drifting away from the top of the building (from within the building).
There are lots of bits and pieces I remember about working there. We had a mixture of cubicles and offices. I was in a cubicle but was fortunate to get a really good window view. People in the offices were usually original Citrites.
We used to go out to lunch quite often. That was one thing Coral Springs did very well. You could go to a different lunch place for a couple of months. Lunch was when we used to talk in detail about what was currently going on.
Okay, so there probably isn’t much point in this post. Perhaps someone will be curious about the early office location.
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Jeff, thanks for the posts on Citrix History! So few people from those days are still around, it’s great to get first hand accounts.
Good post, Jeff. Interesting to read about Citrix history — some of which I witnessed, some of which I didn’t.
The “upside-down” building is called that because the higher floors are larger than the lower ones. There are columns on the sides to support the overhanging ends of the upper floors. The building still exists, on the west side of University Drive, a couple blocks south of Atlantic Blvd. I’d post a link to a picture of it, but I can’t find one.
Some records that I’ve found confirm that Citrix’s mailing address was once suite 700 of this building. I think it has nine floors in all.
Wow! I still have fond memories of that building.
When I started there (Nov. 1996) my desk was right in the entrance to the main engineering desks, almost, but not quite in the hallway. It was also memorable for have only two out of four legs. The other two sides were held up by a couple of red bricks. Apparently, the desk didn’t quite fit through the door, so someone sawed off the legs of the desk.
I also remember the network consisted of cat5 cable strung through the drop ceiling and literally hanging down from the ceiling. If you needed another cable point, you just got on your desk and pulled the cable through and down.
Not only does the building still exist, but it is now owned by citrix co-founder Randy Wood … he claims his first act as owner was to fire our old land lady đŸ˜‰
Actually, we had 3 floors, at least 1994 and beyond. 4th floor (I think) was a HUGE storage area – nothing but empty boxes and junk! and then the sales folks were on I think on 9th?
Tony,
I had forgotten about the storage floor. It’s true that it mostly had junk and boxes. I remember going there once or twice to help carry some boxes down there.
There was some kind of agreement that we could only use the space for storage and not for people. Someone had joked that we could start putting people down there as long as the boxes formed parts of the furniture. Makes me think of “Office Space” when the guy gets sent to the basement.
As for the sales people, I don’t remember that. It does make sense since sales people always like being higher :).
yeah – they were on like the 9th.
ScottK was up there, Michelle was up there.
Weren’t the meetings up there too, for what to work on because it had (sales) opportunity?
I remember quite a few times, setting up WinView setups with kernel debugging, so you could step through code.
Man…the old days….
Tony
Jeffrey? Do you know anything about CTX before it was Citrix? My boyfriend bought a small amount of insurance stock in North Carolina in 1963, the name changed and we have a letter from 1971 stating that they purchased 12,000 acres in Florida and that their new stock symbol was CTX. (1971 is when Nasdaq started.) We are still trying to find out more info to see if the stock is worth anything. Any help would be appreciated? Coral Springs has come up in our research and it may have been part of the area that CTX purchased (which used to be an old phosphate company). One of the plans was to pay for a new portion of the University to be built there. That’s about what I know. Armer E. White was the one who signed the letter.
Citrix went public in 1995 as CTXS. It has not been involved in any of the things you have described. I could not find any mention of CTX but I did find some information on “Armer E. White”. He owned a real estate business in Florida. He was born in 1913 and died in 2003. His company name was his name as well (“Armer E. White Inc”). If you search on his name you will find similar things. He appears to have moved around a bit and was reported to have died in Leon county, Florida.