Mark Mcdonough

Vocation

Family

American astrologer and entrepreneur, the designer of AstroDatabank and founder of the AstroDB company. He has studied astrology off and on since he was 13 years old. He wrote his first astrology software at Vassar college on an IBM 360 mainframe with 32K of memory in 1976 while majoring in "Relating Eastern Spirituality to Western Profane Consciousness." In 1982 he matriculated at MIT's Sloan School of business. While studying for his MBA, he became so excited about an interface for making databases powerful and easy to use that he started a company to make one. He sold the product to the world's largest supplier of microcomputer databases and it was sold around the world in 11 languages. He began his most earnest foray into astrology at the end of his training as a Marriage and Family therapist. To aid himself in studying astrology, he hand entered all of the planetary positions of his friends into a database to create sorted lists of planets by sign and house. His logical mind was frustrated by the plethora of conflicting astrological techniques. He longed for a tool that would make it easy to resolve the competing claims made by equally eminent astrologers. He went to ISAR's "Computers and Astrology" conference in July 1996 to find such software and contact Lois Rodden to pick up some accurate data for doing research. While at the conference, he realized that his knowledge of databases and astrology, plus access to capital put him in a unique position to make a contribution to the field of astrology. McDonough and Rodden formed a tentative partnership which became a full-time occupation six months later. McDonough designed the software for the AstroDatabank and is President of the AstroDatabank company, which builds and sells the Rodden collection. The company is dedicated to building "software to create better astrologers" and tools to help astrologers resolve which techniques work more consistently than others. In 2005, he sold the company to Richard Smoot, who, in 2008, sold it to Astrodienst. McDonough has been married and divorced, and has a daughter, Lillie, whom he adores.