Linn Software, Inc. was founded in 1989 by
Dr. William E. Linn. Prior to forming the company, Dr. Linn was a senior executive in the computer software industry, serving as Senior Vice President of Research at Cullinet Software, Inc., a leading vendor of corporate database management systems software, now part of CA, Inc. Dr. Linn received his Ph.D. in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan in 1972. He has taught undergraduate computer science courses as an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
 
Chad L. Payne joined Linn Software in 1996 and serves today as Senior Software Engineer.  Chad received a Mechanical Engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology and an MBA from Georgia State University.  Chad has made significant contributions to the development and evolution of Investor/RT including key components Market Profile, Profile Indicator, and Volume Breakdown Indicator.  Chad is responsible for the production of many Investor/RT instructional videos.

The company's first investor software product, TickerWatcher®, was developed exclusively for Apple Macintosh® computers. In the early 1990's, TickerWatcher achieved a wide following. Before the advent of Internet-based data services, the company's software products were designed for use with cable and satellite broadcast data services such as Signal, BMI, and DTN. A news and stock-quote cable-based service called X*PRESS offered by an affiliate of Telecommunications, Inc. (now part of AT&T) adopted one of the company's products as its standard Macintosh client software in 1990 and distributed the product for more than five years.

In 1994, the company embarked on a major development effort to broaden its market by developing a cross-platform product for both Windows and Macintosh computers. Mark L. Tucker, working at Linn Software at this time, was instrumental in the design and implementation of this advanced market analysis product to meet the needs of sophisticated traders and active investors.

Introduced in 1996, Investor/RT® was the first product of its kind developed with cross-platform software engineering tools and a high performance cross-platform embedded database system. Investor/RT also incorporates a "data feed independent" architecture that has enabled the company to expand the market for its products and provide its clients great flexibility in the choice of data services to meet a wide range of trading requirements. Supported data services include DTN IQFEED, eSignal, Interactive Brokers, Zen-Fire, Rithmic, Transact Futures, Infinity Futures and Yahoo Finance.

Today, Linn Software products are in use every day by more than a thousand traders and active investors in more than 50 countries worldwide. Investor/RT is the only product of its kind having native implementations for both Windows and Macintosh platforms.