Charlie Crystle is a Pennsylvania businessman and philanthropist from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

Lancaster County, known as the Garden Spot of America or Pennsylvania Dutch Country, is a county located in the southeastern part of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, in the United States. As of 2010 the population was 519,445. Lancaster County forms the Lancaster Metropolitan Statistical Area, the...

.

He founded the software company Chili!Soft in 1996 and raised startup capital from venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetsen of Palo Alto, CA. Chili!Soft was purchased by Cobalt Networks

Cobalt Networks

Cobalt Networks was a maker of low-cost Linux-based servers. Founded in 1996 in Mountain View, California under the name Cobalt Microserver, the company pioneered easy-to-use server appliances featuring secure web user interfaces, designed for Internet service providers and small to medium sized...

 for $70 million when Crystle was 32 years old. He used the proceeds to fund several non-profit organizations and projects. The software is now incorporated into Sun Microsystems's

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

 Sun Java System Web Server. He has been described as a "software wunderkind."

He entered the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate

United States Senate election in Pennsylvania, 2004

The 2004 United States Senate election in Pennsylvania was held on November 2, 2004. Incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Arlen Specter won re-election to a fifth term.-Campaign:...

 in an attempt to unseat Arlen Specter

Arlen Specter

Arlen Specter is a former United States Senator from Pennsylvania. Specter is a Democrat, but was a Republican from 1965 until switching to the Democratic Party in 2009...

. Interest in his candidacy the race was stoked when he told the Associated Press

Associated Press

The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...

that he would consider spending $1 million of his own money on the race. He planned to run as a "business consultant" and "tech-savvy visionary."