Companies That Inspired You
on 11.11.04, 04:28am in life • comments (2)
I’ve been a computer ‘geek’ for as long as I can remember. Even in 5th grade (I’m 33 now, so that was a LONG time ago), I was in ‘advanced’ computer classes (hey, we got to play Oregon Trail). Growing up there were some great software companies for the Apple ][ and Commodore 64 that captured my imagination, and probably led me to the life I lead today. Remember them? Here are mine:
Beagle Bros Software. These guys were the first software guys I remember being ‘cool’. Check out Steven Frank’s Beagle Bros Online Museum. I personally remember their disk icons: Check them out. To this day, they still crack me up.
Mike J Henry. For the life of me, but I can’t remember the company, but I remember the software: Fast Hack’em. The meanest, cleanest and best way to duplicate a disk on a Commodore 1541 disk drive. Funny thing is, I remember a couple of friends and I actually called the company he worked for and asked for him, and he talked to us.
Have any personal favorites?
bruce (November 11, 2004 @ 4:33 pm)
Hi Steve,
i’m reading your book pocket pc network programming, in particular i’m following your code in chapter 8, however when i tried your SIMMgr to get IMSI number(by uncommenting your code)
…
DWORD dwIMSIAddress = 0×06F07;
…
// alloc buffer
hr=SimReadRecord(m_hSIM,dwIMSIAddress,srInfo.dwRecordType,0,lpIMSIBuffer,1024,dwBytesRead);
wsprintf(tchInfo,LIMSI: %S,lpIMSIBuffer);
…
// freebuffer
however when i tried it on my PDA(O2 XDA), it shows somethings doesn’t look like IMSI, have you tried your code on any Phone Edition?
Regards,
Bruce
Jim (November 16, 2004 @ 3:25 pm)
Beagle Bros brings back lots of good memories and they did have the coolest packaging. I was working for a retail software store in those days and was always urging the guy who placed orders to stock more Beagle Bros. I don’t remember if they were great sellers (I suspect not), but I had a their entire library.
Other software (and at least one piece of hardware) that inspired my life-long love of computers:
- Commodore Vic 20 purchased at a local grocery (talk about making computers available for the masses). That was my first introduction to computers. It was tiny and couldn’t really do anything, but my friend came over and showed me the basics of programming. I thought that was really cool that you could program this device to do all sorts of different tasks — do a math calculation, move a dot on th screen, act like a typewriter. Next thing I knew, I wanted a better storage device, more memory, some way to print — I was off and running and still am today.
- Franklin Ace — I yearned for a real Apple II, but couldn’t afford it. Got a Franklin Ace, which was more expandable, had 80 character screen, but wasn’t really 100% compatible (thank God compatibility issues have pretty much gone away these days). Hurray for clone innovators like Franklin and Compaq!
Borland Pascal — $50 for a programming language. What a deal! And everybody loved their PIM Sidekick.
- Quarterdeck — They made memory managers that let you run multiple DOS programs at the same time. Didn’t always work, but very cool and hinted at what multi-tasking would be like on PCs someday.
- GEM from Digital Research — Graphical windows before there was Windows.