

What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s - nih
http://thecodist.com/article/what_writing_and_selling_software_was_like_in_the_80_39_s

======
bsenftner
I had a game company in '82 for Commodore VIC-20 and C-64 home computers. We
sold our games on cassette tape, had to contract printers for the cassette
labels and the package sleeves, and then myself and my partner heat sealed
each one by hand. One of our games had a memory issue, as the memory was re-
organized between two manufacturing runs of the VIC-20, so we printed the
series of PEEKS and POOKS necessary to get the game to run after loading in
our magazine ads - and it did not appear to impact sales. Made some money, but
being "dumb kids" (17 years old) we went bankrupt. That experience gave me
focus during my undergrad.

~~~
hyp0
That sounds way professional!

ZX81 game programmer here. A game shop said they'd stock it, but I was too
exhausted from finishing the game to deal with the "business side" of
arranging duplicating tapes, professional labels etc. (I didn't realize you
could just do them one-by-one, by hand. Start small.) But it did get me a
programming job at a games company (the interviewer later told me he didn't
think a game that good was even possible on a ZX81).

Business side is important. Good to learn at 15.

------
moconnor
I can really recommend Jordan Mechner's Karateka and Prince of Persia journals
for a look into game development in the 80s.

Every time I read one I come away energized with the same passion for creating
something unique.

Edit for link:
[http://jordanmechner.com/ebook/](http://jordanmechner.com/ebook/)

~~~
fractallyte
Two more game development diaries, from Andrew Braybrook (the 'Carmack' of
that time!), who wrote Paradroid and Morpheus for the C64:

[http://www.zzap64.co.uk/zzap3/para_birth01.html](http://www.zzap64.co.uk/zzap3/para_birth01.html)

[http://www.zzap64.co.uk/mentalprocre.html](http://www.zzap64.co.uk/mentalprocre.html)

------
dchichkov
I think it was easier at that time to get a good, pretty complete picture of
underlying hardware and software. A kid could do that. Many of us did :-P. It
was an incomplete picture, because it was not including, say, algorithms used
in BIOS/OS. Or, say physics of the underlying semiconductor technology. But
from the engineering standpoint, yes. It was a full picture. Think this way, a
complete IBM PC manual was a very readable, pretty thin book which included a
complete description of 8086 processor, hardware and APIs (BIOS). And K&R was
another pretty thin book, which gave enough to start hacking away and get you
pretty close to the point when you could develop code that is genuinely useful
to someone! And with that comes an opportunity to start actually selling that
genuinely useful software (and hardware).

I think now, it is maybe easier to get started writing something, but it is
incredibly difficult, if not impossible to get the complete picture. Many
components are designed using technologies that require PhD level
understanding - basically being current with modern research in computer
science. And that comes with a very heavy baggage of scientific notation and
ability to work with research papers. Definitely not approachable by 8-year-
olds :-/ And I'm not sure if one just can be a good engineer without having
that kind of understanding of underlying technologies. Sorry kids :(

------
doxcf434
Demo of Trapeze by the author:
[http://archive.org/details/Business1987_3?start=660](http://archive.org/details/Business1987_3?start=660)

~~~
cursork
Possibly more interesting... start the video from the beginning and they're
talking about software patents. The same points were being brought up then as
now.

But yes. Good video! Cheers!

~~~
webwielder
I think they're actually talking about copyright. Apple famously lost a big
copyright infringement "look and feel" case against Microsoft, partially on
the grounds that software can't be copyrighted. This was one of the catalysts
for the switch to patents as a means of defending software novelty.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer%2C_Inc._v._Micro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer%2C_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp).

~~~
ghaff
Another interesting case during roughly the same period was Lotus vs. Borland
in which, in this case, the court basically found that it was OK to imitate
another program's menu layout and contents.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_Int...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_Int'l,_Inc).

------
mgkimsal
My uncle was friends with some guys who set up a small game shop in Michigan
in... 1982? They had some text adventure games, and were branching out in to
video games for C64 at that time. They were called Aardvark Software in...
White Lake Township, I think. My dad and uncle took me out to meet them at
their 'office' \- a small house/shack with a whole mess of computers. I don't
remember much of the visit, but the idea that people could just sit around and
work on games was inspiring, as run down as the house was ;)

IIRC there was a cassette tape duplication machine, but that may just be a
foggy memory. I seem to remember a lot of cassettes in plastic baggies, and
there were some 5.25" floppy disks in baggies as well.

Right around that time they put out 'Pacacuda', a PacMan variation with a
barracuda/fish angle. My uncle was angling to have them call it 'Fish Lips',
but they stuck with Pacacuda.

Not sure what happened to them after that.

------
eps
> _Now in those days when you almost never sent out patch disks; generally you
> had to wait 6-8 months to ship a new version and you had to charge the
> customer for the update. Trapeze only needed one floppy but Deltagraph
> shipped on something like 10 disks. Paying for hundreds of thousands of
> disks is expensive; add to that printing of manual updates and boxes and
> shipping and you never did this casually. So the version we sent to the
> duplicators had to be perfect and live for months. I was always the final
> arbiter of what shipped. Thankfully we never had an issue with either 4
> versions of Trapeze or the 5 of Deltagraph._
    
    
      We never had an issue (with a shipped version)
    

Damn, this is really impressive.

~~~
userbinator
Now imagine if this was not "really impressive", but the norm today. Things
would be so much better if we'd no longer need constant patches-upon-patches
to fix what _should 've been fixed before release_ (while sometimes
introducing _new_ bugs), and users would spend more time doing useful work
with the software instead of fighting it.

As the article notes, this is all possible with a minimal of tools and
resources, so I think it's all a matter of mentality. Today we have access to
so much information and tools, machines that are several orders of magnitude
more powerful, huge bureaucracies of development practices for assuring
quality, "safer" programming languages, and yet... it feels to me like
software quality today hasn't really improved much if at all.

~~~
brazzy
No. Errors in production have become more common because they have become
_much_ more tolerable (cheaper and faster to fix), and (apart from the
massively increased feature scope and complexity of the environment)
tolerating errors (that are soon fixed) gets you more features and shorter
time-to-market.

Users value software that does more and is available _now_ more than software
that is perfect, but does less and comes out next year.

~~~
Joeri
Users value software that works. The driving forces behind featuritis have
very little to do with what users want.

~~~
seabee
Users come up with feature requests all the time. Featuritis is exactly what
the users ask for.

~~~
Someone
What users ask for is not necessarily what they want. A good designer listens
to what users say, but doesn't follow them to the letter.

('Twas the night before Christmas variation on this topic:
[http://www.daclarke.org/Humour/sware-
engr.html](http://www.daclarke.org/Humour/sware-engr.html))

------
rdl
I feel like I missed out on the personal computer marketplace of the 80s/90s
-- I had a Mac in 1990, but I got VMS and UNIX shells slightly before, so the
Mac was really just a terminal (and at one point, I actually replaced it with
a dumb terminal to do dialup since the screen was bigger, and then a 386
running 386BSD.

MUDs, stuff like XTrek, and the general requirement that things be non-
commercial (to fit within NSFnet guidelines) was really different from the
small-computer marketplace happening at the same time. There were definitely
commercial packages, but my only real contact with that kind of stuff was
commercial OS and vendor support contracts for big machines I had shared
accounts on (e.g. Sun support contracts, and some packages being harder to get
than others).

There was a period in the mid to late 1990s when it was an NT vs. Linux (well,
UNIX in general, but mostly Linux by then) question -- NT 3.51 and 4.0 became
viable. But, before that, the high-end timeshare world and the small-computer
world were totally separate.

~~~
blantonl
Don't forget the NT vs OS/2 wars.... that was far more brutal in those days.

~~~
yuhong
Ah, this MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics, and I do have bad
words against MS for it. Remember "Microsoft Munchkins" for example?

------
cordite
This reminds me of the book, The Masters Of Doom.

John Carmack, et al. Had to be quite creative on the programming side of
things.

------
snorkel
As far as selling the biggest difference between now and then was back then
software could only be shipped on floppy disks, so it was more like
manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping physical merchandise.

~~~
doxcf434
I do recall some companies having BBSs however where you could download
updates, and other utilities. This would be around 1987.

~~~
ghaff
Right. Although it wouldn't have been practical for software that filled
multiple floppies, by around the late eighties it was pretty normal to have
drivers and the like available through BBSs. I don't recall most companies
operating their own systems but this type of software was widely available
through private BBSs--whether totally legally or otherwise. (It did seem to
take a while for many companies to realize that they probably shouldn't make
it hard for their customers to obtain the software needed to use the product
they sold.)

Shareware was also widely available on BBSs by around that time although it
was also distributed on floppies at Computer shows and the like. When I had a
small shareware company starting in the mid-eighties the process of taking
orders was still very manual--most orders came by mail with a check and I sent
back a floppy (which I reproduced myself) in a mailer with or without hardcopy
docs depending upon if those had been ordered or not.

------
joelanders
When we talk about making programming accessible to kids (or anyone new to
it), I think of how selling and distributing software is different now than it
used to be. Webapps and app stores make it easy to reach thousands or millions
of customers, but what's the modern equivalent of a kid writing something in
BASIC (or VB) and selling a few copies to friends, parents, local businesses,
etc.?

Some kind of Ruby/Tk/SQLite bundle that produced a universal executable (say,
mac, win, lin) would be cool, I think.

~~~
heleph
I cut my teeth writing websites using PHP and MySQL, mostly around a computer
game I used to play. I got a few thousand hits in the first year and plenty of
nice email so I kept going with it and eventually studied software development
at uni and have spent the last 15 years working as a developer.

I actually knew a heap of kids around my age (I started at around 15) who I
met through my website who did the same thing and many of them also became
developers or designers too.

I don't know if the web is still as accessible as it was back then when you
could get free hosting somewhere like Geocities if you were just starting out,
but I think HTML and javascript are a really nice starting point because it's
fairly easy to cobble together something that works and you can get a fairly
long way just by trying to make whatever you built just that little bit
better. The web is also a good place to learn about the web, particularly
since in those days it was easy to view source on anything I saw that I didn't
know how to do myself.

------
mariuolo
Well, at least nerds had to get out of their basement back then;)

------
blantonl
I remember typing programs in by hand from magazines. At that time, debugging
meant tracking down your typing errors, not debugging actual code.

~~~
brusch64
the "64er" magazine (from Germany) even had checksum programs when typing in
programs by hand (one for Basic code and one for machine language).

So you could be pretty sure that your programs worked afterwards.

Nothing beat the feeling to type a program and then finding out that the game
sucked.

But in one of the magazines there was a drum computer for the C64, which was
pretty cool (forgot its name).

~~~
bierik
Yeah, I spent hours copying these programs to the computer. I remember one
huge machine program listing (I think it was for a graphics program) that had
a line with a wrong checksum printed. Without a correct checksum, you couldn't
go on typing. So I changed one of the hex values until the line passed... The
final program was kinda buggy but I never knew whether my change was
responsible for one of the bugs or not.

------
brassattax
[https://archive.org/details/1993-04-compute-
magazine](https://archive.org/details/1993-04-compute-magazine)

Page 159 is one of the later reviews. Interesting to see you couldn't search
for anything back then either without seeing ads for porn.

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marsucsb
I love hearing these kinds of stories. It makes me appreciate how much easier
it is to ship and build software nowadays.

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Codhisattva
Shareware was a great increment from the publisher model. And then of course,
AppStore is the real game changer.

~~~
ishansharma
I think internet was the real game changer. Once bandwidth got good enough for
downloading software, it got easier to sell and patch anything. I can't
imagine living 7-8 months without patches.

AppStore is definitely a step up, but it may be too crowded.

~~~
antjanus
I agree. Before any "AppStore", there were countless avenues to getting
software. Plus, software finally got online "profiles" so to speak that
allowed people to learn more about it before purchasing/downloading.

------
georgiecasey
windows 3.0 came out in 1990, not 1992

