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What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

thecodist.com

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Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#11

Post by walshemj »

snorkel wrote: post #6

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.

I had to do a few releases on cassette tape for the PET now that was a hassle compared to the foibles of the various CBM disk drives.

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#12

Post by userbinator »

eps wrote: post #7

> 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 versio…

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.

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#13

Post by analog31 »

Codhisattva wrote: post #2

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

I sold a shareware title in the mid 90's. My distribution model was pretty darn simple: There was a place somewhere in Indiana with a printed catalog of shareware titles. I sent them a disk, and they added me to their catalog.

I decided not to charge for updates, as I figured that I was lucky enough to get any money at all.

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#14

Post by 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.

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#15

Post by doxcf434 »

snorkel wrote: post #6

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.

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

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#16

Post by 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/

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#17

Post by 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.

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#18

Post by leschaps »

Sanddancer wrote: post #9
Codhisattva wrote: post #2

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

I'd argue that the AppStore model is several steps backward from shareware, websites, etc. Yes, you get cheap updates, but you're once again beholden to the retailer in order to get your product noticed, it's harder to create apps that deal with social commentary, you've once again got to calculate in retailer overhead in determining a product price, etc. Hell, the bad old days let you include a catalog in with your…

The game has changed fundamentally for both producer and consumer, and the AppStore (powered by mobile device success) is the biggest winner in exploiting the change. The level of its success puts it in a position of influencing/controlling the underlying economics and has forced big changes to the business models of anyone seeking access to the market it provides. I can't really agree that it is worse than other market channels, since the market landscape is fundamentally different from a few years ago, but having been a producer and consumer of software products over a long period, I feel like it is a net loss for competitive (and quality) software development, and a soft win for consumers in some ways, but as you point out, the control and opportunity trade-offs on the production side relative to the bad old days are a pain, and may result in compromises for the consumer.

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#19

Post by cursork »

doxcf434 wrote: post #10

Demo of Trapeze by the author: http://archive.org/details/Business1987_3?start=660

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!

Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s

#20

Post by kabdib »

eps wrote: post #7

> 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 versio…

Shipping ROMs was the same deal. You wrote an OS, or a game, and tested the crap out of it. Then you sent out for mask ROMs and waited like six weeks for them to come back, and you hoped that they worked.

My office mate was told to make three versions of the game she worked on, each ORG'd at a different address so that manufacturing could pick whichever configuration was cheaper to make. Q/A was able to test two of those, but didn't have the special test cartridge needed to test the third, and guess which one had a fatal error and didn't boot? $250K of ROMs wound up in the dump (next to E.T., for all I know).

We wrote a boot ROM for a consumer computer. We were pretty sure it worked, but again we lacked some hardware and had to ship the final version out for mask ROMs without testing. They came back and worked. I told the hardware test manager what we'd done, and it was the first time I'd ever seen someone turn white.

Newton was the same deal (except that we had a way to patch the ROMs through a snazzy jump table system).

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