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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

#21

Post by webwielder »

cursork wrote: post #19
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!

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....

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

#22

Post by cursork »

webwielder wrote: post #21
cursork wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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... .

Yeah. Bad use of 'patent' maybe. Just interesting that the same arguments are provably going around and around.

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

#23

Post by derekp7 »

userbinator wrote: post #12
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…

Except back then, you had your app running on the machine all by itself. And there was no need for security -- if putting in a magic input string caused some weird behavior, well, "don't do that". Whereas today that would be considered a security bug (even if your app isn't directly used by non-trusted sources, it could be in a deep toolchain used by some other app).

Not to mention, that when you shipped for an Atari 800, or Vic 20, you only had to test against that -- not an Atari 800 with a Nvidia Graphics chip, vs. a Matrix chip, etc.

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

#24

Post by ghaff »

doxcf434 wrote: post #15
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.

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.

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

#26

Post by ghaff »

webwielder wrote: post #21
cursork wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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... .

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....

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

#27

Post by brazzy »

userbinator wrote: post #12
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…

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.

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

#28

Post by 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.

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

#30

Post by heleph »

joelanders wrote: post #17

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/SQLit…

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.

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