Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Ziff Davis Interactive, Liberty BASIC, and Bill Gates

Robert Gerami, a close friend of mine worked for Ziff Davis (the owner of PC Magazine) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He was in charge of their free downloadable utilities.  They were particularly well known for their whimsical screensavers, including one where a cartoon of Bill Gates would smash your Windows 3 desktop to reveal a shiny new Windows 95 desktop which would then be eaten by bugs before your eyes.

Robert liked what he saw in Liberty BASIC and decided to offer me a chance to have it featured on their web site as a special edition.  But, before he was willing to do this he want it to support making API calls.

The best part of this arrangement was that Ziff Davis would pay me to do the development, and that the resulting work would still be owned by me.

This is one of the important features of what became Liberty BASIC v2.0.  This was promoted by Ziff Davis Interactive on their website for several years.

1 comment:

Brad said...

I came to Liberty Basic at version 1.3 (or was it 1.4?). I still have the manual that the disc shipped with. I remember when LB 2.x came out. It was pretty awesome and the API (AKA DLL) feature was the cat's meow! Lots of great extensions were dreamed up that leveraged the DLL calls. Most notable was the SPRITE engine work that Alyce did. The community at that time was really awesome. Probably is today, but I don't spend much time there.