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.
Showing posts with label pc magazine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pc magazine. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Monday, March 8, 2010
MIX C
Unlike today, in the 1980s most computer magazines like BYTE, Compute!, and PC Magazine had lots of articles about programming and programming languages. BASIC, Pascal, Prolog, Lisp, Forth, assembly language; you name it. In 1987 C was a very popular language and a good C programmer made good money so I decided that I should learn it.
I found an magazine ad for MIX C headlined "C for yourself". They had a very special deal called MIX C Works and this included the compiler, a split screen code editor, and a source level debugger for only $89.90. The ad claimed that the included book would make learning C easy. I paid for this software myself, and it was so exciting to open the package when it arrived in the mail. Nice new crisp books and disks. It all felt very professionally done. It was a great investment.
It was very exciting to dig into the C tutorial and use the editor and the source level debugger. This was really well written software and book was as good as the ad promised. C is a nice, small language and well written C is actually quite pretty to look at with those curly braces.
We had some simple applications in engineering that were perfect for learning a new language. Open a file, translate the information in some way and write it back out to a new file.
I found an magazine ad for MIX C headlined "C for yourself". They had a very special deal called MIX C Works and this included the compiler, a split screen code editor, and a source level debugger for only $89.90. The ad claimed that the included book would make learning C easy. I paid for this software myself, and it was so exciting to open the package when it arrived in the mail. Nice new crisp books and disks. It all felt very professionally done. It was a great investment.
It was very exciting to dig into the C tutorial and use the editor and the source level debugger. This was really well written software and book was as good as the ad promised. C is a nice, small language and well written C is actually quite pretty to look at with those curly braces.
We had some simple applications in engineering that were perfect for learning a new language. Open a file, translate the information in some way and write it back out to a new file.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
