[HN Gopher] Life before the web - Running a Startup in the 1980'...
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       Life before the web - Running a Startup in the 1980's (2016)
        
       Author : gscott
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2025-05-17 09:07 UTC (13 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.zamzar.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.zamzar.com)
        
       | wlindley wrote:
       | My company "Lindley Systems" did all this from 1980 (when I was
       | 14) until the mid 90s, in the Heathkit (later Heath/Zenith)
       | arena. I still have master diskettes and original manuals ready
       | for taking to the Xerox shop, and only a few years ago tossed
       | boxes full of registration cards (with 13 cent stamps on them).
       | 
       | We made the transition from Heathkit HDOS to CP/M and MS-DOS but
       | never shipped a product for MS Windows. We almost had a product
       | ready in 1996 but then MS "upgraded" VB 3 to VB 4 and we started
       | a rewrite, almost completed just in time for the "upgrade" to VB
       | 5 - by which time our market had moved on.
       | 
       | It was a fun time to build custom and specialized hardware and
       | software.
        
         | TMWNN wrote:
         | > We made the transition from Heathkit HDOS to CP/M
         | 
         | A very unusual case of a company explicitly deprecating its own
         | proprietary OS, and shifting to an external standard, _on the
         | same hardware_. Tandy giving existing Model 16 customers Xenix
         | and shipping it with new units is the only other case I can
         | think of offhand.
         | 
         | What do you think of this 1983 ACM paper comparing HDOS and
         | CP/M? <http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/360000/358070/p188-pechu
         | ra.p...>
        
       | saulpw wrote:
       | > We couldn't reach potential customers directly (there was no
       | web), so we had to groom editors of computer magazines and feed
       | information to them, hoping they would print it in their
       | magazines.
       | 
       | Editors of computer magazines were the "influencers" in the '80s.
        
       | jcmontx wrote:
       | What a great read. I've lived all of my professional life (2014-)
       | shipping productive code by just pushing to repos or specific
       | branches. I avoid getting into mobile app development due to what
       | a pain it is to get to the stores and stay compliant with ever-
       | changing policies. I can't even imagine what was like delivering
       | software in a cartridge or CD without a chance to update
       | afterwards. It feels like such a titanic endeavor
        
       | anonzzzies wrote:
       | We built and shipped educational software to schools in the 80s
       | and 90s; starting with homecomputers and pcs and later on (of
       | course) only pcs. Good times sending stacks of disks off with the
       | postal service. We also, starting late 80s (running on an msx2),
       | had a BBS which was written by me so it had the
       | licensing/logistics/accounting in there; barely anyone used it
       | for getting their software, but we used it ourselves for mostly
       | everything.
       | 
       | Good times; not having to worry about library versions/updates
       | was nice actually. Besides turbo Pascal (later delphi), we had no
       | 3rdparty dependencies up until we sold the company.
        
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       (page generated 2025-05-17 23:01 UTC)