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The DesignWare History Thread

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Welcome to The DesignWare History Thread.

For the purposes of an interview I’m giving this week, I’m going to write here about the threads of my life “from the vantage point of my company DesignWare from 1980 through 1986.” It’ll be a lot about me. Can’t avoid that, because that’s how humans experience the world. We have our own eyes and ears, and cannot be inside the heads of others. But it’ll also be relational because everything I’ve done was with other people. You could think of this as a segment of an autobiography maybe. So let’s go… [Read more…]

DesignWare’s Legacy

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Chapter 7 of 7 in the DesignWare history thread.

In late 1984, MSA announced it would divest or shut down Peachtree Software, as well as DesignWare, Eduware and Blue Chip Software. The announcement was made 38 days after the acquisition of DesignWare. Our consumer advertising said “One Tough Speller.” Well we were one tough something-or-other to survive all of this.

In that initial acquisition by MSA, our investors came out OK. I think one investor lost a small amount, and most of them did as well in this investment as they would have in the stock market at that time. Pat McGovern, Chairman of IDG Group, had invested in DesignWare early that year in a last round, and several times after all this transpired, he reminded me that we had done a good job preserving not only their investment, but that of the others. I was relieved, more than happy. In those days it was said that maybe 1 in 10 venture investments might come out very well, with the majority of them fading to zero, and the others just kind of piddling along. [Read more…]

Becoming an Integrated Developer-Publisher

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Chapter 6 of 7 in the DesignWare history thread.

By 1983 we were publishing and shipping titles under the DesignWare label. A very different proposition from just working with other publishers. Previously we had to sell the publisher on the idea of a particular title or game. Then the publisher would take on the risk at that point. Now we had to be sure we weren’t deluding ourselves by developing something that might not sell. And we now had to manufacture the floppies, eventually the CDs, on which the software would be shipped. [Read more…]

Building a DesignWare Team and Becoming a Corporate Author

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Chapter 5 of 7 in the DesignWare history thread.

OK, so I had the basic idea of a computer interacting with a human, and discovered that programmed instruction had been tried, and computer-based education was new (PLATO) and decided to build a software language that could transcend proprietary computer hardware through computer-science linguistic tricks. I build LINGO, and MultiTutor, and then the Courseware Design System. [Read more…]

DesignWare’s Founding

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Chapter 4 of 7 in the DesignWare history thread.

In 1976 I was doing my thing to advance online medical education. Using minicomputers and video terminals at Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. And creating my CDS system which made it possible to run the same courseware on many types of computers using many different computer languages.

A couple of years later when I was leading the very small office of WICAT in San Francisco, I was introduced to the world of personal computers. I don’t know whether it was 1978, or 1979, or even 1980, but I heard about Apple, cold-called them, and they said “You have to talk to Steve.” I didn’t know Apple, and I didn’t know who Steve was. I found out.

We know now the importance of that initial Apple computer. [Read more…]