QModem allowed me to explore the wonderful world of BBSs before the Internet was a thing. Having access to BBSs gave me a leg up when I got to University and got access to the Internet. BBSs are what got me seriously interested in computers and helped me launch a career in software development.
Your Dad's legacy will be writing the software that opened doors for many of us when computers used to be a walled garden and talking to another person on a computer was still a foreign concept for the general population. Condolences on the loss of of your father but hopefully you can take comfort in the fact his legacy made the world a better place for PC users.
I had the opposite experience. I actually left the industry and then suffered a workplace injury in the new job(PTSD). Trust me when I say this, PTSD really messes you up. One of the biggest injuries was my brain's ability to logically reason.
So with lots of free time due to medical leave I got got back into coding. Picking it up after having not done it for some time was not too bad. After a while I was ready to start learning new stuff. As I got better at coding a lot of my PTSD symptoms started to subside. I had an easier time organizing my thoughts.
Eventually my PTSD symptoms subsided and I knew enough code to get a job writing code. So while yes, I have burned out on coding it was also the old friend that dug me out of the hole.
Spent hours back in the day getting my ass kicked playing this with my grandfather. It quite often got used as a chance to get some grandfatherly advice. The one lesson he taught me and has stuck with me:
"If you can't win. Make it hard for the other guy to win."
Anyone here old enough to remember from the BBS days when Phil Katz was embroiled in a legal dispute over his program PKARC and the ARC compression file format? At the time it was cast as a David and Goliath story (with Phil being David) when it was really just two small home based software developers fighting it out.
Long story short, Phil lost the arc dispute which is why I assume he moved onto the ZIP format. In the end, Phil Katz was taken from us too soon because his personal demons got the better of him.
Sure, I had a talk recently where I mentioned P.K. and opening the ZIP which made it the default compression format. And zip became a proper noun (aside zoning improvement plant, version, that's it)
>In the end, Phil Katz was taken...
Indeed, 37 -- it's almost a cautionary tale, nowadays.
Lost my mother to ALS. She was a nurse so she made a point to ask if there was a chance she passed it onto her kids and was assured no we are fine. It is a small consolation considering all she had to endure.
ALS is a horrible way to exit this earth. It is a death I would wish on no one
Oh you spoiled little children with your integrated development environment and in place editing. Real programmers used GW-Basic with consecutive line numbers.
Dr. Dobb's Dec 1994 had an article on writing HTML. I used it as a reference to write my first homepage (remember when homepages were a thing?) in Dec. 1994 on the computer science club's server. It was my first introduction to the inner workings of the web. Fun times.
Yup. Back around the same time, the local newspaper found my homepage and wanted to interview me about it. I waxed poetically about how the web was the ultimate enabler, bringing big and small publishers back to the same level and allowing anybody to be heard. Sounded great at the time, but I'm more and more afraid that pipe dream of my young adult self is long gone now, along with much of my hair.
Your Dad's legacy will be writing the software that opened doors for many of us when computers used to be a walled garden and talking to another person on a computer was still a foreign concept for the general population. Condolences on the loss of of your father but hopefully you can take comfort in the fact his legacy made the world a better place for PC users.
Just wanted to add, found this YouTube video of your father launching QModem on an old PC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs7XZs6jOhc
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