- HESware
HESware (from "Human Engineered Software") was an American
home computer software and hardware developer/publisher during the 1980s, who concentrated on theCommodore 64 . The company was located inBrisbane, California . Published titles included numerous games as well as educational and productivity programs. Among them were "Project Space Station ", "Mr. TNT ",Turtle Graphics byDavid Malmberg , severalJeff Minter games (Llamasoft), such as "Attack of the Mutant Camels ", "Hes Games ", andHesMon ,Graphics BASIC ,64Forth (a cartridge-based Forth implementation), and theHesModem andHesModem II . At one point, HESware was the largest single-source supplier of software for the Commodore 64.The company was started as HES by
Jay Balakrishnan andCy Shuster in 1980, in Jay's apartment inLos Angeles . Typical of his creativity, Jay took down the door to his bedroom, put it across two file cabinets, and used that as a desk for his development (winding the cables around the doorknob!). With incredible amounts of research into the PET ROM, Jay wrote the first8K 6502 Assembler ,HESbal (HES Basic Assembler Language ) inBASIC , and an accompanying text editor, HESedit . Having HESbal allowed numerous creative follow-on products, such asHEScom , software and a userport cable that allowedVIC20 programs to be saved to a PET hard disk (since the first VIC20 didn't have a hard disk). Cy soldered the HEScom cables in his garage and wrote HESlister, a print utility for BASIC programs, that he ported from aTRS-80 Model I to the PET, to the VIC, and later to theIBM PC.Game writers
Lawrence Holland andRon Gilbert , later to be famous for their work atLucasArts , started their careers at HESware.In October 1984 HESware was acquired by
Avant Guard Publishing Corp. and thus, already in deep financial troubles, avoided having to declarebankruptcy .
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