For those of you who didn't notice, Fastgraph turns 10 years old today. Diana, who has been awfully quiet lately, has a few words to say on the subject.

A Decade of Excellence

And that's the kind of subtlety that is required when marketing a product like Fastgraph. You can't scream "decade of excellence" at people. You have to talk to them like intelligent human beings. You have to chat with them and email them and get to know them. Okay, I haven't been doing very much of that lately. I've been writing code. But I'm doing it now! So read on for some interesting stories, and I promise I won't say "decade of excellence" again.

Ten Years of Progress

Well, duh. Everybody had ten years of progress. Didn't you? We did. During the past 10 years, one child has grown up, and another one has joined our family. Ted and I have both gotten a little older and a little fatter. But all that belongs in our Christmas letter. Actually, I am writing two different stories here. One for people who just scan the headlines (which are starting to look pretty good!) and another one for people who actually read the copy (which is starting to wander).

Changes in the Software Industry

Okay, this is where it starts getting good. I'm going to reminisce about all the software products that were around when Fastgraph was launched in 1991, and where are they now. This will be fun, if you are the sort of person who likes to read about carnage in the software industry. Let's start with the basics. What was installed on a standard, government-issue computer during the late 80's and the very beginning of the 90's?

WordStar, dBase III and Lotus 1-2-3

I know this, because I was issued a standard government computer by Computer Sciences Corporation. That's where Ted and I were working when we first started thinking about Fastgraph. And those programs worked on an 80286 computer, known as an "AT". AT's ran at 10 megahertz and it didn't have hard disks. They used paper tape with little holes punched in it. And you had to stand in line for hours to use the punch machine. Okay, I'm lying. They did have hard disks. Often as much as 10 megabytes! And WordStar, dBase III and Lotus 1-2-3, would all fit on it with plenty of room left over for your data files. They were small, fast, and they worked great. And if you were clever, you could install a compiler on there as well. My favorite was Microsoft Fortran. It came on 3 floppy disks. It worked great. Everything worked great back then. Writing programs for this environment was a snap.

The Birth of the Internet

I don't know anything about the birth of the internet. Ted does. He was a system manager on a VAX cluster, which was, amazingly, connected to the Internet. From my understanding, the internet had existed for some time before Ted got there. It was called something else, though. Arpanet, I think it was.

At home, we had a computer with a modem. It was 1200 baud. We thought this was a big improvement over the 300 baud modem we had before. A modem, back then, connected to your serial port. It was approximately the size of a shoe box. Most of them had connectors that looked like they would fit in the parallel port. Plugging a modem into a parallel port was a common problem. People would complain all the time that their modem didn't work, when what they really needed was a little adapter plug that would convert the parallel-port-shaped cable connector into a serial-port-shaped cable connector. Okay, so the software back then worked just fine, but hardware manufacturers were a bit clueless.

Connecting to the World

Does anybody remember Dust Devil BBS? It sat on a desk in our living room for years. People from all over the world would call in and read messages, and download files and upload files. (Sharing files was a healthy group activity back then. You didn't rely on ZD-Net for file distribution, you shared your files like a good cyber citizen). Our BBS was powered by Clark Development's PCBoard software, which was small, fast, and worked well. Relatively speaking. Clark Development was a fine company, run by fine people. I wonder what happened to those guys.

Fastgraph/Light 2.0 for DOS, our first public release, was uploaded to the Dust Devil BBS on June 1, 1991. Good cyber citizens immediately downloaded it and uploaded it to other bulletin boards all over the world.

Crushing the Competition

Isn't that a good heading? But we never crushed any competitors. We had competitors, for a while. Most of them sort of faded away. I'm not going to mention names, because some of them are still around in one form or another, and I don't want to get into another debate about whether going open-source is the same as giving up. But there were some large companies who sold graphics libraries during the 1990's. Those guys bought big color ads in magazines, and booths at trade shows. We were the little guys. We bought tiny black-and-white ads in the back of Dr. Dobb's Journal, which cost about $200 at the time. We thought it was terribly extravagant.

Trade Show Presence

Do you want me to talk about how great CGDC used to be before Miller Freeman took it over and turned it into Comdex? For that matter, do you want me to talk about how great Comdex used to be? No, you don't want to hear about that. You want to hear about the airplanes.

One year, I think it was 1995, we took a booth at CGDC and passed out as a promotion, little balsa-wood airplanes that said "Fastgraph, 32-bits of Raw Power". I still have a few of them around here somewhere. They were a lot of fun. You could put them together, and they would fly a long way.

They are especially fun if you are in a large room with a lot of people, for example the CGDC closing banquet. Pass out handfuls under the table, and game developers will gladly put them together while waiting for their breaded chicken patty and vegetable medley. Within minutes, they were flying around the whole room. By the end of the evening, people were building massive mutated balsa wood airplanes. It was so much more entertaining than listening to that guy from Wired Magazine. I don't know if that guy ever recovered.

The Software Story

Not very many software products have survived over the 10 years since 1991. Shareware highlights back then were a database product from Buttonware called PC-File, and a word processor from Bob Wallace called PC-Write. (Is it true Bill Gates named his company after Bob Wallace's cat? I never received confirmation of that rumor, except it is true that Bob had a cat called "Microsoft".)

A really great product from that time period was a text editor called "Brief" by a company called "Underware" (Get it? Briefs? Underwear?). It was small, fast, and it worked great. I still use that editor, even though it hasn't been available for years. I once asked those Underware guys what it felt like to build, nurture, and release a product, and then sell it to Borland, who subsequently killed it. They told me it felt like "selling your daughter to the Tsar."

Games were dominated by 2-D side-scrollers, notably the Commander Keen games released by Apogee. They were small, fast, and they worked great. You can still find them, if you look for them. But the side- scroller genre has been largely replaced by 3D first-person shooters.

Derek Smart was working on a Battle Cruiser game.

One notable exception to the software product longevity cycle is AutoCAD. AutoCAD ran great back then. It would fit on a 286 with a 10 meg hard disk, and you could use it to draw pictures. You can still use it to draw pictures, but now you need more than 10 megabytes. Does anybody know why AutoCAD went from version 2 to version 9, skipping all the intervening versions? Another mystery.

Some Things Haven't Changed

Me, for example. Except for the older and slightly fatter part, I'm still doing pretty much what I was doing in 1991. I was a game developer back then, and I am a game developer now. I worked happily out of my home back then, and I still do now. I couldn't tell you what game I was working on back then, and I still can't tell you what game I am working on. Actually, I can give a few hints. I am doing analysis, simulation and design of slot machines for Bally Gaming. It's great. We are going to release some really great titles in the fall.

I was potty training a toddler back then. I'm potty training a toddler now.

Some Things Will Never Change

Ted, for example. Ted was one hell of a nice guy back then, and he's still one hell of a nice guy. He wrote perfectionist-level assembly language code back then, and he still does. Which brings us back to contrasts. How many software products have been under constant development for 10 years, and the code is not a mangled bowl of spaghetti? I don't know, I don't look at the code of most software products. But based on performance, I suspect some of them were written by, shall we say, "hired help". Not Fastgraph. Fastgraph source code is as pristine and poetic as the day we released it in 1991.

Fastgraph, when it was released, was small, fast, and it worked great. It still is, and it still does.

Looking Forward

I'm looking forward to more of the same. I really like the life we have here, the friends we have made, the products we have developed and the company we have built. I have a son who is 12, who shows promise. Maybe someday our company can add an "And Son" to our company name. But mostly, I don't want things to change very much.

I am reading a book right now by Robert Heinlein, in which he issued predictions in 1950 and revisited them 15 and 30 years later. He didn't predict the internet. Nobody did. At least not in the form and with the impact it has today. The internet was a sort of pleasant surprise, not really predicted by anybody. But some of Heinlein's predictions did come true. Things like the ability to grow artificial body parts in laboratories, for example. That was a good guess. And he also predicted telephones would be small enough to fit comfortably in a purse. Another good guess.

So I'll conclude this article by making a few predictions of my own. Hopefully we can revisit them in 10 years and see how many have come true. So here goes. I'll predict, in 2011, the following will be true:

• We'll still be here.
• The Internet will still be here.
• A lot of software companies will be born, develop great products, make a lot of money, and disappear.
• The internet will be faster, more global, and more useful than ever.
• Practically everything ever written down will appear somewhere on the internet. And you'll be able to find it, too.
• Live, full-motion video will be common and will be used for such things as telephone conversations.
• My son, at 22, will be in college, close to home. He will do very well at it. He will not spend a lot of time drinking and partying. He will study hard and get good grades, and then join the family business.
• My daughter, at 13, will find ways to drive me crazy.
• Microsoft will still be a presence. They will "design by committee" a number of products that will fail, and a couple of products that will be golden.
• Most families will have over 1000 television channels to choose from, and most of those will be showing reruns of "Law and Order".
• Humans will enjoy medical advances leading to increased longevity, but many will still die young because they are too stupid to take care of themselves.
• I will not be potty-training a toddler.
• Derek Smart will be working on a Battle Cruiser game.

An Amazing Offer from Ted Gruber Software.

So that's it. That's my take on the past 10 years, and my predictions for the next 10. If you have read this far, you are probably saying to yourself, 'What can I do to help Ted Gruber Software celebrate the 10th anniversary of Fastgraph?' Well, you could buy a copy. Or if you have a copy, you could buy another one. Or buy the source code. Or talk your boss into buying it. Just to sweeten the deal, I'm prepared to offer 10% off any Fastgraph purchase for the entire month of June. Just mention that you read this article, and say you really, really liked it.

Hope to hear from you! And here's to another 10 years of prosperity and joy for all of us. A tip of the virtual champaign goblet, and Happy Birthday, Fastgraph.

Diana Gruber