Back when I was trying to figure out this whole technology stuff, The Great Migration happened. For me, that was the migration from a mainframe you had to drive (or, in my case, take the bus) to see and use to a computer you could just go to your room to use. And my first computer (before the TI, before the CoCo, before the C64, before all the rest) was an Apple ][.
Now this is not the time to rhapsodize nostalgic for the Apple ][ per se. But the environment around that computer encouraged hobbyists, students — and it encouraged fun. And one of the leading fun-makers was a software company called Beagle Bros.
They were weird. They were fun. They were whimsical. They’d put code snippets or bits of hexadecimal in their ads that would reveal funny lines, or a previously unknown feature in the computer’s code. Their whole purpose seemed like it was to enable hobbyists to dig ever deeper into the machine and get ever more out.
Take, for instance, their Apple Mechanic software. With it, I could create my own shape tables to use in my little hobby games. I could make ‘em look like they were professionally done. And this was in 1982!
Who else (before Clarus the dogcow) could teach you how to make your computer moo? (CALL 985, by the way.) Who else released so much professional software that was unprotected with code listings available, so you could see how it was done and try it yourself? Who else ran their own comic strip in their catalogs?
And perhaps most tellingly, who else had a software company (now gone) that inspired its own online museum? There aren’t many. And few had as much an impact on an entire generation of today’s programmers.
Perhaps it’s nostalgia, but Beagle Bros was ahead of its time in creating and putting forth a culture that engaged its customers (contests, for instance), respected them (no copy-protection, just a request not to pirate), and supported them (the PEEKs & POKEs poster alone was huge support). Many a company today could take a page from their playbook.