The Definitive History of Backwood Realm SystemsTimeline:19971996
| 1997 | 1998
|
"If you have any more
questions, then you have no business owning a computer." -Matt
Abel, in the "Mechanical Man Simulator" install program,
October 3, 1997 Wow, 1997. Thinking back to this year in BWRS
history, I think of the BBS in it's prime: Every night, at about 10:00
pm, I'd unplug the phones in the house so they wouldn't ring when the
BBS was being called. The Backwood Realm BBS operated from 11PM to 7AM
every day in the first several months of '97. I ran the doors LORD,
Planets: TEOS, among several others. 1997 was the first year I thought to actually
call my little operation something. I wouldn't have bothered, except
that I'd taken some interest in programming in BASIC. I had written my
first program in 3rd grade in the "computer room" at Lincoln
school. It was written on a Tandy TRS-80 in Tandy BASIC. It counted from
1 to 1,000,000 on the screen. Copied it from a book myself. Anyway, I thought that if I was gonna program
stuff, I'd have to have a company name. My buddy Matt Abel had been
calling his BBS the "Late-Nite BBS", and had labeled some of
his programs with "Late-Nite Systems". I suppose I was being a
copy cat, but I took the name of the BBS and slapped "Systems"
on the end...and the "official" entity of "Backwood Realm
Systems" was born. I began to experiment with basic, having very
little training, except what I picked up from Matt, who was in a
programming class in the Vocational Building next to my high school. I decided at one point in September '97 that I
wanted to write a game. I knew no graphics programming, but had picked
up a little bit of file I/O from Matt. I thought to myself that "if
I can write a game that can save data, it'll be a good one!". I set
out to write a door game called "Operation Redneck: Elimination of
the Freaks!". After I realized I didn't know enough programming
syntax and logic to write a random-selection fighting routine like in
the BBS door LORD, It was never finished. I continued thinking of
other things to write...and I suddenly came up with an idea. I really
liked the "Action word" feature in the Wildcat! BBS software, so
I decided to write a home PC version. On the bbs, while in chat, you could
type !Smile and it would print "Tim just smiled!". I liked it,
and knew I could make a BASIC program do it, so in one day, I managed to
collaborate w/ Lacy White on the phone to construct a set of action words
for my first full-featured software release on October 11, 1997:
Chatterbox 1.21. I'm not sure why it's 1.21 instead of 1.0...I guess
that's just the number I gave it. Check out the pics below! My second (and final) 1997 Project
was "The TALLman's DOS Enhancement package", which unzipped
several useful DOS tools into your computers \DOS or \WINDOWS\COMMAND
directory (folder for the layman.) The biggest reason it was posted here
in pictoral form is because of it's extremely funny credits screens. Read
them, and it'll probably give you a good picture of how I looked at life
at the time. |
