Ancient history #publishing #Softdisk

I already put this up on Facebook and thought, what the heck, I can put it up here too! I can go into a bit more backstory here on my author blog though. The below image was the first issue of “DiskWorld” Magazine On Disk™, the monthly software product that was launched by Softdisk Publishing back in, I think, April of 1986 or 1987. I had just gotten married and left a “secure” programming job (in COBOL) at a local bank when Al Vekovius, a local businessman and ex-professor at the local college (LSU-S) called me and said “I hear you do some Macintosh programming. How’d you like to write Mac programs and edit a monthly periodical?”

I said “Very much, thank you.”

And a few months later, after frantically learning everything I could about Mac programming, we launched the product. I worked there for almost a decade, and ended up as Publisher over all the products before I left for greener (the money kind of “greener”) pastures. But for those several years, I was totally in love with my job. On any given day I might be writing a program, writing an article, working with free-lance programmers submitting their own programs, drawing a cartoon, reviewing a software product or doing almost anything I wanted to.

During that time I probably wrote several dozen programs, ranging from puzzles and games to full fledged graphics programs that rivaled “MacPaint”. I once wrote a greeting card generating program back in the days of black and white dot-matrix printers and my wife still has one of those cards (with my own artwork) in with her keepsakes.

That was thirty years ago when all that started. Wow.