Media Piracy - Some Thoughts from Someone Who Creates Stuff

[MineralMan]

7. My apps are already out there for the taking.

The source code is gone. I'm an eclectic coder, and anyone but me would find getting a handle on my code very difficult, to say the least. Everything was done in Visual Basic, through version 3.0. Once Microsoft changed VB to be more Pascal-like, I was at the end of dealing with those applications, and did not bother making the transition and changing the VB source material into the more structured version of VB.

I'm a self-taught programmer, and made much use of global, undeclared variables. For me, it wasn't an issue, since I could carry the entire list of dozens of variables and arrays in my head during coding sessions as I worked. For anyone else, it would be virtually impossible, because the structure evolved as I went. There were dozens of variable arrays, as well, for some of the applications, and versioning was done additively in data files, so maintaining backward compatibility as updates were released involved some creative interpretation of older data files. Very oddball stuff. My error-handling strategies, too, were unique to my programming style. The programs were virtually bug-free in their later versions, and error handling was done in a way that always failed safe, but would be hard to interpret for anyone but myself.

Most people would call my programming style very odd, but it worked very well. VB, through version 3.0 allowed a lot of maneuvering and required some tricks to do things, like displaying and printing graphics. Microsoft, in its questionable wisdom, made those things difficult. I actually created some extensions for graphics scaling and printing that I released into the public domain so that other VB programmers could make use of them. Microsoft finally built functions into VB to do those things, following my reviews of VB in PC World, where I called them out for intentionally limiting VB's graphics handling capabilities. They finally fixed that in VB 4.0.

So, no, I won't be releasing that material, even if it still existed. The old 3.5" floppies that were the backups for it are now unreadable, and I have no interest in dealing with it any longer. It would be useless as open-source software, since VB was changed so dramatically in version 4.0.

Besides, the entire genre has moved on far beyond what I was doing at the time. I started programming at at time when there were many unfilled holes in software functionality, and did most of it to fill needs I discovered, and then expanded my personal stuff into viable shareware applications. Things like creating business cards to print on the newly available sheets of pre-scored business card stock, and an application for label printing that could print anything, including graphics and bar codes on any Avery label product, including a database system to print address labels, instead of using the clumsy mail-merge features in that period's software. To do that, I had to actually create a bar code TrueType font. Another program, Prompter, a Windows-based program for public speakers and television prompters, required the creation a mirror image font and a dictionary-style pronuciation accent font and figuring out a method to display reversed type in Windows. How I did that involved some serious trickery and fancy string array handling. When Microsoft didn't include a useful font management tool in Windows, I created Fonter, which did all the things Microsoft should have done in the first place. That was probably my most popular piece of software, overall. I also wrote a free program, called OKFonts, that could test third-party TTF fonts for errors that crashed Windows, since Microsoft didn't bother to fail-safe its API for defective TTF fonts, which were a real problem and caused hard crashes for Windows. For three years, Microsoft referred its customers to that utility, which was hosted on their servers in their Knowledge Base to deal with people who had problems with corrupt fonts.

My relationship with Microsoft was always one of conflict. As a software reviewer, I frequently called Microsoft to account for issues and missing features with its applications in my reviews. Those generally were corrected in the next version. Occasionally, I'd write VBA routines to implement features in Microsoft Word that should have been included, and make them available to users, always sending a copy to Microsoft Product Managers with a pointed note that asked why such a simple thing had not been done by Microsoft. Those sometimes ended up in the Knowledge Base, too.

At one point, I created a functional parody of Microsoft Bob, called "Bubba," and released it into the public domain. It got international coverage in the press, and was an embarrassment to Microsoft. At one point, more copies of "Bubba" were installed than Microsoft Bob, including on Windows PCs on desks at the Microsoft Campus. That almost cost me my job with the magazine I most frequently wrote for, but I survived. Microsoft Bob did not. I frequently released freeware programs to make up for features that should have been, but were not, included in Windows.

It took Microsoft several versions of Windows before they came up with a useful file management module. So I wrote a freeware program called Filer, that included complete search tools, including searching within files for text, along with global tools for file deletion, file moving, and many other file system functions. Finally, Microsoft added My Computer, to provide some of those functions. It took me a month to create Filer, but I didn't try to sell it. It was just something that was needed, but that wasn't part of Windows.

I'm out of the software business now, and am no longer reviewing computer software. It's not my thing any longer. It was fun, back in the 1980s and 90s, to be sure. But it stopped being fun, so I stopped doing that. That was a long time ago, as computer stuff goes. It was an exciting time, and I got to be part of it. Now, I write content for small business websites, working with a very talented SEO specialist and web designer. I'm good at that, too, and it's a lot easier.