THE SOFTWARE TOOLWORKS

Walt Bilofsky was never one to tread familiar ground. At high school, he caused a minor stir, when he hacked his maths teacher’s IBM 1620, swapping out the “program loaded” message for a “snarky” one. Studying at Cornell and MIT, he blossomed into a brilliant programmer, working at the Institute For Defense Analyses in Princeton before becoming a consultant. At the advent of the microcomputer age, he purchased and soldered together one of the first Heathkit H-89 8-bit computers and, facing a lack of software, decided to develop and port his own – including a fullscreen editor and a compiler. “Wanting to share the goodies, I called the Heath Company and asked if they were interested in marketing the programs. Their visionary answer was, ‘The computer comes with the BASIC language and an operating system, and that’s all the software anyone needs.’”

Undeterred, Walt advertised in the Heath computer hobbyist newsletter, BUSS. “Cheques started arriving in the mail and I was in the software business,” he tells us.” In June 1980, he advertised in Byte magazine, under the name The