Wow! First I'd just like to thank Dave for asking me to put something together for this web site. Really I'm kind of shocked and amazed, but like I said, thanks!
Looking back over the years I can only thank God for where I am today. I was born in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1967 and I've lived in the Boston area all my life. I'm very happily married to my wife Flor (a lovely Spanish lady) and with our two children Laurie and Melody. I have lots of great friends and I make my living doing what I wouldn't have dreamed of ten years ago.
It amazes me when I look back across my nearly twenty years of computer programming. My father is an electrical engineer and when I was about 12 years old, I spied an HP-67 programmable calculator on his desk, just flashing away performing some kind of calculation. I asked what it was doing, and he told me that I didn't want to know. I remember telling him that I really did want to know. I'm still impressed that he was willing to teach me to program his very expensive scientific instrument (I think those calculators ran about $1000 back in 1978).
Then computers just started popping up everywhere. I would hang around at the local Radio Shack and play with their TRS-80s, and go to other computer stores and write demos for their machines so they would let me hang around. It was great fun. I have very fond memories of machines like the Apple ][+, the Atari 800, the Commodore Vic-20, and about a million other machines. Back then the variety was staggering, and it made things a lot of fun too!
Most of the time, programming on these early machines was done in BASIC. There were many different versions of BASIC, but of course they were largely the same. I guess that my fondness for BASIC comes from all that swashbuckling I did in my youth. BASIC just has a wonderful simplicity and friendly lightheartedness about it. It doesn't intimidate like some other languages. BASIC is the people's language.
When I was in high school I had a wonderful opportunity to work with a local businessman developing software in BASIC on Apple and IBM computers for inventory management and for calculating payroll at the local cable television company. This was all great experience, but didn't make me any real money.
After high school I got a job at a local printed circuit factory as a computer controlled machining programmer trainee. In my spare time I wrote some software for the engineering and accounting departments. My boss decided I was more useful programming desktop computers and the rest was history. God smiled on me and I picked up Smalltalk, a powerful object oriented language that proved to be more useful to my career than I ever imagined, and very large and sophicated systems were built in that language while I was there.
When Windows finally hit it big in 1990, I eventually managed to order a copy for use at work. It was neat to be sure, but I was disappointed that it didn't come with a version of BASIC. Here was this cool new graphical interface, but no people's language for it. Even Visual BASIC was too expensive and too complicated.
This disappointment eventually inspired me to attempt my own version of BASIC for Windows, developed in Smalltalk. This started as a for-fun project, but eventually I decided to release it as shareware in summer of 1992. I decided to call it Liberty BASIC to give it a grass roots kind of feel. The philosophy behind Liberty BASIC's development has been keep it simple and easy to learn. I've added to it slowly because I don't want to overgrow it.
People have asked me what it's like to compete against Visual Basic, to which I answer that I don't compete with them, and that Liberty BASIC is meant to appeal to a different crowd who program mostly just for the fun of it. Here's to the hobbiest, the tinkerer, the learner!
The last couple of years have been very exciting as Liberty BASIC was nominated two years running in the Ziff Davis Shareware Awards, and McGraw Hill's excellent NRI Schools adopted Liberty BASIC to replace QBASIC in their computer programming course. Ziff Davis actually hired me on as a contractor to teach people Liberty BASIC programming on their ZD Net University web site. Imagine that!
At this point, Liberty BASIC is doing quite well. Interest is really picking up, other people are beginning to erect web sites about Liberty BASIC, and I'm just having a great time of it.
Three cheers for BASIC! Hip-hip hooray! Hip-hip hooray! Hip-hip hooray!