Dilwyn Jones Computing

A POTTED HISTORY OF MY COMPANY AND I!

My involvement with Sinclair computers goes back to the very early days when I wrote some books on programming the ZX81/TS1000 and Spectrum/TS2068.

After writing a great deal of BASIC programs in the first few years of the QL, | eventually wrote what were my first large programs, Page Designer 2, which was published by Sector Software after I met David Batty at a Quanta QL workshop. Page Designer 2 was a much enhanced version of the rather limited and difficult to use original Page Designer program in the Quanta library.

Following my involvement with Sector Software, I spent a year or two not really doing very much commercially for the QL. I kept on contributing programs to the Quanta software library, but that was it until I decided to start my own company to produce software for the QL. I went on a Business Enterprise Programme course to learn about starting the company and then DJC was born!

I started with just three utility programs – BASIC Reporter (a BASIC programming aid), Vision Mixer (a screen advertising utility) and Wordscheck (a word count utility) – and also supplying floppy disks and other little bits and pieces. Those early days were shaky to say the least! Advertising was expensive and limited and it was an uphill struggle just to keep going. I nearly gave up more than once, but selling items at shows gave me the income and enthusiasm to carry on.

The next program I wrote was Quick Posters, which nearly did not get published! It was written to produce simple text only posters for use on my stand at shows and was only meant for my own use. Enough people asked how they had been produced to persuade me to launch it as a commercial program. Considering that it does not work on many types of printer, it has been quite a successful program.

As the business started to expand and I began to advertise more widely, I decided to advertise for prospective software authors in an effort to expand on the number of programs I sold. The first reply came from Joe Haftke, whose first program had been launched by another QL company at the time, but he was looking for another publisher to work with. That became the start of a long association. British QL users will be familiar with the sight of Joe helping me on the stand at some shows in England – his hard work, support and willingness to help at all times deserve a mention here.

The advert which invited QL authors to contact me produced an enormous response. I quickly became bogged down ploughing through the endless pile of disks and microdrives, some without instructions, some of which would only work on one QL ROM version, and some which I could not understand at all!

A great deal was refused, for various reasons. Some rather promising ideas never actually turned into finished products either because the authors got fed up of waiting for me to wade through them all and reply, or because they took offence when I dared to suggest changes to their masterpieces, or because I did not know enough about the field concerned and had to enroll the help of other people to assess the programs, some of whom never did finish the job or gave negative reports on the program.

Some very successful programs came out of all this, though, such as the Super Disk Labeller, which became one of my best selling programs! The same author later produced another popular program, the Super Disk Index for cataloguing a user’s floppy disk collection.

By now I was supplying printed manuals with the software, a policy I have stuck with ever since. As the number of programs grew, it became more and more expensive to get them printed in the number I was selling, so I went and bought a photocopier – an expensive investment but one of the best I have made, even if I do curse it at times, if it breaks down, or seems to take all day to photocopy stocks of large manuals!

Shortly afterwards I met Chris Boutal. Many readers will be familiar with his excellent Genealogist program, now in its Second Edition.

Interest in using the QL for family tree and family history work had been stimulated by an article in QL World and by the Family Tree program by Andy Carmichael. Chris wrote a BASIC program to be used for Genealogy and compiled it with QLiberator, rather than use an established database like Archive. He started to sell it through small adverts.

We met at a Quanta Workshop in Worthing, England, for the first time and were introduced to each other by a Quanta official. I remember swapping a sample copy of Quick Posters for a sample copy of QL Genealogist. Little did I know then how successful it would be! In fact, at the time, I didn’t think it would sell very well at all – how wrong I was to be proved! It received excellent reviews and the orders flooded in over the next few weeks after the review came out. That was one of the most chaotic Christmas periods I have ever had! Everyone seemed to want a copy!

It has sold consistently well since those early days and we have since also done a roaring trade in the second edition, which continues to sell well. Apart from the disk labeller program, no other program from the range I publish has generated as much praise as QL Genealogist.

Sadly, some of our range of programs have not done anywhere near as well. Programs such as Question Master, The Gopher and Cocktails Waiter have not sold in very large numbers.

More positively, the range of programs has expanded. As well as publishing DJC programs, I have also established a policy of buying in third party products such as the DiRen range, Liberation Software products, Albin Hessler Software, PROGS, Dave Walker and the authors of some programs previously available from Sector Software.

One of the success stories of all this was The Painter. Graphics and printing programs seem to attract a lot of interest on the QL. The Painter is an old program, but it has been rewritten several times and is now in its fourth incarnation (with several versions of the fourth incarnation), which means that the facilities have been refined and it has been well debugged. It is good when used from the keyboard, but is fantastic when used with a QIMI mouse (available from Jochen Merz or from Quanta)! If you have never used pointer environment before, it takes a while to get used to it but once you do, you wonder how you ever managed any other way! Certainly, this and DATA Design were the programs which persuaded me to use pointer environment (and QPACI and QPAC2) as standard on my QL.

All this rapid expansion caused an unforeseen problem – there was no room in the advert to describe the programs. So I simply put what I could in the adverts and concentrated on producing a catalogue to give more information to customers about the programs. It took some time to put together and is a little expensive to produce, but has been well worth it.

We have been caught out by some unexpected developments on the QL scene. Some of our programs suffered from compatibility problems when used with some versions of the Minerva EPROM, as also happened with the Gold Card. I worked hard with some of the authors to try to improve the situation – at the moment I am getting remarkably few complaints about compatibility problems.

1992 had a difficult start. Apart from the fiasco with the delays on the Page Designer 2 Plus project which I hope will be finished by when this is in print, for some reason I started to receive an incredible amount of queries with orders, or simply just queries. It was very time consuming and, of course, slightly annoying since I have tried to send out goods ordered as quickly as possible after receipt of the order and it meant that anything needing more than a very short reply got delayed until I was able to find time to reply (remember that DJC is not a full time concern). This annoyed many people who were not (until I explained to them, a time consuming exercise in itself) aware of what difficulties long letters and long telephone calls cause me. | also received a large number of queries about software which does not have anything to do with me. It has been quite difficult to persuade customers (and sometimes authors) that all too often I simply do not have the time to go into anything at length – there is always someone or something else waiting in line with demands on my time. I just do what I can.

That, and the problems at QL World, were the difficult part of 1992 so far. On the bright side, there are some very interesting projects in progress at the moment. A Mega Toolkit (for lack of a better name) containing a very large number of BASIC extension is planned. Authors will be able to include a runtime only version of this in commercial software free of charge (apart from the initial purchase price) provided users are told who wrote and sells it. A lot of work has gone into this and I am confident that it will be well received when finished.

A disk sector editor for the various disk densities supported by the Gold Card disk formats is in preparation. Winback version 2 is now out and work continues on DATA Design to develop this excellent programmable database still further.

One author is currently working on a utility to convert Archive language programs to DATA Design language applications, What this means is that, if you have QLiberator, for example, you may be able to produce what is, in many respects, an Archive database compiler! At the simplest level, it will enable you to easily move from Archive to DATA Design. Work on this is still in its early stages and it is too early to say for certain even if the project can be completed or what form it will finally take.

Another author is working on a banner and poster making program which uses outline fonts for better quality text printing. I have already seen some of the outline fonts produced by this program and it looks very promising – there should not be the same problems as with ‘staircase’ or ‘jagged edge’ large lettering that you get with some programs.

I hope to be able to supply more pointer environment applications in the future. Although the original QL operating system is remarkably good in many respects, the pointer environment system enhances QDOS beyond all recognition and must be the future of QL software. Utilities like Easyptr II which make it easier for programmers to write in this environment should prove to be very popular.

I would like to think that I managed to create a reasonably successful new QL software company in a fairly short period, at a time when some companies had gone into decline. I have striven to give good customer service and to provide user friendly software which helps the user to achieve what he or she wants to do with the QL, I have produced new software and kept alive some software which might otherwise not be available to QL users any more. I have also, through marketing other people’s software, managed to help to keep many individuals and smaller companies producing QL products.

Ihave tried to achieve this with a friendly, personal service, and without getting involved in any “my product is better than yours” slanging matches. By nature, I don’t like upsetting people, and it is nice to be able to think that I have achieved something in business without treading on many people’s toes!

I have stayed with the QL because I am an enthusiast. I basically enjoy using it and programming it, I find it suitable for my needs and I have also made many new friends through it. I hope to be around for some time yet providing support for this remarkable little computer and its dedicated users worldwide.