DO-IT & Frontpage by Studio Software Corporation (1987)

Comments

• powercrystals

  June 4

  I was/am the one who found and uploaded this, a friend pointed me to this post. The nature of the backup I acquired means that a lot of things had to be "here's my best approximation of what this would have looked like", because I have access to a lot of the pieces but not much of the completed result. I've done my best to present this as it should have appeared at the time, but some parts just had to be reconstructed and the FrontPage installer specifically was kind of a mess as the copies I have of it didn't align to any of the actual released versions. I've at least tried to very clearly mark what was a 1:1 copy of a physical disk vs one I (re)created. I am glad that apparently the effort did not go unnoticed.
  
  There's been a couple updates since that upload a few days ago. Notably, I figured out that FrontPage 1.1 and 1.2 upgraded their graphics backend from GSX to GSS*CGI, and while I can't get the mouse to work on any of the GSX versions, it does work under GSS*CGI. FrontPage 1.0 was supposed to use GSS*CGI, but for whatever reason the conversion failed and they reverted to GSX for 1.0's commercial release.
  
  Also, while GSS*CGI added support for EGA, the installer claims that at one point this software came with a GSS*CGI driver for the Wyse/Amdek 1280x800 monitors. However that file, WY700.SYS, has not survived into the disks I have. If anyone's somehow got a copy of this driver from some other software that uses GSS*CGI I would love to be able to integrate it.
• SomeGuy

  June 5

  This sounds like some very cool stuff. Is it that the files were not on the disks, or were the disks damaged?
  
  Haven't had time to dig in to what is posted, are there flux-level dumps of the disks?
• powercrystals

  June 5

  Most disks were undamaged (or had only one or two bad sectors in an area with no data). I have flux rips of everything, though they aren't part of that Archive post.
  
  The actual problem is that the disks seem like they were a senior developer's backup(s), plus some additional disks they grabbed on the way out as the completeness of backups drops dramatically in the company's final year or so. So for example, I have several copies of the FrontPage installer, but only as part of larger backups of the computer that made them, not as a prepared disk meant for retail release. And I'm hesitant to post that kind of disk image straight to Archive since there may be personal data in there. This is likewise how I wound up with half of DO-IT 2.0 and half of FrontPage 1.0--those are the disks this person kept. They either just didn't grab a full copy for whatever reason, or the other disks got lost somewhere in the intervening 38 years. So instead the best approximation I can do is "as far as I can tell, what a retail disk would have looked like".
  
  I have been gradually going through what else I have and figuring out what makes sense to archive, like DRAW which is of no real value and barely even works but is at least a historical curiosity. But even the TUTORIAL.TXT I found that provides a basic walkthrough of how to use the software had somebody's initials in it addressed as a reviewer, so it's going to take quite a while to go through all of the rest and make sure they're sanitized before I'm willing to share them publically.
• 02k-guy

  June 5

  What a great backstory!!!
  
  Again, truly appreciate the effort you've made, and really, "It's the journey, not the destination" that provides the energy to pursue such things.
  
  So many small developers who will be lost to time, but each in their way, helped shaped the software we now use today.
• powercrystals

  June 14

  I would like to add that I have now uploaded the last major component of the backups I acquired as part of this set: the source code. I wanted to anonymize it to avoid leaking people's names which took me quite a while (and hopefully I didn't miss any), but I wanted to make sure this was available as to my knowledge there's not much like it out there. There's some additional caveats listed in the Archive page's description, but it does work as this is how I was able to produce the "FrontPage 1.2" build that I do not have the retail disks for.