Beagle Bros

~ the obit ~

Bert Kersey started Beagle Bros in 1980 out of his house in San Diego, and the decision that shaped everything after was choosing the wrong customer on purpose. Software companies at the time were selling to businesses, because businesses had the money. Kersey aimed at the hobbyist who had bought an Apple II with his own money and wanted to find out what was inside it, which was a smaller market with far less budget and far more attention.

The products were utilities and toys for people who wrote their own code. Apple Mechanic let you build shape tables, which were the Apple II's sprites, and DOS Boss let you patch the disk operating system so that a command like CATALOG could be renamed to anything you liked. Beagle Bag was a disk of BASIC games that shipped as readable source you were expected to take apart. Later came MacroWorks and then TimeOut, an add-on system for AppleWorks devised by Alan Bird, which grew large enough that Claris hired Beagle Bros programmers to build AppleWorks 3.0 and eventually folded the TimeOut API into AppleWorks itself.

None of this is why anyone remembers the company. The advertisements and manuals were built out of 19th century woodcuts with absurd captions, the logo was taken from an old Smith Bros cough drop box, and the fictional staff roster included Elsie Dee and Flo Chart. Disk sleeves carried warnings against putting the disk in a toaster or an alligator. The catalog itself was a publication people kept, full of short Applesoft programs demonstrating undocumented behavior, and the Peeks, Pokes and Pointers wall chart shipped with orders was printed on both sides so that customers ordered a second copy to see both at once.

The Apple II barely happened in Turkey. There was no distribution to speak of and no hobbyist scene around the machine, and the culture Beagle Bros was written for, ordering software by mail from a San Diego catalog, had no equivalent I could have reached from Ankara at any age. I came to a PC eight years after this company closed. What I recognize is not the products but the register they were written in, which is the register of a person having a good time and assuming the reader is technical.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the catalog ~

Not copy protecting the disks was a business decision presented as a courtesy and it was probably correct. Every competitor was shipping protected media that could not be backed up, so a scratched disk meant a lost purchase, and the protection schemes were broken within days anyway. Beagle Bros shipped plain disks, told buyers to make backups, and asked them not to give copies away. Sales did not collapse. A meaningful number of people paid for software they could have taken, because being treated as an adult is worth something.

The manuals ran the same trick. They were funny enough to read end to end, and they taught you things about the machine that had nothing to do with the product you had bought. A company that ships a good manual is telling you it expects you to stay. Support costs go down, and buyers who read the manual for pleasure buy the next thing without being sold to.

~ the actual end ~

Kersey sold the company to Mark Simonsen, one of his own programmers, in the second half of the eighties and went off to build model trains. Simonsen ran it well through the AppleWorks add-on years, then made the call every Apple II company faced at the turn of the decade: the platform was ending, and staying on it meant a shrinking business with a fixed end date.

The answer was BeagleWorks, an integrated suite for the Macintosh. Development ran long and expensive enough that the technical support department was closed to pay for it, and the product finally shipped in February 1992, last into a market where Microsoft and Claris were already established, carrying the bugs a rushed finish produces. In March 1992 the Apple II line went to Quality Computers. In October Simonsen sold BeagleWorks to WordPerfect, where it became WordPerfect Works and then died in the Novell acquisition, and he went with it as a director of development. Beagle Bros closed in early November 1992.

~ what survived ~

Most of the catalog was released as freeware in the mid-nineties and all of it is online now, in emulators, which is a better afterlife than most software of that vintage gets. The people scattered into things you have used. Joe Holt co-wrote iMovie and Alan Bird ended up working on Eudora, while Randy Brandt kept publishing AppleWorks tools out of his own company for years after the platform was supposedly finished.

What did not survive is the assumption underneath the whole operation, that the person buying a utility wants to understand the machine and will read forty pages of jokes to get there. Software stopped being addressed to that reader. The printed manual went first and the voice went with it, replaced by a tooltip written by someone whose job is to reduce support tickets.

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