Casady & Greene

» see casadyg.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Casady and Greene sold software in a box. There was a registration card inside, and the money went back to California as a check or a credit card number read out over a phone line. I never bought one of those boxes. In Turkey in the late nineties the Mac software that reached anybody reached it on a copied disc, and the question of how an American publisher got paid was not one that came up.

The company was really two companies that shared a booth. Robin Casady started Casady Company in 1984 to publish bitmap fonts for the Macintosh and took out his first ad in the January 1985 issue of Macworld, renaming the firm CasadyWare in 1986 once it moved into PostScript. Michael Greene ran Greene, Inc. and published QuickDEX, a card-file program small enough to live as a Desk Accessory back when the Mac could not keep two real applications open at once. The two split the cost of exhibition floor space at Macworld, and they shared a credit card merchant account.

In the spring of 1987 Greene paid the shareware fee for a game called Crystal Raider and told its author, Patrick Buckland, to get in touch if he ever wanted a publisher. Apple lent Greene a pre-release Macintosh II around the same time, Buckland used it to put color into his black and white game, and Crystal Quest shipped as the first color game available for the machine. It went out the door with almost every Mac II sold. MacUser gave it eight pages of a thin issue because the editorial staff could not stop playing it.

The 1988 merger happened for an unglamorous reason. CasadyWare was for sale because the fonts were not paying for themselves, and Greene, Inc. needed continued access to that merchant account, because the banks in central California had just been burned by a large software bankruptcy and would not open new accounts for software firms. Greene bought CasadyWare and dissolved his own corporation, keeping the older one as the surviving entity under a new name. Fifteen years later that entity was publishing Conflict Catcher and Spell Catcher, and it was the original distributor of SoundJam MP, the MP3 player Apple bought and renamed iTunes.

~ the case file ~

~ the goodnight page ~

Casady and Greene closed on 3 July 2003, nineteen years after the font shop opened. The farewell that went up on casadyg.com is still readable in the archive, and it does not read like a press release. "It is with profound regret that we inform you that Casady & Greene will close its doors on July 3rd, 2003, after nineteen years in the Software Publishing business. We have endured many industry downturns, but the last three years have presented a series of economic disasters from which we were unable to rebound."

Further down is the line that does the damage: "You are the reason we have been here working without pay for the last year." The page is built around a staff member named Charles who bellowed "Goodnight Everybody!" on his way out each evening, and it says everyone would hear that cry for the last time on 3 July.

~ where the products went ~

The practical half of that page is a directory. Every title the company published got a forwarding address, so a customer holding a registered copy could reach the person who actually wrote it. Conflict Catcher's new support contact was a yahoo.com mailbox and Glider Pro's was a personal pacbell.net account. Spell Catcher pointed at Rainmaker's own site, and iData and InfoGenie both went to coastalfog.net. The Windows titles got a column of their own further down.

That is what a small publisher's death looked like before app stores. The catalog did not pass to an acquirer. It scattered back to the individual authors with an email address each, and a few of those products were still being sold years later by the people who had written them.

~ the address now ~

casadyg.com still resolves. What it serves is an empty page running a script that asks a remote endpoint whether anyone wants to buy the traffic, and when nothing comes back it writes three words into the body: no advertisers available.

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