Human Engineered Software

~ the obit ~

This one went under in the year I was born, selling software for machines that reached Turkey later and mostly as copied cassettes. Everything here is reconstruction, then. What makes it worth reconstructing is the speed of the fall: top ten in the world in April, bankrupt by October.

Jay Balakrishnan started it in 1980 in his Los Angeles apartment, with a bedroom door taken off its hinges and laid across two filing cabinets for a desk, the cables wound around the doorknob. He had been reading the PET ROM and wrote an 8K 6502 assembler in BASIC, called HESbal, and a text editor to go with it. Cy Shuster soldered the cables for HEScom in his garage, which let a VIC-20 save its programs onto a PET's disk, because the first VIC-20 had nowhere else to put them. Before long Human Engineered Software was a real publisher in Brisbane, California, shipping cartridges for Commodore's machines and for the Atari 8-bits.

Early in 1984 InfoWorld put it level with Broderbund: tenth of all microcomputer software houses that year, and first among the entertainment ones, on thirteen million dollars of 1983 sales. By October it had filed for bankruptcy.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cartridge years ~

The catalog was wider than a games label's. HesMon was the machine code monitor a lot of Commodore owners learned to disassemble with, and 64Forth put a whole Forth system on a cartridge. Further down the list sat Graphics BASIC, which extended the one Commodore shipped, beside OMNIWRITER, a word processor for people writing on a television set. The games sat in the same price list, including the American editions of Jeff Minter's Llamasoft titles, Attack of the Mutant Camels and Gridrunner, which put the strangest programmer in British games into US shops. Lawrence Holland and Ron Gilbert both started here before LucasArts.

~ october 1984 ~

1984 removed most of the American home computer software business. Retailers were sitting on stock they could not move and discounting it below cost, and a publisher with cartridges in the channel was holding the most expensive kind of inventory there was. Thirteen million dollars of sales in 1983 did not matter against that.

A rescue was reported. Avant Garde Publishing Corporation would buy the company outright for cash, and then the bankruptcy court blocked the deal and HES shut down instead. Jimmy Maher's history of the company is subtitled The Software Icarus, which is about as kind as the record allows: the company that taught a generation of Commodore owners to read their own machine's memory could not read a retail channel one year ahead.

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