Red Ryder

~ the obit ~

Red Ryder lost its name in 1989. My first modem arrived in 1998 on a home line in Turkey at 14.4k, which means the entire working life of this program happened before I had any way to know it existed. I am writing it up from the manual, which is scanned and readable and turns out to be the best thing about it.

The first version was written in 1984 by Wat Buchanon, in Microsoft BASIC, for the Macintosh that had shipped that January. The documentation went out on the disk with it and was full of jokes aimed at Apple and at programmers. Buchanon died, and a friend of his named Scott Watson rewrote the entire program in C as a standalone application, kept the humor in the manual, and ran the whole operation out of a house on Hickory Drive in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania under the name The FreeSoft Company.

There was no advertising budget. Watson put the program on bulletin boards, let it copy itself around for free, and asked anyone who kept it to send him forty dollars. Enough people did that it became the program Macintosh owners used to talk to other computers, which in 1986 was most of what a Macintosh could do outside its own screen.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

It emulated a VT100 and a plain teletype, and it moved files with XMODEM or Kermit. It understood MacBinary, so a Mac file survived the trip with both of its forks intact, and it spoke CompuServe's own B protocol for downloads. It was the first Mac telecom program to handle large screens and to let you pick your own font. Underneath all of it was a procedure language, so you could script a login sequence and stop typing your password into a phone line by hand.

The part that mattered most was Red Ryder Host. Registered users could turn the program around and run a bulletin board with it, which meant the terminal program shipped with the other end of the conversation in the box. A single forty-dollar payment bought you a way to call and a way to be called.

It never won the office. Businesses bought MacTerminal from Apple or Smartcom II from Hayes, and InfoWorld's 1989 review said Red Ryder tried to be too many things at once and was not practical for a typical business user. That was true and it did not matter, because the people calling bulletin boards at midnight were not typical business users.

~ the name ~

Red Ryder is a comic-strip cowboy from 1938, and the rights to him belonged to somebody. The version 10 manual says so on its title page, in small type under the copyright: the name is a registered trademark of Red Ryder Enterprises, Inc., and is used with permission. For years that line sat there doing nothing.

In 1989 the permission ended in a trademark dispute and the name went with it. Version 10.3 is the last release that says Red Ryder on it. The program itself was fine, still selling, still supported by a man who answered the phone himself. It simply could not be called what it had always been called.

~ what it became ~

Watson renamed it White Knight and shipped it as version 11 in 1990, keeping the version numbering continuous so that everyone would know it was the same program. Reviewers followed it over. Later the host side split off as Second Sight. Nothing was lost technically and the product had another good run.

What was lost is the sentence people used. For five years, getting a Macintosh online meant getting Red Ryder, and that is the only name in this entire category that anybody said out loud with any affection. It is also, as far as I can tell, the only piece of software ever killed by a cowboy.

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