STORY
IDES Viral Spread and the TOTO Text Editor Gig
IDES Viral Spread and the TOTO Text Editor Gig
- After I wrote IDES (Interactive Data Exchange System) to connect Colton and Gladstone across our shared HP 2000 BASIC host, the system went viral across the regional educational network.
The 15-School Proto-Social Network
- Friends in Gladstone asked if they could invite friends in Oregon City, Oregon.
- Those friends invited others across neighboring districts, until students across something like all 15 connected high schools were logging into terminals and spending hours chatting with one another during the school day.
- School administrators eventually noticed the widespread chat activity and excessive system usage, prompting them to hunt down and shut the IDES program down.
- Fortunately, I had preserved complete paper tape backups of the source code. I quietly found another, less obvious location on the system to reload the software so the network could stay alive.
Connecting with Superior Software Services
- Through the network presence of IDES and my HP 2000 activities, I crossed paths with Steve Salta and Jonathan Kirwan, the founders of Superior Software Services based in Beaverton, Oregon.
My First Paying Programming Gig: TOTO (and TOTO II)
- Steve and Jon hired me for what became my very first paid commercial programming contract: writing an interactive text editor in BASIC.
- We named the text editor TOTO (Terminal Oriented Text Organizer).
- The name was chosen with a sly, deliberate pun in mind: so that the subsequent upgrade could be named TOTO II ("Toto, too!"—nodding to the classic Wizard of Oz line).
- That first paid contract proved that my self-taught passion could earn real money, launching my journey into commercial software development.
What links here
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.