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My final task was in this coop session was to go out to La Jolla, California and work with Control Data Corporation and educate and support them in their efforts to port the Plato series of computer-cased courseware to the 99/4A. I spend about a month out there, and in that time I wrote the graphics and disk I/O package for the Plato interpreter. A byproduct of this work was an intermediate tool, DISKO0, which was used for debugging the disk I/O package. I understand this program eventually made it into the public domain. For those of you familiar with this tool, there is a whimsical menu choice, "Resign/Go to Black's Beach". Black's Beach is a nude beach in La Jolla:).
I returned to school in the fall of 1982, but only lasted for one semester. At that time I joined with my Parsec partner, [[Jim Dramis]] and the author or [[TI Invaders]], [[Garth Dollahite]], along with two business types and we formed a company called SoftMachineSofMachine. Our charter was to author, produce and market game cartridges for the TI 99/4A, kind of like the TI version of Activision. White Softmachine Sofmachine was in existence, we wrote three games of our own and converted two games for [[Atarisoft]]. The games we wrote during that time were:
{| class="wikitable" style="margin: auto; vertical-align:center; text-align:center;"
! Title || Author || Company
|-
| Spot-Shot || [[Jim Dramis]] || Softmachine Sofmachine (ourselves)
|-
| Barrage || [[Garth Dollahite]] || Softmachine Sofmachine (ourselves
|-
| Jumpy || [[Paul Urbanus]] || Softmachine Sofmachine (ourselves
|-
| Pole Position || [[Garth Dollahite|Dollahite]]/[[Paul Urbanus|Urbanus]] || [[Atarisoft]]
|}
Because our business partners were unsuccessful at securing the required capital funding, combined with TI's exit from the home computer market, we were unable to manufacture and market our (Sofmachine's) three games. However, due to a sequence of events beyond our control, the Sofmachine games were pirated and eventually freely exchanged around the TI 99/4A community. A valuable lesson was learned: NEVER trust anyone with your own livelihood. Lesson number two: Don't believe what a "business" guy tells you just because they're the business guys and you're the technical guys, ESPECIALLY if it goes against your gut instincts.
All games programmed by Sofmachine used the TI 99/4A as the development platform, along with the Editor/Assembler cartridge. Two of us programmers purchased a Myarc 10 MByte hard drive to $1800 EACH! I just sold it about 6 months ago for $100. OUCH!
[[Category:Software programmer]]
