[Coco] Owing the community

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 01:44 AM 7/21/05 +0000, farna at att.net wrote:
>He had got a lot from the CoCo community, but took it like we owed him more.

I have no knowledge of this situation, but I did know Bill.

Bill worked incredibly hard and was a marvelous gentleman. He was kind and
dedicated, and never failed to come through. When we started UnderColor,
Bill broke one of his cardinal rules -- he wrote for us for free. He, like
many of us who wrote articles and books, received poor and erratic
payments, few royalties, and found himself ripped off many times. Bill was
one of the many who suffered the IJG fate, a story which I will not repeat
here, but which save the loss of tens of thousands of dollars each.

The hobby computer community was fickle and, in those days, rarely came
through in support of the writers whom they encouraged to create for them.
Program copying drove several authors out of business -- I found my
embedded bit-shifted name still in code published in a Magazine Which Shall
Remain Nameless.

For those of us who produced both hardware and software and had employees
to pay, margins were razor thin. I ran Green Mountain Micro for seven
years, and took a salary for six months of that time. When folks passed up
my carefully tested memory chips because they could get cheaper ones
elsewhere, when the encouragement to create "Learning the 6809" came from
thousands while only a few hundred eventually purchased it, when our
projects were copied and released elsewhere virtually unchanged, I was also
disaffected by it all. I don't think one can claim that authors "got a lot
from the CoCo community." We stayed for the community as long as we could.

To those who threw their hands up in disgust and left the hobby market, I
hold no ill will because I did it myself -- after having lost my life
savings, my business, and my wife.

Dennis