Human Engineered Software

Human Engineered Software (HES, also known as HesWare) was an American home computer software and hardware developer/publisher from 1980–1984, concentrating on the Commodore 64 and the Atari 8-bit family.[1]

This article is about an American video game publisher. For an Australian video game distributor, see Home Entertainment Suppliers.

Human Engineered Software
IndustryGame development
FateClosed
Founded1980
DefunctOctober 1984
Headquarters
United States of America 

History

The company was located in Brisbane, California. It was acquired by Prabhat Jain in 1984 and funded by Microsoft's Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Dave Marquat of TVI and Prabhat Jain of Video-7/Paradise. Published titles included numerous games as well as educational and productivity programs. Among them were Project Space Station, Mr. TNT, Turtle Graphics by David Malmberg, several Jeff Minter games (Llamasoft), such as Attack of the Mutant Camels, Gridrunner, Hes Games, and HesMon, Graphics BASIC, 64Forth (a cartridge-based Forth implementation), and the HesModem and HesModem II. At one point, HES was the largest single-source supplier of software for the Commodore 64.

The company was started by Jay Balakrishnan and Cy Shuster in 1980. The company was founded in Balakrishnan's apartment in Los Angeles, where he took down the door to his bedroom, put it across two file cabinets, and used that as a desk for his development (winding the cables around the doorknob). With research into the PET ROM, Balakrishnan wrote the first 8K 6502 Assembler, HESbal (HES Basic Assembler Language) in BASIC, and an accompanying text editor, HESedit. Having HESbal allowed numerous creative follow-on products, such as HEScom, software and a user port cable that allowed VIC20 programs to be saved to a PET hard disk (since the first VIC20 didn't have a hard disk). Shuster soldered the HEScom cables in his garage and wrote HESlister, a print utility for BASIC programs, that he ported from a TRS-80 Model I to the PET, to the VIC, and later to the IBM PC. HESware published OMNIWRITER, a word processor for the Commodore 64.

Game writers Lawrence Holland and Ron Gilbert, later to be famous for their work at LucasArts, started their careers at HES.

By early 1984 InfoWorld reported that HES was tied with Broderbund as the world's tenth-largest microcomputer-software company and largest entertainment-software company, with $13 million in 1983 sales.[2] In October 1984, HES filed for bankruptcy.[1] It was reported that Avant Garde Publishing Corp would buy HES in a straight cash deal,[3] but later detailed that the offer was blocked in bankruptcy court and HES shut down.[1]

gollark: It also does have the whole "anything which implements the right functions implements an interface" thing, which seems very horrible to me as a random change somewhere could cause compile errors with no good explanation.
gollark: - `make`/`new` are basically magic- `range` is magic too - what it does depends on the number of return values you use, or something. Also, IIRC user-defined types can't implement it- Generics are available for all of, what, three builtin types? Maps, slices and channels, if I remember right.- `select` also only works with the built-in channels- Constants: they can only be something like four types, and what even is `iota` doing- The multiple return values can't be used as tuples or anything. You can, as far as I'm aware, only return two (or, well, more than one) things at once, or bind two returns to two variables, nothing else.- no operator overloading- it *kind of* has exceptions (panic/recover), presumably because they realized not having any would be very annoying, but they're not very usable- whether reading from a channel is blocking also depends how many return values you use because of course
gollark: What, you mean no it doesn't have weird special cases everywhere?
gollark: It pretends to be "simple", but it isn't because there are bizarre special cases everywhere to make stuff appear to work.
gollark: So of course, lol no generics.

References
  1. Carlston, Doug (1985). Software people: An insider's look at the personal computer software industry. Simon & Schuster. pp. 238–239.
  2. Caruso, Denise (April 2, 1984). "Company Strategies Boomerang". InfoWorld. pp. 80–83. Retrieved February 10, 2015.
  3. Chin, Kathy (October 29, 1984). "HES Finds Financial Savior". Infoworld.
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