A bit of early Parallax history from 1985: ISEPIC for the C64
Ken Gracey
Posts: 7,407
In 1985 Chip designed his first major product - ISEPIC. He was 17 years old and was considered a fairly uninspired high school student, staying up all night and sleeping through the first couple of periods each day. The stories surrounding his first products were amazing, whether they involved the friends that showed up at our home for days (really) or the multi-day computer tear-downs that usually resulted in some subsequent break-through that would be shared via BBS.
ISEPIC allowed a quick copy of C64 programs and was a hacker device of sorts. It sold a lot of units - the number 10,000 seems to stick in my head. Chip's company was Innovative Software Engineering and the sales partner for ISEPIC was Starpoint Software.
We're normally looking forward around here, but when Vern Graner found the manual on-line I thought it might be of interest to our customers.
http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/hardware/Isepic_V1.0_Manual.pdf
I have an ISEPIC sitting on my office desk, thanks to OBC. I'm pretty sure that at least a few of our customers have one of these in their C64 box.
Ken Gracey
ISEPIC allowed a quick copy of C64 programs and was a hacker device of sorts. It sold a lot of units - the number 10,000 seems to stick in my head. Chip's company was Innovative Software Engineering and the sales partner for ISEPIC was Starpoint Software.
We're normally looking forward around here, but when Vern Graner found the manual on-line I thought it might be of interest to our customers.
http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/hardware/Isepic_V1.0_Manual.pdf
I have an ISEPIC sitting on my office desk, thanks to OBC. I'm pretty sure that at least a few of our customers have one of these in their C64 box.
Ken Gracey
Comments
By the way, is Chip Gracey any where related to Ken Gracey? The surnames are the same. I'm just curious.
Chip was a very young entrepreneur....
I think maybe Microcontrolled is going to follow the same kind of path :-)
Software companies would create games which would be sold with some form of disk protection (error tracks, and the like). Once the program detected the expected track errors, the program would run. ISEPIC would plug into the computer, quietly waiting for the user to press a button on the back of the unit. When pressed it would take a snapshot of the program running in memory and allow you to write that information back to a blank disk along with a special loader.
The new program would load quickly, without errors returning you back to the exact place you hit the button, each time you loaded the new copy of the game. This didn't work with multi-part games, but most games were reasonably small and would be completely loaded into memory.
Funny how Chip's products have been a part of my life off and on over the years..
OBC
(Ken, are you ready to outsell Roomba for a lot less?)
It's great to see Ken taking time to make a few fun posts today. It takes us all a while to ramp back up to "business mode" after a holiday weekend.
I want to go back to having pictures and profiles of the programmers on the software boxes. Nothing like having the people who use your stuff know what you look like to encourage you to do a good job writing it LOL.
Thanks for sharing, Don. Indeed, that's a relic that we discontinued around 1996 and I remember talking with you about it. Parallax was very successful with the PIC Programmer and Clearview Mathias emulators in that era. You've been a customer for a long time.
I'm holding out a few surprises that are stuffed away. We made a few products that will strike you as totally strange and out of our core business capabilities. Usually these things surface at the end of June when we do an annual full-office cleaning.
Ken Gracey