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40 Years Of Programmer’s Sideprojects: A Historical Review
Sidehustling programmers are as old as programming itself. From the very first floppies shipped by indie developers in the mid 80s to today’s app stores: programmer’s were always looking for interesting projects on the side. They are often asked whether they are bored by their full time job, yet most programmers do sideprojects for pure entertainment, to gain experience or to save money for retirement. It just seems natural to do.
In this article we’ll be going through what made sideprojects successful in the past 40 years and how many factors are still relevant today. The example’s will outline how technical expertise, distribution and marketing capabilities need to play hand in hand for indie developers to commercially succeed with their sideprojects.
Andrew Fluegelman’s PC-Talk in 1982
Fluegelman developed PC-Talk in 1982, a software that allowed IBM PCs to connect to bulletin boards. Something you could remember as the great grandfather of today’s browsers. He wrote PC-Talk in Microsoft BASIC for IBM DOS, MS DOS. It used the PC’s RS-232 serial port to communicate with the modem and ran VT52, VT100 terminal emulation on top of that. Even today, this is some of the more advanced things to do compared to the average “To Do List” application. Using the serial port…
