Ubercode News Archive (Pre-2000)

New assistants! (1998)

As a result of the coding pressures caused by the additions to Ubercode, I took on two new assistants (Wolfgang and Ludwig):

Their salary requirements were modest, about 1 tin of Whiskas per day. Also here is a picture of the litter-tray cleaner and chief programmer (me again):

Notice the nice Windows 95 pale blue background. I now have somewhat less hair, due to the excitements of dealing with Win32 API bugs!

Move to Guernsey (September 1996)

As a result of balancing paid employment with running a business, I moved the software business to Guernsey (near the UK) in 1996. Here is a view of St Peter Port, the principal town in Guernsey. The picture is from Clifton hill looking onto the harbour. St Peter Port town church is on the right, and you can just about make out Herm island on the horizon.

During 1996, work started on the changes needed for Windows 95 and Windows NT. Events were added to the language, the compiler, run time library and documentation were updated, and graphics methods were added for the screen and the printer.

Exhibition at the PC95 show (June 1995)

The beta was ready for the PC95 computer show in Darling Harbour, Sydney, Australia. Here is the senior programmer (Bill Rayer again) talking to an interested customer:

Or he may have been the show organizer complaining about my stand, it's a long time ago now.

The PC95 show took place about the time Windows 95 was released. From the feedback I received at the show, it was clear the days of command line software were over. Apple had lost their lawsuit against the Windows look and feel, and Microsoft Windows was going to dominate the PC market.

This meant a major re-design was required. The language had to be integrated with an event handling system, there had to be a proper GUI and a Developer Environment, so that compiled Windows programs looked like other Windows programs. Also the portability elements no longer mattered, a Windows version was the only requirement.

An early beta is released (1995)

Ubercode was born near the sunny shores of Perth in Western Australia. The plan was to develop a new high level language that would make it safe and easy to write software, and would make it easy to port software between different operating systems (MS-DOS, Macintosh, Unix, etc).

The founder, chief programmer, project manager and author of this website were the same person - Bill Rayer. Having graduated in Econometrics in 1984 and been annoyed by the limitations in programming languages ever since, I figured it was time to design a high level computer language which would be easy to use, yet powerful enough for useful applications.

In 1995 an early beta release was ready, the Language Design was complete, the Reference Manual was finished, and the compiler and run time library core were working. At this stage, Ubercode existed only in a command line version, and the language did not support graphics, printing or a GUI, and there were other missing features. Here is a picture of the early release:

This beta release is now a prized and highly rare item!