Beagle Bros

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Beagle Bros' logo, whimsically in late 19th century style.
Beagle Bros' logo, whimsically in late 19th century style.

Beagle Bros was a software company that specialized in creating personal computing products that were both useful and whimsical. Their primary focus was on the Apple II family of computers.

Beagle Bros (the lack of a period at the end is intentional; "there wasn't room") was founded in 1980 by Bert Kersey and expanded over the years to include a wide variety of staff members, programmers, and designers. Whereas most software companies focused on professional users and business systems, Kersey founded the company with the intention of supporting the "hobbyist" users who had sprung up when affordable personal computers were made available to the general public.

As a result, much of the Beagle Bros product line consists of software that put the creative power in the hands of the user or expanded popular products of other companies. Apple Mechanic allowed users to create their own shape tables (an early form of sprites) to create their own games, DOS Boss let users patch the disk operating system, and Beagle Bag had a number of simple but fun games written in BASIC that budding programmers could also list out and learn from. The company took great pride in not copy-protecting their software.

When the Apple IIgs was released, Beagle Bros was among the first companies to release high-quality packages that took full advantage of that computer's capabilities. Both Platinum Paint and BeagleWrite GS are still regarded as being among the high points of commercial IIgs software.

Perhaps the most memorable aspect of Beagle Bros was their use of vintage woodcut art in their print material. While many computer and software companies in the 1980s aimed for flashy, high-tech logos and advertising, Beagle Bros cultivated a nostalgic, down-home feel in keeping with their intended mission of creating software that was welcoming to inexperienced computer owners.

Humor permeated Beagle Bros products, even extending to the warning label printed on their 5.25" disk jackets. Unlike most disk care labels, which warned that magnets, water, and high temperatures could damage disks, Beagle Bros' warning icons admonished users not to use their disks as kites, fold them into paper planes, or feed them to alligators.

Another delight was the "two-liner" computer programs that peppered Beagle Bros advertising and mailers. Each new Beagle Bros communication contained one or more Applesoft BASIC programs tucked away in speech balloons or whitespace. The two-liners were always nigh-impenetrable, yet extremely clever, little programs that showcased unusual tricks or capabilities of the Apple II. At first these were written by Kersey himself; later, users began submitting their own. Eventually, almost every Beagle Bros release came with a selection of these "miniprograms" either on disk or in the box inserts.

In the early days, every order included a Peeks, Pokes, & Pointers chart, a wall poster that budding Apple hackers could hang on their wall as a reference for the memory locations that did useful things on the Apple II. The chart had two sides, so naturally you needed two of them so you could see both sides at once, which meant placing another order with Beagle Bros! The company also later released a Big Tip Book containing many programming tips for Apple hobbyists and also published a Tip Disk.

Beagle Bros reached a new audience when they began producing add-ons for the AppleWorks integrated package. Their first AppleWorks add-on, released in 1986, was the MacroWorks keyboard shortcut utility. Beagle Bros programmers later devised an API for creating AppleWorks add-ons, which they dubbed TimeOut. The company produced an extensive and ever-expanding line of TimeOut products. Three TimeOut programmers were tapped by Claris to develop AppleWorks 3.0, and the TimeOut API itself became a part of AppleWorks with version 4.0. Eventually the TimeOut API was made public and a number of non-Beagle TimeOut applications were released.

The end of an age came in 1991 when then-owner Mark Simonsen licensed the Beagle Bros Apple II line to Quality Computers. Quality Computers subsequently went through several acquisitions and no longer exists. However, many Beagle Bros "classics" were released as freeware in the mid-1990s, including most of the company's early utilities and games. Today, their programs are available on the Internet.

BeagleWorks, the company's main Macintosh product, was licensed to WordPerfect Corporation in 1992, where it became WordPerfect Works. This product was later discontinued after WordPerfect was acquired by Novell.

Many former "Beaglers" have continued to be involved in the software industry; for example, Joe Holt is one of the authors of iMovie, and Alan Bird has worked on Eudora and was the author of the OneClick shortcut utility for Macintosh. The company's founder, Bert Kersey, started a model train company after selling Beagle Bros, featuring much of the same humor, but is now retired and living in Fallbrook, California with his wife Sharon and a backyard full of barn owls.

[edit] Notable products

  • Alpha Plot: one of the first graphics programs for the Apple II
  • Apple Mechanic: allowed users to create fonts and shapes for use in their programs
  • Beagle Bag: a "best-of" collection of Beagle Bros games
  • Beagle Basic: An extended version of Applesoft BASIC with numerous new commands
  • Beagle Compiler: a compiler for Applesoft BASIC that was orders of magnitude faster than its closest competition
  • BeagleWorks: later called WordPerfect Works, then PerfectWorks an integrated package much like Microsoft Works
  • BeagleWrite and BeagleWrite GS: GUI word processors acquired from Styleware, where they had been called MultiScribe
  • Big U: a series of utilities for ProDOS
  • D-Code: program optimizer and debugger for Applesoft
  • Double-Take, many small utilities for programmers, notably allowing two-way text scrolling
  • Extra K: a tour-de-force utility that allowed Applesoft to use the second 64K bank of memory on an upgraded IIe or IIc
  • Flash: Copies files over AppleTalk, integrated into the Finder. Beagle's first Macintosh program
  • GPLE: Global Program Line Editor, a powerful line editor for Applesoft BASIC programs. Originally published by Synergistic Software.
  • I/O Silver: hailed by many as the best game ever done exclusively for the Apple II[citation needed]
  • Platinum Paint: the paint program for the Apple IIgs
  • ProntoDOS: accelerated version of DOS 3.3 with other additional features; most compatible of the "fast DOS" products
  • The TimeOut series of accessories and add-ons for AppleWorks

[edit] Quotes

"Our programs are FUN to use. Our instructions are CLEAR and complete."

— The Beagle Bros "Statement of Quality"

[edit] External links

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