About DBSoft
DBSoft had it's genesis under a different name in the mid 80s when I wrote a "Barbie skiing" game for my sister Valerie on my Timex Sinclair computer. Several years later after we acquired our first real PC at Christmas of 1987, DBSoft became what it is today while I was writing my BBS software for DOS. It's original name was DBSBBS but later it was renamed to Infiniti.
Infiniti was written over the course of almost 10 years from 1988 to 1997. It was originally written in BASIC, and then as I learned more languages, C, Pascal and Assembler were added and at the end of the development the BASIC was being completely rewritten in C to eliminate BASIC limitations. Unfortunately this process was never completed and it was in the mid-90s when I switched my attention completely from DOS to OS/2.
Transitioning Infiniti from DOS to OS/2 was a monumental task and it quickly was replaced by other more interesting projects and Infiniti was left to become obsolete. During the first few years of learning OS/2 (1992), I also got into FreeBSD (1993) and Linux (1994) and my time was more often spent learning new things about these systems than writing software for them. While I was at school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign I was also exposed to NCSA and was introduced to AIX and Solaris (1995).
In the late 90s my knowledge base had sufficiently expanded that my software was coming into maturity on my new platforms and I started writing software professionally. After writing the initial versions of my Installer application, HandyFTP, BitchX and Everblue on OS/2 I was hired by SciTech Software out of Chico California and I moved there in late 1999. It was here that I gained a lot of experience I needed, I was introduced to revision management with Perforce, CVS and later Subversion. It was here during Christmas of 1999 that Dynamic Windows had it's genesis. For the SciTech installation application I needed a way of automatically resizing the window based on several variables, and the only other toolkit that I had used for something similar was the Cell Toolkit which had severe limitations. So I sat down and wrote the first revision of what is now the Dynamic Windows layout engine.
I left SciTech Software in 2000 but it's legacy lives on. During my time at SciTech and for some time after I left small amounts of code were contributed to a number of projects including wxWidgets, Odin and GTK. At this point I would like to thank the OS/2 Netlabs hosting many of my projects and thanks the Netlabs contributors for their many hours of work and time. I continued improving my projects for a number of months until I was contacted by F/X Communications to port their Firewall and Dialer software to Linux.
For the next few years I worked on porting to Linux, and since my Dynamic Windows library was coming into it's own on Windows as well as Linux (Unix) I also ported the software to Windows and FreeBSD. I moved to Holbæk, Denmark in 2001 and stayed there for over 6 months. With the software in late beta stages I left F/X Communications in early 2003 and started writing Dynamic Mail which had been mulling in my mind during the last few years, since I didn't have a good email client I liked that worked on all the platforms I ran. PMMail was usable on OS/2 and Windows but was missing from my Unix and Mac platforms.
In mid-2003 I became partner in an advertising company called Silver Shooters which deals mainly with creative talents which have historically used Macs, so I began porting my software collection to the Macintosh, this is still a work in progress but hopefully soon most of the DBSoft software collection will be available for the Macintosh.
I'd also take this opportunity to thank Eirik Øverby for hosting this web page on his server Anduin.