HesWare

HesWare
Address	390 Swift Avenue South San Fancisco, CA 94080 Suite #14
Founded	1980
Defunct	1984

Founding of HesWare

HesWare was founded in June 1980 by Jay Balakrishnan on his 25th birthday. The company began in his apartment in Riverside , California. HesWare was the prototypical garage startup, described as a bedroom door across two file cabinets as a desk, with cables wound around the doorknob. Balakrishnan began selling an 8K 6502 assembler, HESbal, and a text editor, HESedit, which he wrote and initially intended to publish as magazine type-in listings. Orders started coming from small advertisements placed in early computer magazines and newsletters such as Kilobaud, Compute!, and The Midnite Software Gazette.

History

With an initial focus on the Commodore PET, HesWare quickly diversified its support to include the Commodore 64, VIC-20, and Atari 8-bit computers. USI, a privately owned supplier of microcomputer components, wanting to expand into the software market, purchased a controlling interest in HesWare, with Balakrishnan staying on as vice president.

A new professional management team was brought over, headed by Ted Morgan, previously general manager of the Computer Products Division of USI. Before that he had spent thirteen years at Xerox in sales and marketing positions. By the summer of 1983, USI was in deep financial trouble, for reasons largely unrelated to the software division. USI needed cash to stay afloat. Software companies were benefiting from investor excitement that summer, so USI "spun off" HES and persuaded three investors, including Microsoft to kick in $1.5 mllion each for equity in the new independent company. It was during this time that the company was rebranded as HesWare.

HesWare engaged in aggressive promotional efforts. They made a major promotional splash at Steve Wozniak's second (and final) US Festival on Memorial Day Weekend 1983, featuring a large presence at the tech expo. Further boosting their profile, in early 1984, they acquired the services of Leonard Nimoy as a spokesman, a move that highlighted their ambition and willingness to leverage celebrity endorsement.

By early 1984, HesWare had achieved a significant market standing. InfoWorld reported that the company was tied with Broderbund as the world's tenth-largest microcomputer-software company and, notably, the largest entertainment-software company, boasting $13 million in sales for 1983.

Even more quickly than HesWare rose, it fell. During the summer of 1984, HesWare became the victim of increased competition and a weak software market. This was compounded by high inventory costs for cartridges, a medium that HesWare favored more than some of their competitors who primarily distributed software on floppy disks. There was an attempt by Avant-Garde Publishing to acquire HesWare, but the offer was blocked by a bankruptcy court judge, and the deal fell through. HesWare closed its doors.

HesWare

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Founding of HesWare

History

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