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Who is Andrew Fluegelman?
Tsu want an answer to the following
question:
"So who the heck was (is?) Andrew Fluegelman?
According to
his Jargon File entry, he was one of the founders
of the Shareware concept, the writer of
PC-Talk, and owner of the trademark on
'Freeware'. But, apparently, he has since
dissapeared and is presumed dead. This is
an interesting bit of trivia from the
Dark Ages of personal computing, and I
think it's high time we find out what
happened. Conspiracy, anyone?" Hmmm...
now I'm intrigued!
AF was indeed the author of several versions of PC-TALK, my comm program of choice during the mid 80's. He committed suicide, possibly because of the side effects of medication he was taking. There was a nice article in one of the SF bay papers shortly after his death describing his work and demise. I think he lived in Marin county, Calif.
Jim
Sure, that's what they *want* you to believe. It was really a consortium led by IBM and Microsoft (they called the group THUGS/2) that found the shareware concept hazardous and aimed for it's complete destruction.
Yeah, that's it.
Microsoft later saw it's mistake and to soothe it's own conscience quietly replaced the group with Thugs NT, ensuring that no one would ever have to worry about the group working again.
but other thugs will shake in their boots when the new THUGS 2000 arrive with new thuggish features, including optional ($495) spikes on their clubs, and (not yet implemented) central thug control. Virtual thugs can be sent out from the server and roam hidden inside a user's profile until popping out of their screen to do them in. ActiveThug will eliminate waiting for thugs to arrive; only a small thug setup need be downloaded...
Thugs 2000 will give new backing to the words, "this is my domain."
somebody stop me.
liver at soon dot com, now you can sue my pants off
Andrew Fluegelman was one of two people who pioneered the shareware distribution concept along with Jim Knopf ("Jim Button").
From the looks of the following story, he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and his body was never found.
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
IS COMPUTER PROGRAMMER DEAD OR MISSING? POLICE SEEK CLUES
DATE: Wednesday, July 17, 1985
Section: SECTION: California News
Page: 5B
By LINDA GOLDSTON, Mercury News Staff Writer
Memo: Mercury News Staff Writer Louise Woo contributed to this report.
A nationally known Bay Area computer programmer and editor mysteriously disappeared more than a week ago, and while his family already has held a funeral service, police still consider it a missing persons case.
Andrew Fluegelman, 41, editorial director of PC World and MacWorld magazines, has been missing since July 6 when he left his Marin County home to go to his office in Tiburon. He called his wife, Patricia, later that day and has not been heard from since, according to Tiburon Police Chief John Bailey.
Bailey said Fluegelman was reported missing by his wife the following Monday, July 8.
Fluegelman's car was recovered by the California Highway Patrol at Vista Point on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge last Thursday.
And while a note was found inside the car, "the note doesn't indicate anything that you could draw any conclusions about," Bailey said.
''There's no indication of foul play and no indication of suicide," he said. "At this point, we're working a missing person's report."
But Fluegelman's family already has held a funeral service for him in White Plains, N.Y., where the family is from, according to Bailey.
Death notice
The family also placed an obituary in the New York Times that ran Monday. The brief death notice said only that Fluegelman had died "suddenly" and that private services were held.
''It's a means for the family to put something to rest," Bailey said. "They're looking at it on a worst case basis. It's their conjecture, their analysis, that he's gone. But nobody's come and told me they found a body anyplace."
Reached by telephone in White Plains on Tuesday, Fluegelman's mother, Evelyn, declined to discuss her son and directed all questions to Patricia Fluegelman, who could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
''I have no reason to believe he's not dead," David Bunnell, chairman of the board and publisher of PC World and MacWorld, said late Monday night. "But it makes no sense. Andrew was successful, he was happy."
Side effect?
Bunnell said Fluegelman, who suffered from colitis, was taking some kind of drug for the illness and that the drug may have caused depression as a side effect.
''He was really important to us," Bunnell said. "It's an incredible loss to the industry."
Harry Miller, editor of PC World, said Fluegelman was a gifted editor and "something of a visionary. He saw things and the importance of things more clearly and accurately than other people."
Fluegelman was a practicing attorney in San Francisco when he was asked by Stewart Brand to edit the Whole Earth Catalogue during the late 1960s, according to Miller. He edited several issues and then founded his own book-packaging company, Headlands Press, in Tiburon.
Fluegelman "only got into computers in 1981, but his contribution to PC World was staggering," Bunnell said.
By the following year, Fluegelman had written what became the highly successful computer program "PC Talk," which provides for the transfer of data from one computer to another.
The name shines up here as:
Andrew Fluegelman, editor, The New Games Book,
Doubleday, New York, 1976
Andrew Fluegelman, editor, More New Games!,
Doubleday, New York, 1981
Please tell me this ain't one of those "Who is John Galt?" things.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Marin County supposedly has the highest per capita income in the U.S. and the highest proportion of citizens who are undergoing psychiatric thereapy. (I read that somewhere recently.)
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