Sales declined year after year, and Fetch Softworks went from having 3 full time employees and a couple part-time contractors to being a nights-and-weekends effort for two of us. Meanwhile Fetch 5 stagnated, and customers who needed more than Fetch 5 could offer moved on. But with a blank slate and no clear destination or deadline, we spent years without getting anywhere close to having a product that we could actually sell. It was exhilarating to be free of the shackles of our legacy code. This, of course, is one of the classic blunders in software development. I imagined a new Fetch that had all the improvements that I’d daydreamed about, and none of the old code that made it so hard to implement new features. At that point Fetch had over 20 years of testing and debugging, but the source code also had cruft and compromises that had been bugging me for over 20 years. So I turned back to Fetch, and started work on a total rewrite: Fetch 6. In 2011 we tried to branch out into iPad apps, which was fun and novel and lost money. I suppose it isn’t surprising that after a couple decades the excitement of working on file transfer software began to wane. I never really knew how to promote Fetch, but word got around, and today our customer database includes orders from 212 different countries, from Andorra to Zimbabwe. It got a professionally designed website and UI artwork. Fetch made the jump from Classic MacOS to OS X, and from PowerPC to Intel. But that wasn’t the case, thanks to the efforts and high standards of Ben Artin and Scott McGuire, who joined Fetch Softworks and turned Fetch into a real professional product. In 2000, when I used game show winnings to buy the rights to Fetch from Dartmouth, it looked like Fetch’s best days were behind it. It’s a niche that has shrunk in recent years, as more sophisticated forms of Internet publishing have become available, but to my amazement it still exists today. For some reason web browsers never got very good at uploading files, and as the web exploded in popularity that left a big niche for FTP clients like Fetch to fill. But people didn’t just want to browse web pages, they also wanted to create them and upload them to web servers. When the early 1990s brought the first graphical web browsers, I figured Fetch’s relevance had passed web browsers could download files too, and do so much more. But 1989 also brought Dartmouth’s first full-time connection to the Internet, and soon Fetch was being used more for downloading files from far-flung Internet archives than it was for moving files across campus. I developed Fetch to solve a specific problem at Dartmouth: we had a bunch of different kinds of central computers - UNIX, VMS, VM/CMS, DCTS - and no easy way to move files between them and the thousands of Macs on campus. The Fetch icon is a dog with a floppy disc in its mouth at this point it might as well be a stone tablet. Fetch 1.0 was released into a world with leaded gasoline and a Berlin Wall DVD players and Windows 95 were still in the future. Of the thousands of other Mac apps on the market on SeptemI can only think of four (Panorama, Word, Excel and Photoshop) that are still sold today. Most application software has the life expectancy of a field mouse. But as far as I know there weren’t any other stand-alone FTP clients with a Mac user interface in September, 1989, and there certainly weren’t any that are still maintained today.įetch’s longevity has been a continual surprise to me. There was also Doug Hornig's HyperCard-based FTP client from Cornell called HyperFTP. The first Mac FTP client I ever saw with a graphical user interface was Amanda Walker’s, included in the InterCon product TCP/Connect. There were Mac FTP clients before Fetch, starting with ports of the UNIX command line ftp client. Many years later I started marketing Fetch as “the original Mac FTP client,” which is sort of accurate. So that was the day I finished Fetch 1.0, the Mac file transfer program that I had been working on all summer. Thirty years ago today my colleagues in the Computing Services department at Dartmouth College were preparing for the distribution of about 1,000 Macintosh SEs, SE/30s, and Mac IIxs, and they needed to start duplicating the floppy disks of software that would be bundled with those Macs.
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