HESWare
71 Park Lane
Brisbane, CA 94005
USA

Year Founded: 1980
Year Defunct: 1984 (Late October/early November)


HESware (from Human Engineered Software) was an American home computer software and hardware developer/publisher during the 1980s, who concentrated on the VIC20 and Commodore 64. The company was located in Brisbane, California.

Published titles included numerous games as well as educational and productivity programs.
Among them were Project Space Station, Mr. TNT, Turtle Graphics by David Malmberg, several Jeff Minter games (Llamasoft), such as Attack of the Mutant Camels, Hes Games, and HesMon, Graphics BASIC, 64Forth (a cartridge-based Forth implementation), and the HesModem and HesModem II.

At one point, HESware was the largest single-source supplier of software for the Commodore 64 due to 8000 stores selling their software. This large supply chain would later lead to their ultimate downfall. Too much stock - failed sales on predicted hit products.

The company was started as HES by Jay Balakrishnan and Cy Shuster in 1980, in Jay's apartment in Los Angeles. Typical of his creativity, Jay took down the door to his bedroom, put it across two file cabinets, and used that as a desk for his development (winding the cables around the doorknob!). With incredible amounts of research into the PET ROM, Jay wrote the first 8K 6502 Assembler, HESbal (HES Basic Assembler Language) in BASIC, and an accompanying text editor, HESedit. Having HESbal allowed numerous creative follow-on products, such as HEScom, software and a user port cable that allowed VIC20 programs to be saved to a PET hard disk (since the first VIC20 didn't have a hard disk). Cy soldered the HEScom cables in his garage and wrote HESlister, a print utility for BASIC programs, that he ported from a TRS-80 Model I to the PET, to the VIC, and later to the IBM PC.

Game writers Lawrence Holland and Ron Gilbert, later to be famous for their work at LucasArts, started their careers at HESware.

In October 1984 HESware declares bankruptcy. The remnants of HES were eventually acquired by Avant-Garde Publishing of Eugene, Oregon, a company which dated from the same year as HES and had its own fleet of eager venture capitalists behind it. Avant-Garde kept the HES name alive for a while; the original plan for the merger had the HES name being used for lower-end, mass-market software, the Avant-Garde name for higher-end IBM and Apple software to be sold through dealers. But, while Avant-Garde did keep a number of older HES titles in circulation for a time, they released just one new one under the label.

Within a couple of years Avant-Garde too would be gone, justifiably so in light of cheesy efforts like Joe Theismann’s Pro Football, Dave Winfield’s Batter Up!, and Slugfest: Chris Evert-Lloyd Tennis, which purported to teach you or your kids how to play their respective sports with the help of their respective athlete endorsers.