Spoonbill Software is Ian Humphreys, a happily retired computer programmer. That's me at my computer. I started my working life as a cartographic draughtsman for Ordnance Survey in Southampton, England in 1960. In 1962 I met a girl named Joy who also worked for Ordnance Survey and in 1964 we were married. We continued to work for Ordnance Survey drawing maps and in 1968 our son Peter was born. It had long been my desire to emigrate to Australia because in 1953 my best friend emigrated with his family to New South Wales and he sent glowing reports of how wonderful it was. Towards the end of 1968 we emigrated to Perth, Western Australia where I took up a job of cartographic draftsman for the Lands and Surveys Department. In 1970 the Lands and Surveys Department of WA began to use computers and I had an opportunity to switch from drafting (which I was not too good at) to computer programming (which I soon became very good at).

The first mainframe computer I ever worked with was the NCR 315 RMC which had a fantastic 48K word main memory. The RMC stood for Rod Memory Core - the memory consisted of iron rings threaded on sensing wire - not solid state as it is today. Input was via magnetic tape and to get the data onto mag tape we had an off-line punch card reader. It was quite an art to get our programs to fit into the small memory and it was often necessary to use program overlays.

Over the years I've worked with many different mainframe computers and later in life, just prior to my retirement in 1999, with client-server equipment and the Internet. My last project was to develop the first system in WA to provide Geodetic survey information via a website. I've programmed in Fortran IV, COBOL, various assemblers, Pascal, C, C++, BASIC, Visual BASIC, Delphi and have dabbled with many other programming languages. The development system I use now is Borland Delphi whose underlying programming language is Object Pascal - an object oriented version of Pascal.

My first home computer was an Apple II EuroPlus which was an amazing little machine for its time. I bought mine in 1982. It had a 1MHz CPU, 48KB RAM and 128KB 5.25" floppy disks. I optioned mine up to 64KB RAM with a 16KB expansion card and also installed an 80-column upper/lower case card because the raw machine could only display 40 characters per line all in upper case. When you switched it on, it booted up into Applesoft BASIC which was a flavour of Microsoft BASIC and this is where I did a lot of my BASIC programming. It also had a beaut little assembly language called 6502 assembler (named after the CPU chip which was a Motorola 6502). It had exactly 56 different machine instructions and so it was fairly easy to get your mind around. The Apple II came with what was called a mini-assembler but it was rather basic and very difficult to use for anything but a little subroutine. So the first thing I did was to write a 6502 assembler rather than buy one - much more fun!. The assembler started out as a BASIC program which, when you used it to assemble some code and you also wanted a printout of the assembler code and a variable map it took about 4 hours to run! So I wrote assembler code for the assembler and assembled it with my BASIC assembler program until I got it to such a stage that the assembler had enough functionality to run on its own. I then used the assembler to assemble itself and this ran and printed out a program listing and variable map in about 15 minutes. A vast improvement on 4 hours! Once I'd developed the 6502 assembler to a fairly advanced stage I then wrote a text editor completely in assembler so now I could enter my assembler code and then assemble the code into an executable program using only my editor/assembler system. I managed to sell several copies of this. Then I purchased Apple Pascal which was a complete program development system using Pascal as the programming language. I wrote many games and utility programs using this system.

Then, in 1986 I saw a demonstration of the Commodore Amiga and its graphics capabilities blew me away. I just had to have one! This was a 7MHz machine with a separate graphics co-processor. So I sold my Apple II and bought an Amiga. The native programming language on the Amiga was C and so I had to learn another language. I wrote a much more advanced text editor which I published in cooperation with my programmer friend Stephen Strong and sold several hundred copies. Then eventually, because we used IBM PC compatibles at work, I switched to a PC compatible at home too. This way I could develop routines at home and use them in my programs at work. We started out by using the OS/2 operating system but eventually switched over to Windows NT at work and Windows 3.1 at home.

I've always been writing computer games even before I had my own computer at home. I find that writing a game is a good way to learn a new programming language. It uses all the different aspects of the computer, input from keyboard and mouse, graphics output via the screen, file output to disk (saving high scores and storing options) and computational routines to make the game function. Being a game, it's fun to test it as development progresses, and it keeps your interest because you can't wait to program the next little bit and try it out. So I used to write games, not for myself but for my children, Peter and Ruth. I find that once I've developed a game and rigorously tested it, I get bored with it and want to get on to the next project. Then Peter and Ruth got married and grandchildren came along and I was writing games for them too. Soon I had quite a collection of games.

After I took early retirement in July 1999, Joy and I moved from Perth to Albany on the south coast of Western Australia and it wasn't until 2002 that I suddenly thought that it would be nice if I could share my games with more than just my close relatives. It was then that I got the idea of creating a website and offering my games to the world! And so Spoonbill Software was born. I decided to offer my games as Freeware because I didn't want all the hassles of managing credit card transactions and all the tax implications which that would have created - I was retired from the rat race and wanted a peaceful life!

Because Freeware doesn't generate any income, I didn't want my website to cost me money and so I can only use the 10MB of free space which is provided as part of my ISP monthly subscription. This being the case, I didn't have enough space to store all my programs on the ISP server for direct downloading. It was then I hit on the idea of disseminating them via email. It also turns out that this system is more personal and I get to chat to many of my clients. Some people request games, I send them and then I hear no more. Others are more friendly and thank me for the games, let me know how much they enjoy them and even offer suggestions for future improvements. Some even tell me a little about their country. The personal touch takes away that coldness of knowing you're talking to a computer on the other end of the line. The Internet's a wonderful thing, I have sent my games to people all over the world and when I get words of appreciation and encouragement, it makes all the hundreds of hours I've spent writing the games seem worthwhile.

More recently in 2004 I started writing computer games for blind people. This has proved a very rewarding exercise. It hadn't occurred to me before that blind people would play computer games, until someone requested my Cribbage game and found that it wouldn't work with his screen reader. Not knowing what a screen reader was, I logged on to the Internet and did some research. When I discovered that a screen reader was a piece of software which spoke text from the computer screen, I realised that this person must be blind. So I emailed him and sure enough he was a keen Cribbage player but required a version, not with graphics but one that spoke to him instead. This was a new field for me and not knowing any other way to produce a program which spoke, my first effort in converting my Cribbage game included short sound clips of my own voice in wave files. This took an inordinate amount of time but resulted in a very accessible game which was well received by the blind community. After this I did some further research and found the Microsoft SAPI 5.1 Text-To-Speech engine which I now use. This produces synthesized speech from text strings and enables me to complete a program in much less time, and also makes it much easier to modify. And thus was born my Blind-gamers series of games. As at January 2008 thirteen games have been released in this series, and demand for my accessible games has far outstripped the demand for my sighted games, except one, Apple Lode Runner - The Remake which has gathered the largest following around the world. Thanks to the Internet, I have now sent my games to more than 80 countries world wide.

As from 7th November 2007, Spoonbill Software's website address is: http://www.spoonbillsoftware.com.au

Send mail to webmaster@spoonbillsoftware.com.au with questions or comments about this web site.
Last modified: February 16, 2008