Kidware
 | |
|---|---|
| Company Type | Developer |
| Founded | 1982 |
| Status | Closed Circa 2017 |
| Head Quarters | Seattle Washington, USA |
| Head Quarters | www.kidwaresoftware.com |
3DO Overview
Kidware appeared on the original Developer list in 1993. They did not make any 3DO Games.
Overview
Kidware focused on education titles, all seem to have been released on PC. With a heavy focus on Visual Basic. From their website:
"KIDware was originally founded by Lou Tylee in 1982 to publish a series of "family friendly" computer games and learning applications for the quickly growing micro-computer market. At the time, we felt that the Texas Instruments TI-99, Radio Shack TRS-80, and the Timex Sinclair offered the most to the consumer and began writing and marketing children's software (in the BASIC language) for these machines. Our software was distributed on audio cassette tapes (the first media used by Microsoft, by the way) and was sold by most of the major national vendors. PC Enterprises was founded by Philip Conrod in 1986 to focus on the quickly growing IBM PC Compatible market. Philip formed PC Enterprises after working for Command + BibleBytes as a game developer and technical editior for two beginning computer programming books published by Ac'cent Books in 1984.
When Microsoft's Visual Basic was introduced in the early 1990's, we decided to rewrite all of our programs (and add many new ones) in this new language and market exclusively to Microsoft Windows users."
History
In 1998, WWW.KIDWARESOFTWARE.COM was launched on the rapidly growing World Wide Web to help market and distribute our new Microsoft Visual Basic computer programming tutorials. LEARN VISUAL BASIC 5 was published on the internet as a Beginning Visual Basic course for colleges and universities. This Visual Basic courseware was successfully taught in a major Washington State University's introductory programming course for many years. VISUAL BASIC FOR KIDS was developed as a beginning Visual Basic tutorial for kids and teens. In late 1998, the tutorials were updated to Visual Basic 6. BEGINNING VISUAL BASIC 6 was developed as beginning Visual Basic programming tutorials for computer enthusiasts.
In 1999, VISUAL BASIC AND DATABASES was developed as an intermediate college-level course for Visual Basic 5 and 6 using Access and Microsoft SQL Database technologies.
In 2002, VISUAL BASIC .NET FOR KIDS was released for the Visual Basic.NET 2002 environment.
In 2003, JAVA FOR KIDS, BEGINNING JAVA, LEARN JAVA GUI APPLICATIONS were written for the Sun Java environment. BEGINNING VISUAL BASIC .NET was also released.
In early 2004, VISUAL C# .NET FOR KIDS and BEGINNING VISUAL C# .NET were written for the Visual C# .NET 2002/3 environment.
In 2005, BEGINNING VISUAL BASIC EXPRESS, VISUAL BASIC EXPRESS FOR KIDS, and HOME PROJECTS WITH VISUAL BASIC EXPRESS were written for the free version of Microsoft Visual Basic Express 2005. We also released the BEGINNING VISUAL J# EXPRESS FOR KIDS and BEGINNING VISUAL J# EXPRESS tutorials which were later discontinued when Microsoft retired Visual J# with Visual Studio 2008.
In 2006, Lou's Introduction to Visual Basic course at the University of Washington receives positive media coverage from the Seattle Times.
In 2007, KID GAMES WITH VISUAL C# EXPRESS and KID GAMES WITH VISUAL BASIC EXPRESS was written for the free Microsoft Visual C# Express 2005. LEARN VISUAL BASIC was developed for Visual Basic 2005. LEARN VISUAL C# was developed for Visual C# 2005. VISUAL BASIC AND DATABASES and VISUAL C# AND DATABASES were both developed for Visual Basic and C# 2005 using Access and Microsoft SQL Databases.
In 2007, Lou was invited by Microsoft to write an article on Visual Basic Express 2005 forms development for Microsoft's Developer Network (MSDN). Lou also hosted a MSDN Webcast called Introduction to Windows Forms Applications Using Visual Basic Express Edition (Level 200) on Microsoft World Wide Events.
In 2010, all of our Visual Studio Tutorials were updated to Visual Studio 2010. SMALL BASIC FOR KIDS, BEGINNING MICROSOFT SMALL BASIC, KID GAMES WITH MICROSOFT SMALL BASIC, and HOME PROJECTS WITH MICRSOSOFT SMALL BASIC were all written for the new Microsoft Small Basic development environment for beginners. We also acquired the re-publishing rights to several classic BASIC programming books originally written by David H. Ahl and Edward H. Carson and updated each of them to Microsoft Small Basic. We published the first Developer's Reference Guide to Microsoft Small Basic.
In 2011, Microsoft Corporation licensed several chapters from three of our new Microsoft Small Basic Programming books and re-published them on the Microsoft MSDN's website. We also updated all of our remaining Java courses to Oracle Java v6 and Xinox JCreator v5.
In 2013, we updated our Visual Basic and Visual C# programming tutorials to Visual Studio 2012. We also updated our Java Tutorials to Oracle JDK7.
In 2015, we updated all our Java Tutorials to JDK8 and replaced the JCreator IDE with the free open source version of NetBeans 8 as the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The NetBeans 8 IDE runs very well on Windows, MAC OS X, and several versions of Linux.