What Mailing List?

[Projects Portfolio]

In 1988 a mailing campaign was envisioned during a conversation with my good friend and colleague, Skip Taylor of Lancaster, California. The first draft of the software was completed in a few days. Mr. Taylor thought it was so good that he encouraged it to be marketed. I dubbed the software What Mailing List? (WML for short) because at that time I had more interest in sounding clever than in marketing.

By 1991 I had the software placed on many bulletin boards (the predecessor to the Internet for anyone outside of government and universities). The time to compile it in Quicksilver was becoming a burden, so I converted it to Microsoft PDS (Professional Development System), which was Microsoft's high-end BASIC compiler and just what I needed at the time.

During the 1990s I added USPS bar code support, mouse support with drop-down menus (in MS-DOS text mode, mind you – not Windows), support for virtually every printer HP made and several other brands as well, and wrote an in-depth user's guide for it that I would print and bind myself with every $65 order that came in. I had only a few dozen customers, but among them were some very large enterprises, including the United States federal government.

Software was still distributed on floppy disks then because not all computers had CD-ROM drives. I would pride myself on the efficiency of my code, sometimes spending days just seeing how much smaller I could make the code without removing any features. Throughout its life the software was able to run on any computer that could run MS-DOS, even the oldest, slowest computer you could find that only had a single 3.5-inch floppy disk drive.

I continued to sell the software even as Windows 95 started to become more common than MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, but I did not want to convert the software a third time so it remained a DOS package. By 2000 I had not had an order in about a year so I discontinued development, but continued to support the customers I had. As recently as Autumn 2019 I had a phone call from a customer who was still using WML with Windows 7.