Human Engineered Software
Human Engineered Software was an American software developer and publisher from 1980 until 1984. The company sold video games and educational and productivity software, in addition to several hardware products. It focused on the Commodore 64, VIC-20, and Atari 8-bit computers.
History
The company was located in Brisbane, California. Published titles included games, educational and productivity programs. Among them were Project Space Station, Mr. TNT, Turtle Graphics by David Malmberg, several Jeff Minter games, such as Attack of the Mutant Camels, Gridrunner, Hes Games, and HesMon, Graphics BASIC, 64Forth, and the HesModem and HesModem II.The company was started by Jay Balakrishnan and Cy Shuster in 1980. The company was founded in Balakrishnan's apartment in Los Angeles, where he took down the door to his bedroom, put it across two file cabinets, and used that as a desk for his development. With research into the PET ROM, Balakrishnan wrote the first 8K 6502 Assembler, HESbal 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. Shuster 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. HESware published OMNIWRITER, a word processor for the Commodore 64.
Game writers Lawrence Holland and Ron Gilbert, who later worked for LucasArts, started their careers at HES.