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Remembering Duane Blehm
It surprises me that people much younger than I am (I’m sixty years old) are into retro computing—where a ‘retro computer’ might include the original Macintosh Plus — the very machine I cut my teeth on writing shareware games in the late 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s. I mean I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised — some thirty-five years have passed since.
PUZZ’L was a cute little jigsaw puzzle game where I expect Duane was leaning heavily on the Region type — unique at the time to the Macintosh’s graphics system, Quickdraw. Since I nonetheless went on to write my own shareware games for the Macintosh (and also self-published them) it’s obvious that I eventually learned by other means what Duane could have handily shown me: how to do flicker-free animation on the Mac using off-screen bitmaps, etc. Whether I am right or not, I saw the little scarecrow icon of Duane Blehm’s “HomeTown Software” as representative of the Wizard of Oz books (I’m pretty sure that is what people immediately think about when they hear Kansas).
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