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Marc Zeedar

An interview with Marc Zeedar, the multi-talented force behind xDev magazine.

Issue: 22.4 (July/August 2024)
Author: Tim Dietrich
Author Bio: Tim uses Xojo to develop custom software for businesses that are running on NetSuite.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 26,105
Starting Page Number: 62
Article Number: 22409
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

## Your Background

You have a very broad and interesting business background, having done everything from writing, editing, graphic design, publishing, photography, software development, and more. At what point did you become interested in software development, and in Xojo in particular?

I was in high school in the mid-1980s when personal computers were just becoming a thing. I wanted to be a writer and I'd been saving my money to buy a typewriter. Back then an IBM Selectric cost $2,500 (about $7,500 today). In 1981 or so, I visited my uncle and he'd bought an Osborne 1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1), one of the first "all-in-one" computers. When I saw how it had a screen where you could correct typos without having to retype your whole document, I knew then that I wanted a computer instead of a typewriter.

It took years, but in 1985 I finally got my computer. I bought a Sanyo 550 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanyo_MBC-550_series), the first PC clone that sold for under $1000 with a monitor. It was a fun machine and had some unique features (like 256 colors per pixel at 640x480 resolution), but some of those improvements meant it wasn't completely PC compatible. (This was back before the PC's BIOS could be readily cloned.) Software was hard to find and I couldn't afford it anyway.

I'd done some programming on borrowed computers and my uncle's machines (Atari ST, Amiga, etc.). I have vivid memories of being at my cousin's over Christmas vacation where his teacher mom had brought a TI-99/4A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A) home since school was out and it wasn't being used. We had two weeks to play with it, and we were writing a game in BASIC. The only problem was we didn't have a cassette tape recorder, so we had no way to save the game. We left the machine on for days while we worked on it. One night there was some family thing going on, and we were working on our game. My cousin's dad (not my uncle who was into computers) came in, irritated we weren't participating, and unplugged the machine. Days of work gone! I think that scarred me for life.

But I didn't really get into programming until I had my computer. I initially played around with BASIC, which came with my Sanyo. It was one of the only ways to get access to some of those cool features, like the high-res graphics. I was entirely self-taught. There were few computer resources back then. I was one of the only kids at my high school of 1,500 who had a computer at home (most used the computers in the lab at school). I had no modem to go online and didn't even know such a thing existed. I subscribed to Soft Sector magazine (which was specifically for Sanyo owners) and bought a few books. I typed in BASIC games and tried to figure out how to make them work in quirky Sanyo BASIC.

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