I worked with John for a few years in the 1990s. This was during the heyday of BBSes, when he joined our small team at Mustang Software after Mustang bought Qmodem. John moved to Bakersfield California (with his family, including OP!) to be with us. John left a few years later due to I think business differences with management.
John was personable and full of joy. He always loved a good joke. I remember the parties (not wild, we were pretty tame back then) we would have around the pool at his place. He was generous with his time.
The story of Qmodem itself was a bit different. Qmodem for DOS was a one-man shareware business and was John's pride and joy. It was clear that he poured everything into that program. It was finely tuned and just worked. Times were changing though, and people were calling for a Windows version. Unfortunately, John was not interested in learning Windows programming, so Scott Hunter (now at Microsoft), Dan Horn, and I built Qmodem for Windows. It was good, but it really never had the same level of polish that John's work did. It was "Qmodem" in name only.
After John left Mustang he also left Bakersfield and I lost touch with him. I'm sure he continued to make the people around him smile. Thank you for your time and contributions, John.
In the mid 1990's, as a teen, I once was hired to cold call a bunch of software companies to contribute to some non-profit, and I recall calling Mustang Software.
That was 30 years ago. I don't know who I talked to, but they were not too happy to have me on the phone lol. Sorry if that was you. and OP sorry about your father. I recall QModem well.
QModem was amazing software, and I was sad when Mustang bought it. I was happy to see a software company in Bakersfield, though, and continued to use it. Without it, I never would have come as far as I did.
My condolences to you and your family during this time. I am grateful for John's work and the pathway he paved for so many into this world.
John helped get me and my college roommate started with Linux system administration and web development three decades ago. We both grew up in in the town in Iowa where John lived, and my roommate had met him around the time we went to college in the mid nineties. We were both nerdy engineering majors who had gotten exposed to Unix through our college dial-up shell accounts, and we had managed to scavenge together enough computer parts — an old 386 motherboard, a discarded hard drive that just needed a molex connector soldered back onto it, a spare floppy drive — to assemble a computer just barely capable of running Linux.
I remember lugging it all over to John’s basement where he helped us install Slackware Linux from a giant stack of 5 1/4 floppies he had.
Later, when John was running up a dial-up ISP in town, he let us park that server at his ISP, so we had a full Linux server of our own connected to a T1 with its own public IP address, and where we had root access and could experiment with running our own web and email servers and other such things. Back then in dial-up days, having a Linux server of our own on the Internet seemed unbelievable, and I will always be deeply appreciative to John for that opportunity.
Your father's contributions are immeasurable. Just reading the word "QModem" gave me an instant flashback to my youth. QModem was my gateway to the outside world.
I grew up way out in the country. I was the 80s and I was pretty isolated from technology and didn't even know anyone who cared about it at first. I started tinkering with our home PC, and I finally purchased a modem and figured out how to connect to BBSs. This changed my life. I had many sleepless nights as teenager, connecting everywhere I could. QModem was like a fancy car that drove me anywhere I wanted to go.
I became obsessed with learning and tweaking things. AT commands, autoexec.bat, QModem scripting. Whatever I could figure out to get maximum performance and fast download speeds. Because of Qmodem, I could download games, text files, and even talk with other people. This moment in time defined my future. I knew right then what I wanted to do with my life.
I owe thanks to your father and what he built for my wonderful career, and 40 years of enjoying technology. Without something as easy to learn and reliable as QModem, who knows what path my life would have taken.
Qmodem was my favorite comm program during the BBS days, and it still is today when working with vintage computers. It was just nice to use. Its scripting language was the first I used and I find myself wishing there was a Linux comm program with scripting that worked that well. Long distance calls were expensive so I used a Qmodem script to call BBSs each morning to download my email before school.
Just the last several months I've been using Qmodem scripting to make thousands of modem calls over VoIP to test downloads to see which models and ATAs work best.
After I jumped back into the vintage BBS world I've been keeping an eye out for anything Qmodem. I recently just picked up a Qmodem manual on ebay that I wanted to scan and archive, because it's pretty rare to see.
Not too long ago I saw where John had posted to a FB group he was working on a new DOS version of Qmodem, my first interaction with him. I was excited to see it be worked on again and hoped to see the new version. Sad to see him go.
> Just the last several months I've been using Qmodem scripting to make thousands of modem calls over VoIP to test downloads to see which models and ATAs work best.
This is great. That someone is still using this software meaningfully to this day.-
Do you plan on writing about your dip back into vintage BBSs? I have a lot of memories from my youth oriented around BBSs, a world and network of communities I wasn’t really old enough to understand. I’d like to revisit that time with my adult brain…
QModem and then Telix were a window through which I explored another world as a young teenager with a budget modem with shaky MNP compatibility. In that world I eventually found friends, a wealth of knowledge, and a career. So thanks JF. RIP.
The family of modem data transfer software back then had Kermit, xmodem, ymodem, zmodem, UUCP scripts, and pro-quality tools like QModem and Telix, as you mentioned. I'm sure I've left some other modem data transfer tools out. QModem had a certain polish and stability to it.
John and I met each other in the early days of BBSes and he put me in touch with the developer of a BBS called Colossus which was written in Turbo Pascal. This got me started as a developer and I met Jim Harrer through these interactions as we were trying to port BBSes to run on the IBM PCjr. Years later Jim started Mustang Software where we developed a commercial BBS called Wildcat. Jim and I stayed in touch with John the whole time which led to Mustang buying Qmodem. After John left Mustang he and I continued to stay in touch. I ran into him and his son at many of the conferences I spoke at for Microsoft. And most recently he and I were in touch trying to find all the components so we could compile Qmodem again.
In the early 1990s, QModem's workflow for offline inter-BBS email (in the QWK file format) allowed me to communicate several times weekly, much faster than physical mailed letters, to people all over the world that I would not have been able to do otherwise. It helped me curb depression, build my technical skills, and join a community whose members I am still in contact with over a third of a century later.
QModem was written in Turbo Pascal, and was noticeably faster than other terminal ("modem") programs on my aging 8086 hardware at the time. And knowing it was written in TP, and being a TP programmer myself, gave me hope for the possibility of writing fast code in a high-level language myself, which I eventually did.
I would not be as successful in my life today without the positive experiences made possible by QModem.
PS: Your father's choice of name for his shareware company, "The Forbin Project", was quite the hax0r flex at the time.
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John was personable and full of joy. He always loved a good joke. I remember the parties (not wild, we were pretty tame back then) we would have around the pool at his place. He was generous with his time.
The story of Qmodem itself was a bit different. Qmodem for DOS was a one-man shareware business and was John's pride and joy. It was clear that he poured everything into that program. It was finely tuned and just worked. Times were changing though, and people were calling for a Windows version. Unfortunately, John was not interested in learning Windows programming, so Scott Hunter (now at Microsoft), Dan Horn, and I built Qmodem for Windows. It was good, but it really never had the same level of polish that John's work did. It was "Qmodem" in name only.
After John left Mustang he also left Bakersfield and I lost touch with him. I'm sure he continued to make the people around him smile. Thank you for your time and contributions, John.
That was 30 years ago. I don't know who I talked to, but they were not too happy to have me on the phone lol. Sorry if that was you. and OP sorry about your father. I recall QModem well.
My condolences to you and your family during this time. I am grateful for John's work and the pathway he paved for so many into this world.
I remember lugging it all over to John’s basement where he helped us install Slackware Linux from a giant stack of 5 1/4 floppies he had.
Later, when John was running up a dial-up ISP in town, he let us park that server at his ISP, so we had a full Linux server of our own connected to a T1 with its own public IP address, and where we had root access and could experiment with running our own web and email servers and other such things. Back then in dial-up days, having a Linux server of our own on the Internet seemed unbelievable, and I will always be deeply appreciative to John for that opportunity.
Your father's contributions are immeasurable. Just reading the word "QModem" gave me an instant flashback to my youth. QModem was my gateway to the outside world.
I grew up way out in the country. I was the 80s and I was pretty isolated from technology and didn't even know anyone who cared about it at first. I started tinkering with our home PC, and I finally purchased a modem and figured out how to connect to BBSs. This changed my life. I had many sleepless nights as teenager, connecting everywhere I could. QModem was like a fancy car that drove me anywhere I wanted to go.
I became obsessed with learning and tweaking things. AT commands, autoexec.bat, QModem scripting. Whatever I could figure out to get maximum performance and fast download speeds. Because of Qmodem, I could download games, text files, and even talk with other people. This moment in time defined my future. I knew right then what I wanted to do with my life.
I owe thanks to your father and what he built for my wonderful career, and 40 years of enjoying technology. Without something as easy to learn and reliable as QModem, who knows what path my life would have taken.
Just the last several months I've been using Qmodem scripting to make thousands of modem calls over VoIP to test downloads to see which models and ATAs work best.
After I jumped back into the vintage BBS world I've been keeping an eye out for anything Qmodem. I recently just picked up a Qmodem manual on ebay that I wanted to scan and archive, because it's pretty rare to see.
Not too long ago I saw where John had posted to a FB group he was working on a new DOS version of Qmodem, my first interaction with him. I was excited to see it be worked on again and hoped to see the new version. Sad to see him go.
This is great. That someone is still using this software meaningfully to this day.-
ATH0.
In the early 1990s, QModem's workflow for offline inter-BBS email (in the QWK file format) allowed me to communicate several times weekly, much faster than physical mailed letters, to people all over the world that I would not have been able to do otherwise. It helped me curb depression, build my technical skills, and join a community whose members I am still in contact with over a third of a century later.
QModem was written in Turbo Pascal, and was noticeably faster than other terminal ("modem") programs on my aging 8086 hardware at the time. And knowing it was written in TP, and being a TP programmer myself, gave me hope for the possibility of writing fast code in a high-level language myself, which I eventually did.
I would not be as successful in my life today without the positive experiences made possible by QModem.
PS: Your father's choice of name for his shareware company, "The Forbin Project", was quite the hax0r flex at the time.
I would’ve never discovered UNIX or the pre-web internet without software like and including QModem.