SpiSoft, Inc.
The dreams of a small child at the dawn of the digital age. Take the WayBack machine to 1997 and find a highschool freshman in Michigan, slightly ahead of his time. His name: Jeremy R. Hilts.
About Me
While, technically, I began programming on my C64 in 5th grade, the whole mess didn’t begin to spiral out until around 7th grade with my family’s first Packard Bell. I had high hopes and dreams, at that time, of writing lots of interesting programs that did lots of interesting things; alas, with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, the secrets of the digital universe were not easily found. I don’t recall through which means I found it, but QuickBasic (or QBasic) changed my life.
It started with simple programs that controlled my modem. I could dial out, listen for a connection, transfer files, and annoy the hell out of anyone who called me. It was an interesting day that I discovered how annoying a simple ATA command was. My first “application”, if you will, was KPhone (or Kill Phone) which I used on telemarketers.
Around 1998, I was highly involved in the IRC scene and soon found fellow code enthusiasts. A friend turned me on to Visual Basic; and, soon, my first windows applications were built. The first would be a windows version of KPhone. Then a simple color-picker-to-hex-code converter. I soon became bored with writing simple utilities and began to dabble in the client/server arena — starting with an IRC client. Why use someone else’s when you can write your own?
I also maintained a number of websites (which is what the hex-code converter was for). Whoa, wait a sec. Websites? Why does an 8th grader need a website? Well, because they’re fun to make. Before the days of XHTML and CSS, there was plain-old HTML with table and frame based layouts. Being a Notepad Purist, I wrote all of my HTML by hand. With the advent of WYSIWYG editors, every Joe Shmoe with a computer could write a website; but I was a pretty cool 8th grader with a web presence back when most companies hadn’t realized the importance of a web presence.
In 2008 I moved to Washington, DC to begin my career in professional web development… it’d been a long time coming.
About SpiSoft, Inc.
According to the archives (rather, an old website that I made), SpiSoft officially began on New Year’s Eve (1997-1998) after losing a hard drive and all of my previously-written code. How’s that for new beginnings? The domain name was registered in 2001 and the website existed on a FreeBSD machine that lived in my bedroom.
Since my humble beginnings, many applications, utilities and websites have been written. Off the top of my head, I can count (not including anything that I’ve done professionally, and the 100′s of small things that I seem to have forgotten about):
- 3 IRC clients
- 1 IRC server
- 1 MUD client
- 1 MUD server
- 1 NES Emulator with DirectX GUI
- 2 photography websites
- 1 forum module
- 1 biorhythm calculator
- 1 Facebook front-end for said biorhythm calculator