I thought it would be interesting to find out what was being discussed two years ago in the Liberty Basic world.

The December 2000 Newsletter (NL0084) was edited by Cameron Arnott. The programmer's spotlight featured an enthusiastic young programmer named...Brandon Watts. Brandon contributed an article to that same issue on submitting your LB programs to the major shareware/freeware archives on the World Wide Web. The other featured article was by Richard Miller, entitled "Binary Searches". Richard discussed rapid ways to search for values in arrays that are already sorted.

To me, the most interesting part of the issue was Cameron's "Letter from the Editor". Cameron mentioned how three new beta releases of LB2 had been released in the month prior. We take 32-bit LB for granted now, but the advent of LB2 must have been very exciting.

Down further in his letter, Cameron provided a list of projects under development at that time:

Visual Liberty BASIC - An editor / development system for programming in Liberty BASIC
Liberty Basic Development Studio - An editor / development system for programming in Liberty BASIC
Cheetah - A programming language written in Liberty Basic
LB Web Browser - Written in Liberty Basic
Sprite maskers - Written to do Batch processing
FreeForms - GUI Window designers, painting programs and compactors
Games - Lots of them. Too many to mention here!

I suspect "FreeForms" developed into what we now call "FreeForm". I believe that Cheetah became a releasable product for Brandon. Some of the other items may have become completed projects also, but perhaps under different names. Others in the LB community will have to fill us in on how this little piece of history played out. (I used Year 2000 to catch up on sleep...)

The end of NL0084 gave readers valuable code snippets and attachments that had been posted in the LBNews group in November of 2000. Coding examples from Carl Gundel, David Drake, Alyce Watson, Brandon Watts, and Mitchell Kotler were all featured.

Wait! If I'm not mistaken, some of those people might still be around somewhere! Nah, must be my imagination...