Corey Kosak here. A friend told me this was trending on Hacker News. Ask me anything LOL. Many of the people mentioned in the article are still around so I'll let them know this is happening. :-)
Were you also involved in making Music Shop? I loved that program as well, and I can still hum some of the tunes that were included with it, like Kajun Klog, Oogie Boogie and the various arrangements of classical repertoire.
When I first find out you can print a single desain over multiple pages (banners), my mind was blown. Me and my friends then went quite wild with it.
Thanks again. Much appreciated.
The credit is due to David and Marty but there's also an interesting backstory. As I understand it, the prototype that David & Marty first brought to Br0derbund was a "Greeting Disk". As in "Wouldn't it be fun for people to be able to make a dynamic, custom greeting disk that they can give to their friends to boot on their computer?" A great idea really, but perhaps a little ahead of its time. I believe it was Br0derbund's Richard Whittaker who first suggested to them "how about printing instead?"
Not many people can say that they helped bring about a social and technological revolution with their work. You can (And the Porsche wasn't a bad reward, either!).
My point is that this scale meant that one person could write a program of publishable quality all by themselves. This would be borderline impossible today. I'm thinking of AAA video games and their enormous development costs. It's still possible to do some quirky or cult products (like agar.io or homestuck or whatever) that could be the work of one person.