Data Becker

I used to buy their shareware game diskettes (in Germany). They were in smallish colorful paper packaging, hanging in displays a bit like Lego polybags today, and they were everywhere. In every supermarket, in paper shops etc.

Data Becker also had lots of serious software, shareware and full versions. There were shelves full of it in electronics markets.

Also, some of the best PC books for amateurs were from Data Becker. I got one for Christmas that explained everything, from the hardware components to using MS DOS.

https://gitlab.com/amigasourcecodepreservation has quite a number of the old Data Becker / Abacus published books

For example: https://gitlab.com/amigasourcecodepreservation/amiga-graphic...

Slightly OT: An active family. I remember the company named Auto Becker, which turns out to be owned by the parents of the guys that started Data Becker: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_Becker

Data Becker Music Center, the first real MIDI composition software I ever used. Came with a pretty decent dead-tree printed manual. Hadn't thought about that one in a long time.

Profimat! Clicketyclicky 68000 Monitor/Debugger/Assembler for the Atari ST.

Bought it in person in that building pictured there.

Growing up in the German-speaking part of Europe, it was impossible to not know them if you were a nerd kid in the 90s - back when you could buy retail software (not only computer games) packaged in huge, shiny cardboard boxes and delivered on physical media (3.5" floppy disks and CD-ROM) at all the fancy computer stores around town and in malls.

I remember buying a Data Becker product for cold, hard-saved-up pocket money for use with what was my first (or was it my second? Hard to tell after the decades ;)) CD writer, it was named "DER GROSSE CD-KOPIERER" ("The great CD-copier", roughly). First thing I wanted to do was use it to make a backup copy of its own installation medium, a CD-ROM containing a win32 application of only a few MBytes in size, but with the medium having had more than its nominal max. capacity of 650MB "recorded" on it regardless. It did not support that, because recording more than that amount of data mandated the use of Disc-At-Once recording mode, which "DER GROSSE CD-KOPIERER" failed to implement. So they made their amazing(ly bad) software solution to copy CDs deliberately unable to copy the very CD that program was distributed on.

Needless to say, I never considered buying any of their products again after that.