From: Mike Westerfield (BYTEWORKS) 
                                                                                                        
September 18, 2000
Time: 1:08 pm 
    
To: ALL
    
Hi all, 

I was recently asked about the possibility of putting all of the Byte Works'
products onto a collection CD. I have my doubts about whether such a thing would
sell enough to make it worth doing, but I promised to check.

What we're talking about would be a CD with all of the Byte Works programs, but
not the APDA programs. A few Byte Works programs would not be included because
of contractual arrangements. This includes ORCA/Disassembler, Talking Tools,
Ugly Duckling and Design Master. All of the other Byte Works products could be
on the CD, both the Apple II and Apple IIGS versions. This includes the ORCA
programming languages, the Quick Click productivity software and GSoft BASIC.
For a complete list, see http://www.byteworks.org.

Most of our documentation was done in Microsoft Word, and could be supplied in
Word format on the CD. Some of the Apple II software was done with some really
old word processors, and I probably can't recover the text in machine readable
format without more work that I am likely to put into this project. There is one
notable exception: Microsoft Word refuses to read the ORCA/C 2.0 documentation.
All I have is ASCII. It's possible, but a bit of work, to create PDF files.
Considering the number of programs involved, the work is not unsubstatial, so I
would have to expect a lot of response to justify that effort.

I could make printed documentation available as well, but that would cost a bit.

It's also barely possibly I might collect all of the source and make that
available on a separate release. That would require a license, signed in
advance, limiting the orders to those sent by mail.

With all of this in mind, if you are interested, please answer these questions:

1. Is Mac OS HFS OK for the format, or would you need a dual-platform
(Mac/Windows) format?

2. What is the best format for the documentation? The reasonably viable choices
are Word, PDF and ASCII.

3. Would you want the CD to contain Apple II disk images or simply folders? If
the CD contains disk images, what program should be used? Think about your
answer to #1!

4. Would it bother you that the CD was a CD-R and not a mass-produced CD? (It
would be in a nice jewel case with appropriate printed covers.)

5. How much would you pay for this product?

6. Would you me interested in source code? If so, how much additional would you
pay?


Mike Westerfield