In Remembrance - Bob Zale

[Brad]

A Sad Day for PowerBASIC

Bob Zale, founder of PowerBASIC - who has had a long, productive career with compilers - passed away on the 6th of November.

http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pbforums/showthread.php?t=51887

[hutch--]

I am genuinely sorry to hear this, I have known Bob Zale for years.

[jj2007]

I've only once had a contact to him, but I feel sad, too - he was a man with a vision, and he gave the programming community one of the rare good alternatives to the mainstream. RIP Bob.

[dedndave]

a shame
he will be remembered in the world of programming

[frktons]

Sad news. His PowerBASIC gave me a new opportunity to learn
some computer stuff. RIP Bob.

[Gunther]

Sad news; I've known Bob since the CompuServe times in the 80s.

Gunther

[hutch--]

Just a note for those folks who did not know Bob all that well, Bob was an exceptional assembler language programmer who had been creating basic compilers since the late 1980s where he took Turbo Basic and developed it into PowerBASIC. His compilers were all hand crafted in assembler with the earlier ones being in 16 bit assembler and his more recent 32 bit compilers written in 32 bit assembler.

Having worked in a couple of Bob's beta teams for his later 32 bit compilers you learned very quickly the range of Bob's tech savvy, massive work load capacity and flexibility as a developer yet he also had a good sense of humour, tended to be reasonably patient in the face of silly questions (some of mine included) and was more than willing to defend his work against the occasional idiot that had little grasp of how much he knew.

His product will continue to be developed as he made provision to keep his work and company going yet like many I am sorry to see his passing, it eventually happens to all but it is a great shame to lose someone of this capacity.

[farrier]

Here is an interview with Bob Zale, I found thru a link from a CodeProject article.

Oddly, PowerBasic.com seems to have stopped responding!

farrier

[hutch--]

Hmmmm,

Site is dead from here as well. lets hope its just a temporary server glitch.

[MichaelW]

From here everything leads to a new powerbasic.com website that as far as I can tell has nothing to do with PowerBASIC. I was not a PowerBASIC fan but I hate to see this sort of thing going on.

[dedndave]

i saw that interview on tech republic
here it is...

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/programming-and-development/interview-with-powerbasic-founder-bob-zale/4857

it seems it was rather recent

[hutch--]

The site is still there, here is ping of the site.


#    IP address       Host name                                Round trip time
1    96.254.223.74                                                 245 ms
2    96.254.223.74                                                 243 ms
3    96.254.223.74                                                 243 ms
4    96.254.223.74                                                 246 ms
5    96.254.223.74                                                 244 ms