40th Floor Software

A small company run as a part time concern by Cornel H. Huth that is based in San Antonio, Texas, USA, but prior to founding his own software company Mr Huth had contributed articles on QuickBASIC programming to fanzines and a few print magazines. Started life as a developer of OS/2 multimedia related software including enhanced drivers and mixers for soundcards. Also sold a database engine for DOS and OS/2 called Bullet, that was intended for developers and used an industry standard .dbf file formats as database containers. Over time the company ported the Bullet engine to a number of other operating systems and added front end support to a number of popular development packages.

No one appears to know what exactly happened, or why, but one day in 1998 or 99 the 40th Floor website was gone and had been replaced with a strange rant directed towards OS/2, IBM and their own customers, that was later removed and replaced by a blank page for about a year. When the website re-appeared the company had not only removed any mention of OS/2 from the site and removed all OS/2 related software and documentation as well even though support and listings for all other operating systems remained, but Mr Huth had actually taken the time out to go through the documentation of his other software and remove any sideways mention of OS/2 from them as well, this from a company that was pretty much an OS/2 specialist a year earlier. In addition all resellers of his products were instructed to remove OS/2 software from their catalogues and any e-mail requests for support for products already purchased either got ignored or responded to in what can only be referred to as a snarky or even bizarre manner, with even those that needed replacement executables/packages due to disk failures, corruption or similar getting the same treatment.

2006 re-appearance
In an almost surreal move, after having for seven years answered requests for purchases of their products with anything from silence to outright hostility there suddenly appears on the 40th Floor website a link in an extra small typeface size that simply stated "Back catalog" that was probably missed by most that did visit it. And there the company was offering all their OS/2 software for sale in what they described as a "Tire Fire software sale". If you associate a "fire sale" with discounts you are sorely mistaken since they were now all being offered at considerably higher prices than they had been when last listed, Bullet licenses were 250 USD for instance but they had been USD 149 previously. But no support documents available and in fact the website stated that the software was only provided as is, and no support of any kind would be available and "All sales are final".

But it was the relative strangeness of the offer of software that had seen no development for a decade that made it all the more intriguing, with the exception of some of the mixers, all of the application the company had offered had since been replaced with better freeware and open source options, the mixers were all for old ISA hardware that had been out of the market for six to twelve years, even the company's best product in the form of the Bullet database engine had not only been caught up with in most respects by free and open source products such as SQLite but mostly surpassed as well and any developer long since given up on contacting the company anyway.

So what you basically got was a 2006 webpage with a white fixed width typeface on a black background like it was 1993 all over again, offering you software from 1997 at 1982 prices, with a promise that in no circumstances would you get your money back even if the author did not actually manage to locate a copy of the software to send to you, all from a vendor who had for the last seven years refused to ship even software products people had already paid for. Offensive really, if it was not for the fact that the site implied that this was all done as a favour to people, which, frankly made the whole episode deeply comical.

OS/2 products

 * Bullet - Database engine for developers
 * Validate - Database integrity checker
 * Bullet/REXX
 * XG-DSP

Links

 * Homepage