Beagle Bros Software Online

Back in the 1980's, there were tons of software companies producing software and fighting piracy by creating some of the most expensive copy protection schemes known to man.  One company bucked that trend and made all of their software intesting, fun and copy protection free.  That company was Beagle Bros.

Beagle Bros was based in San Diego and produced some of the most useful Apple ][ utilities ever produced.  Their disks and programs were all copyable and they even encouraged making backups of your disks.  While their programs were very intesting and useful, it was also their graphics and catalogs which drew even a larger fan base than their software.

The overall theme of the Beagle Bros software was the 1800's type inventions with the 1980's type production.   That meant that all of their graphics looked like something that had come from a completely different era but the items listed were given names of items from the computing world of the 1980's.  Each catalog had tons of little one and two line programs that, while they appeared to be pure garbage in the listings, when you typed them in, they actually worked.

Many people collected just the catalogs and the tip books and now all of these items along with the software are online again 20 years later.  The Beagle Bros Museum (http://stevenf.com/beagle/) started off the idea of maintaining the idea and concept of the company in a web site and then The Beagle Bros Software Repository (http://beagle.applearchives.com) went a step further by getting permission from all of the original authors and putting the company's software online.

While many companies have come and gone in the software realm, this company and the legacy they created have lasted 30 years and continue to dominate the vintage Apple computing realm.