Thanks for sharing the sad, but not unexpected, news.
Besides being an all-around sterling character and wonderful personality, it's not an exaggeration to say that without John, A-Shell would never have reached commercial success. Not that he sold a tremendous number of systems, or developed much of the system code, but he purchased one of the very first copies, and then had the peculiar and endearing mindset of actually expecting it to work. Not just a little but one hundred percent.
You might wonder, who wouldn't? But in those early days, the idea of being able to emulate the AMOS environment on a PC (he started with a DOS version) was more of an exotic novelty than a reality. In fact, most of the early adopters were really just curious and more often than not, pleasantly surprised that it worked at all. But John figured that if we were selling it, it must be real, and we must be ready to support it. (That was the way he operated, and naturally expected others to as well.) He was a realist and knew that it was still wet behind the ears, but he had the vision to see the potential. To that end, he matter-of-factly and maybe even a bit too cheerfully sent me hundreds of detailed reports of bugs and missing features, almost on a daily basis for that first year or two.
I have to admit that there were times I may have wished that I hadn't sold him that first copy, but he won me over with his persistent attention to detail leavened with a sharp wit and sense of humor.
Without all of that feedback, his confidence that a production-quality release was within reach, his willingness to actually buy a few copies for sale back in 1993 (on a Novell network), and not to mention his ahead-of-the-times insistence on paying for support, I sincerely doubt that we would have stuck it out.
We owe him a debt of gratitude that can never be properly repaid.
