In the mid to late seventies,
David Tebbutt was a trainer, then a project manager, at ICL. His secret organizational
weapon was based on the mind-mapping technique popularized by Tony Buzan, although
David's maps often covered an entire wall. His maps were a combination of his
own thoughts and material culled from his background reading. It was not ideal,
because paper was such an inflexible medium. It lacked the intelligence to know
when something was already in the map and couldn't easily be reorganised. David
went on to become editor of Personal Computer World, still using vast maps but
nurturing ideas to put them on the personal computer. He had also had close skirmishes
with bill-of-materials processing in his previous life as an IT manager. These
two strands, plus a fascination with how the mind works, led to the invention
of BrainStorm. He started the design in 1980 and finished the programming in
1981. He used it as his personal productivity aid in his latter days at Personal
Computer World and during the early days as technical director of Caxton Software.
When his partners at Caxton saw it in action, they decided to publish it. A superb
programmer, Mike Liardet, was responsible for making David's efforts acceptable
to the outside world. The finished product was launched in November 1983. UK
sales soared for a few years before turning downwards as first CP/M then DOS
fell from grace. Publishing rights reverted to David and Mike in 1988. Adrian
Evans and Andy Redfern each contributed significant improvements to the DOS version
but in 1996, it was clearly time to shut up shop.
In 1994, David met up
with one Marck Pearlstone, a professional programmer, who he'd first met in 1981
while researching an article for Personal Computer World. The upshot of the 1994
meeting was that they decided to apply their considerable combined experience
to building a Windows version of BrainStorm. They decided to subsidize BrainStorm
development with real work - Marck by programming and David by writing and teaching.
Little did they realize that the project would consume much of their spare time
ever since. They are both fanatical about giving users the: best quality, fastest
speed of operation, least intrusive, and most useful software (David had been
programming since 1966 and Marck since 1973.)
As luck would have it,
the internet, the world-wide-web and email became massively popular while they
were developing BrainStorm. The advent of HTML, Java and JavaScript meant that
BrainStorm models could be easily published and shared with people who don't
use BrainStorm itself. Paper could never reveal the richness of the contextual
links that are an intrinsic part of every BrainStorm model. The internet also
gave them the perfect base from which to spread BrainStorm throughout the world.
And the shareware publishing model means that every customer can 'try before
they buy'. In 2000, David´s son Daniel Tebbutt, by now a demon programmer in
his own right, contributed to the project by writing all the Java, JavaScript
and HTML web-publishing elements of BrainStorm.
Marck and David worked together
on design and overall strategy. Marck programmed BrainStorm while David developed
the website and the documentation. BC4, Inc. is responsible for the business
and communication.
