20 Years of Awesome
published on
BBEdit turns 20 years old and that is well worth sharing a story.
We've had your back for 20 years. We were first on OS X. First on Intel Macs. First day in the Mac App Store. And there's lots more to come.
In early 1998 when I started working on the web I didn't know much about it, nor did I have a clue of any programming languages or how this all was supposed to work. I was curious and wanted to find out. All I knew was the stuff that was written in the Mac Bible, which I bought and read twice, even before I got my first Mac. At the end of the book it mentioned something about the Internet, how it was made up of HTML pages and I then purchased a copy of Dreamweaver 2 and Fireworks 1 to tap into the world of building websites.
I can't remember how exactly I came across BBEdit shortly after, but I bought a copy of BBEdit 5.1 at a Fry's Electronics. That day I fell in love. I fell in love with a clean and simplistic interface, a piece of software that 13 years later turns out to be one of the best apps that is and has been out there since I've been in. And today, I'm still a proud user.
BBEdit taught me a lot of things, which I would have never dreamt about before. I learnt to code, HTML, CSS and later PHP. Not only did I learn to code, but BBEdit for sure helped me to understand more of what I was doing, since it was all about handcoding, where others were building websites with their WYSIWYG editors.
By joining the BBEdit mailing list, I also gained a lot of knowledge by just reading others users posts and their incredibly useful answers. BBEdit is also the reason why at some point I started to learn about Regular Expressions. I'm not an expert now, but I know enough to have them make my life so much easier from time to time.
It is now 2012, BBEdit turned 20 years old and I consider this one of the most useful tools I use every day. It has proven as rock-solid software, it's state-of-the-art, always one of the first products to adopt new technologies from Apple and the customer support is just superb.
Happy Birthday to Awesome. Happy Birthday to BBEdit. And congratulations and a big thank you to Bare Bones Software for giving birth and committing to delivering software that doesn't suck. And never did. Cheers!