This is a rather odd thing for me to have been able to buy but I found somebody selling a lot of disks for five such dealers, all dated 1989-1990, and I thought it was weird enough that I should give it a shot. In the end it was basically exactly what I expected. This is, genuinely, software for boat dealers. There's not a lot to go over here but I just think it's neat and want to present it as "here's what using a computer to do business was like".
When you launch BOAT-SOFT you're greeted with this incredibly 80s splash screen upon launch:
There's four companies involved in the making of BOAT-SOFT:
- Microsoft you know; in this case they made QuickBasic which this is apparently programmed in.
- Friday Systems is I believe the actual author/developer. They appear to still exist and today they advertise software for car dealers so it seems likely that's the same one.
- DALCOMP (appears to be stylized in all caps) appears to be the publisher. It looks like they went out of business by the late 80s or early 90s but I can't find any records on this easily.
- "The Software Bottling Company of New York" has a copyright that appears only in the binary, not in the UI, and they likewise disappeared around the mid 90s. What role did they play in this software? Well,
I removed a phone number from the screenshot since it's long dead anyway. But no, it's not actually a printer problem, this thing expects a copy protection dongle. Since Friday Systems still exists I leaned on the local academic fair use wizard to get me in. Thanks to that wizard's assistance we can see the main menu:
This thing has a powerful aesthetic. It also has the name of the original dealer that this copy was made for in the top center, so I blanked that out too as that company appears to also still exist. This is, however, literally software for selling boats. Literally literally. And that mostly means it is a collection of heartpoundingly exciting finance forms.
There's not much I have to say about these, aside from I still love the aesthetic. Some of the forms however are hardcoded to specific corporate contracts with companies that also still exist, so I'm not going to be showing any of those. I also won't be distributing this at all for this reason on top of Friday Systems still existing--it'd be a giant pain to properly anonymize this thing, because in addition to all these named strings (there's addresses too!) it's across several executables, as BOAT-SOFT was distributed as BOATSOFT.EXE itself (the splash screen), BAC.COM (a backup utility), FNI.EXE (the main menu and some of the forms), FORMS1.EXE through FORMS3.EXE (forms, natch), INVENT.EXE (inventory), UTILITY.EXE (backup/etc. operations), and WRITE.EXE (a letter writer for form letters, but form letters about boats; it's actually pretty decent for the time). All of these except the first two have all the hardcoded names/etc. and they share a decent amount of code. But of course every dealer's copy of e.g. FNI.EXE was different, as for software with this few customers it's often easier to just have a custom build for every customer than just build the generic case.
Back to the main menu the one option worth calling out is "BUYER EDUCATION". This is so you can educate them on how much money they can save by buying a boat from you. For example, did you know owning a boat is cheaper than owning a TV? It's true!
At least it's true for this completely made up example. I've never bought a boat, much less in 1989, I have no idea how much any of this cost. The Dishwasher/TV/Copier values are pre-filled, for what that's worth. I suspect "cost of service contract" was supposed to be "lifetime cost" not "monthly cost" but again, never bought a boat.
There's also one comparing gas mileage to your old boat that you apparently own:
So I guess this made up example isn't a great thing to show the customer. Also boy the number of times as a kid I got corrected for using "present" instead of "current" feels slightly vindicated seeing this software doing the same thing.
And there's this MORTGAGE COMPARISON screen:
I'd like to note that I put in "1000" for mortgage payment, it showing 6000 (the value for boat loan amount) is a bug in BOAT-SOFT. The punchline of course is the line at the bottom: the dealer makes all their money on finance plans, so their goal is to convince you to finance the boat by showing you how much money you can save doing that. There's another one showing you a comparison to a "high interest savings account" but that combination of words makes my millenial self sad so we're going to skip that (also it's basically the same as the mortgage one anyway).
That about covers it for BOAT-SOFT. It's very mundane software, but computers were and still are used heavily for very mundane things, and that's worth celebrating just as much as games. The software itself has some issues, namely it's missing bounds checks in a lot of places so it's not hard to get it to attempt a division by zero at which point it just exits and drops you back at the main menu. And the bug with the mortgage screen above. But it's pretty capable for what it is and it's wild how fast this responds even on an era appropriate system compared to how everything these days takes 5 seconds to load 20MB of javascript to do the same thing. On a 25MHz 486 it's basically instant except for I/O delays when switching executables or accessing its inventory/etc. data files.
So the next time you go to buy a boat, just remember: don't WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO PAY CASH?