Bob Wallace

Bob Wallace (May 29, 1949 – September 20, 2002) was an American software developer, programmer and the ninth Microsoft employee. He was the first popular user of the term shareware, creator of the word processing program PC-Write, founder of the software company Quicksoft and an "online drug guru" who devoted much time and money into the research of psychedelic drugs. In 1996, Wallace and his wife, Megan Dana-Wallace, started Mind Books, a bookstore that offered publications about psychoactive plants and compounds. In 1998, they started the Promind Foundation, which helped support scientific research, public education, and harm reduction efforts related to psychedelics. Wallace also served on the Board of Directors for the Heffter Research Institute and helped financially support the most important organizations in the field, including the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), the Heffter Research Institute, Erowid (responsible for half of Erowid's funding from 2000–2002), DanceSafe, the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, EcstasyData, Black Rock Arts Foundation, and a number of other projects. wiki

"As a student at Brown University in the 1960's, he worked with a group of researchers led by Andries van Dam ...on a pioneering information age tool known as the file retrieval and editing system, or Fress. Although it was designed on a mainframe I.B.M. 360 computer, it would shape personal computing in the next three decades.

"He was one of the key designers of Fress, said Dr. Van Dam, who is now vice president for research at Brown. We would have these long arguments about what was good for the user. He had this very gentle flower child demeanor and philosophy.

"Many ideas that would become commonplace in personal computing and that would later lead to the development of the World Wide Web were invented by the Fress group at Brown and, separately, by researchers led by Douglas Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International, in Menlo Park, Calif." [1]