PHILIP CONROD & KIDWARE SOFTWARE 40+ YEAR HISTORY
1982 – Philip Conrod graduated from Warren Tech with a certificate in Computer Programming for Business and co-founded BibleByte with his parents to publish a series of applications and games. Lou Tylee originally founded KIDware in 1982 to publish a series of non-violent learning games for kids. Computer names like the Radio Shack TRS-80, Commodore PET, Apple II, Texas Instruments 99/4A, Atari 400, Coleco Adam, Sinclair Timex, and the IBM PC Jr, were finding their way to market. We quickly expanded our learning games to other popular micro-computer platforms.
1995 – KIDware publishes our first college level computer programming curriculum which was used to teach Visual Basic v4 to beginning programming students at the University of Washington. The curriculum and writing style would become the inspiration for all our future computer programming tutorials.
1998 – The new www.KidwareSoftware.com website officially launched on the rapidly growing World Wide Web to help market and distribute our newly developed Microsoft Visual Basic programming tutorials for Windows 95/98. LEARN VISUAL BASIC 5 was written as a beginning Visual Basic programming course for colleges and universities. VISUAL BASIC FOR KIDS 5 and BEGINNING VISUAL BASIC 5 were also developed as beginning Visual Basic programming tutorials for kids and teens. All of our programming tutorials were updated to Visual Basic 6 later that year. We also finished upgrading all of our KIDware Learning Games for the Microsoft Windows platform.
1999 – The VISUAL BASIC 5/6 AND DATABASES tutorial was published as a college-level course for Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Databases.
2002 – Microsoft launches a new version of Visual Basic called Visual Basic .NET. Philip takes the first official .NET Microsoft Certification course in July to determine what major changes needed to be made for the VB 5 Apps using the new Visual Basic. NET Framework paradigm. VISUAL BASIC .NET FOR KIDS and BEGINNING VISUAL BASIC .NET were both written for the new Visual Basic .NET 2002 development environment.
2003 – JAVA FOR KIDS, BEGINNING JAVA, LEARN JAVA GUI APPLICATIONS were all written for the popular Sun Java development environment.
2004 – VISUAL C# .NET FOR KIDS and BEGINNING VISUAL C# .NET were written for the Visual C# .NET 2002 environment. VISUAL BASIC .NET AND DATABASES was developed as an college-level course for Visual Basic .NET using Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Databases
2005 – LEARN VISUAL BASIC was updated to Visual Basic 2005. VISUAL J# EXPRESS FOR KIDS and BEGINNING VISUAL J# was released for Microsoft Visual J# Express.
2007 – KID GAMES WITH VISUAL BASIC EXPRESS was written for Microsoft Visual Basic Express 2005. KID GAMES WITH VISUAL C# EXPRESS was written for Microsoft Visual C# Express 2005. LEARN VISUAL C# was developed for Visual C# 2005. VISUAL BASIC AND DATABASES and VISUAL C# AND DATABASES were both written as intermediate college-level courses for Visual Basic and C# 2005 applications using Microsoft Access and SQL Databases. Lou writes an article on Visual Basic Express forms development for the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN). Lou also hosted a virtual MSDN Online Webcast: Introduction to Windows Forms Applications Using Visual Basic Express Edition (Level 200) on Microsoft’s MSDN World Wide Events.
2009 – The VISUAL J# EXPRESS FOR KIDS and BEGINNING VISUAL J# courses were retired as the Visual J# language was formally discontinued by Microsoft in 2007.
2010 – MICROSOFT SMALL BASIC FOR KIDS, BEGINNING MICROSOFT SMALL BASIC, KID GAMES WITH MICROSOFT SMALL BASIC, and HOME PROJECTS WITH MICRSOSOFT SMALL BASIC were all written for the new Microsoft Small Basic development environment for beginners created by Vijaye Raji. Microsoft writes a nice review on our programming tutorials on their Small Basic Developer blog here. We also acquired the re-publishing rights to several classic BASIC computer programming books that were originally written and edited by David H. Ahl and Edward H. Carlson and updated them to Microsoft Small Basic. We also published the very first DEVELOPER’S REFERENCE GUIDE TO MICROSOFT SMALL BASIC. We launch a new https://www.ComputerScienceForKids.com website to showcase our new Microsoft Small Basic Tutorials. Our Microsoft Visual Studio tutorials were updated to Visual Studio 2010 Professional Edition and Visual Studio Express 2010. We also updated all of our remaining Java courses for Oracle Java v6 and Xinox JCreator v5.
2011 – Microsoft licensed our new Microsoft Small Basic Programming Tutorials and published portions of them on the Microsoft Developer Network website as part of the Microsoft Small Basic 1.0 launch event. You can see our Small Basic Programming textbooks highlighted on Microsoft’s website here. We discontinued all our old VB6 KIDware Learning Games and decide to focus completely on our computer programming tutorials and textbooks. Ingram Content Group is selected as our global paperback textbook distributor for all of our new textbooks and they become available in bookstores like Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository, BooksAMillion, and Walmart.
2012 – We updated all our Visual Studio tutorials to support Visual Studio 2012. We also updated our Oracle Java tutorials to Version 7 of the Java Development Kit and add a color printed edition.
2013 – We updated all our Visual Studio tutorials to support Microsoft Visual Studio 2013.
2014 – We started working on a new Unity 3D C# Adventure Game Programming Tutorial using C# and Unity 3D.
2015 – We updated all our Java tutorials to support Oracle Java JDK 8 and switched to the NetBeans 8 Integrated Development Environment (IDE). We also updated our Microsoft Visual Studio Tutorials to the new Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition.
2016 – Kris Murray joins the tutorial writing team as a co-author on the new Unity 3D C# Game Programming Tutorial project. We also start working on a Unreal 4 Engine Medieval RPG Game Programming Template Tutorial using Unreal Engine Blueprints.
2017 – Microsoft highlighted our Developer’s Reference Guide to Microsoft Small Basic and our Beginning Microsoft Small Basic tutorial on their Small Basic Developer Blog.
2019 – We released the Visual Studio 2019 version of Learn Visual Basic, Learn Visual C#, Visual Basic & Databases, and Visual C# and Databases. We also expanded our offerings to include Cybersecurity training and consulting services to businesses, school districts and non-profit organizations as Philip is a Certified Infomation Security Manager (CISM) and a Certified PLTW Cybersecurity Instructor.
Today, our paperback textbook tutorials can be purchased through online book distributors and bookstores like:
