PCFirst page

In the spring of 1998, a friend introduced me to Avi Urban, formerly of Apple Computer and Steam Communications to hear about a new idea of his.  The idea was for a utility program that would migrate programs, settings, and data from an old computer to a newly purchased computer.  I didn't want to be in the "utiility" business, but this idea did seem to have a lot of merit and could potentially be very useful to computer manufacturers.

Of course, my development methodology was to use HTML-hosted pages with embedded script and COM objects and the added advantage that this gave was that the system could be deployed from the internet.  This meant that we could be in the "service" business instead of the "product" business and that was appealing to Avi.

After some hesitation, I signed on and started working.   My first attempt was to catalog a bunch of applications, tracking their files and registry settings in several databases, which could then be applied to migrate the application.   What I found was that the installation of many software apps was very complex and did very different things based on the installation parameters.  Rather than trying to catalog all the installation parameters of every application, I tried a different approach; rather than an "inclusive" move where we determined what to move, I would move everything except what was known to conflict on the target computer.  The first attempts at this were unbelievably successful so we pursued this avenue, starting in December of 1998.  The system was then enhanced with better web content, and much of the processing was moved to a server-side application which I wrote in Java (as a DCOM object!).  The client was generalized to download and run a server-generated script and things were working great.   Some other developers came on board to enhance the communication infrastructure, which was previously limited to a TCP/IP network and now works with parallel cables and special USB connections.

After the infrastructure was working pretty well, I moved onto the content development.   This consisted of many tables of application names and file descriptions that we could use to isolate which applications were installed on each computer.   Since new computers typically come with some "pre-installed" applications, I worked on algorithms to match up the paths between app versions and merge the applications.

Around August, 2000, our site went live (with free migrations) and a few people tried it.  In November, a shopping cart was added and we charged about $50 for the migration service.  In January, the company ran out of cash and frantic attempts to get a buyer or backer were unsucessful.  In April 2000, the assets were purchased by Fusion One.   By October, they wanted to get rid of it and the company was repurchased (for debt) by some of the former management team.   After struggling for another year or so, there isn't really much left.

However, the site is still up and I assume the service is still available at www.pcfirst.com.