The company was located in
Brisbane, California. Published titles included games, educational and productivity programs. Among them were
Project Space Station,
Mr. TNT,
Turtle Graphics by David Malmberg, several
Jeff Minter games (Llamasoft), such as
Attack of the Mutant Camels,
Gridrunner,
Hes Games, and HesMon, Graphics BASIC, 64Forth (a
cartridge-based
Forth implementation), and the HesModem and HesModem II. The company was started by Jay Balakrishnan and Cy Shuster in 1980. The company was founded in Balakrishnan's apartment in
Los Angeles, where he took down the door to his bedroom, put it across two file cabinets, and used that as a desk for his development (winding the cables around the doorknob). With research into the
PET ROM, Balakrishnan wrote the first 8K 6502 Assembler, HESbal (HES Basic Assembler Language) in
BASIC, and an accompanying text editor, HESedit. Having HESbal allowed numerous creative follow-on products, such as HEScom, software and a user
port cable that allowed
VIC20 programs to be saved to a PET hard disk (since the first VIC20 didn't have a hard disk). Shuster soldered the HEScom cables in his garage and wrote HESlister, a print utility for BASIC programs, that he ported from a
TRS-80 Model I to the PET, to the VIC, and later to the
IBM PC. HESware published
OMNIWRITER, a
word processor for the
Commodore 64. Game writers
Lawrence Holland and
Ron Gilbert, who later worked for
LucasArts, started their careers at HES. ==Demise==