The Story of Decoder

Decoder was born sometime in 1996. I was teaching Introduction to Personal Computing at Colorado State University. I was training the lab assistants in how to use Microsoft Excel to produce graphs. I had an idea to pull data from the CSU Usenet server and display a graph in Excel that showed what percentage of CSU Usenet activity was copyright violations in the form of Usenet message attachments. Sadly, it was a poor example as well over 99% of the CSU Usenet traffic was binary files. While that statistic was no good for an example graph in Excel, it did give me an idea for the shareware program I was thinking about writing.

It turned out that Macintosh users, and especially AOL users, had a difficult type extracting binary attachments from e-mail and newsgroup messages. Decoder was born.

Over the years, Etresoft has received many referrals from much larger companies. We provided the software and support that some of the largest companies in the world couldn’t.

Decoder itself evolved significantly over the years. It started out as one of the few programs that could extract Base-64 encoded attachments. Today, it can decode a large number of various encoding formats.

Internally, Decoder is quote sophisticated. It makes extensive use of templatized C++ code and highly efficient iostream filters. Decoder is cross-platform, running on MacOS X (both PowerPC and Intel), the old MacOS, and Windows. Again, not too bad for a shareware program.

The Future of Decoder

Decoder isn’t nearly as popular as it was in the late ’90s. Most people either have no problem with binary attachments anymore or they have so much spam they have given up. Decoder still has a market for people who need to decode obscure file formats and need to do it thousands of times a day. Of course, Etresoft will continue to support Decoder and release bug fixes. But after ten years, we’re ready for some new software.