TI99ers Hall of Fame - Dennis and Chris Faherty

It can quite accurately be said that Dennis Faherty and son Chris Faherty spawned industries within the TI99er community with their creation of TI-Base and TI-Artist. Each product met a critical need within the 99/4A user base, and met it so well that they became 'standards' which other authors wrote to in support. Working and collaborating with each other they became household names to most of the TI99er community.

Chris, at the age of 16 while a high school student, started work on TI-Arist. Chris credits Bill Gronos' Editor Assembler articles, along with the Editor/Assembler documentation that taught him 9900 Assembler. According to Bill Gaskill, the 1985 release of TI-Artist is perhaps the most successful post 'October 1983 bailout' product introduction the TI99er community has ever seen. This wildly popular and fun to use drawing program truly 'set the standard' for artist/drawing programs in the TI99er community to this day. No less than two dozen TI-Artist compatible applications and support products found their way onto the retail market compliments of TI-Artist.

Applications developed for use with TI-Artist include:

Artist's Companion #1 throught #7
Designer Labels (distributed by Texaments for Nameloc Software)
TI-Artist Plus! Pak Fonts, Frames and Fun Guidelines
TI-Artist Graphics Support (distributed by Texaments for Nameloc Software)
GIF Mania. By Barry Boone. Part of the TI-Artist productivity software series
The Missing Link. By Harry Wilhem. (in particular by his program TIA+TIW that appeared in MICROpendium)

Other programs authored by Chris included:

Floppy-Copy a program for formatting and copying
EPROM-It a hardware/software project with Bill McAdams
Chris did the software for Desk Top Publisher v1.3. Initial work was done by Galen A Read and then he was assisted by Chris and Ed Johnson.
The DEMO program for Myarc XB II, Level IV.
Display Master, a program to allow user designed screen presentations

The 1988 release of Dennis Faherty's TI-Base 1.0 and the subsequent increased-feature-updates through 1990's TI-Base 3.02 provided the impetus for many a newsletter tutorial by talented users who freely shared in their enjoyment of the power and utility of this great data base manager. According to Dennis, "When I developed TI-Base, I had already used Dbase and felt that something like that would be appropriate for the TI." He was so correct in that statement.

Some of the applications that were developed for use with TI-Base include:

99/4A User Groups Database - Andi Wise - TI-Base translation by Bill Gaskill
Adventure Database - MS Express - Mickey Cendrowski
Cartridge Collection Kit database - Bill Gaskill
CHECKtrak - Texaments - Bill Gaskill
Command File Editor - Bill Gaskill using Brad Snyder's 40-Column Utilities
Equipment Inventory - Bill Gaskill
Events Calendar - Bill Gaskill
FilmLib - Notung Software - Ken Gilliland
Genealogy Plus - MS Express - Mickey Cendrowski
GEnie Index - Bill Gaskill
Instance-X - Wesley R. Richardson - converts TI-Artist Instances to TI-Base usable file
Mailing List Manager - Texaments - Bill Gaskill
Membership Manager/Newsletter Exchange - Bill Gaskill
MICROdex for TI-Base - Texaments - Bill Gaskill
NAMES database in Mailing List Manager format - Bill Gaskill
PR-Base to TI-Base Converter - Terrence Murphy
Public Records Database - Dick Beery
Resource Index - Bill Gaskill
The Organizer - Texaments - Bill Gaskill
The TI-Base User Newsletter - Bill Gaskill
TI-99/4A Software Database - MS Express - Mickey Cendrowski
TI-Base Tutorial Column in MICROpendium - Bill Gaskill
TI-Base Tutorials in Northcoast 99ers User Group Newsletter - Martin Smoley
TI-Base Tutorials in Paris, TX User Group Newsletter - Jerry Keisler
Publications Index - Texaments - Bill Gaskill

A series of TI-Base articles were also published in MICROpendium from June 1990 to July 1991 in support of TI-Base and a third-party TI-Base User Newsletter was published by Bill Gaskill around the same time. Thanks to its unique flexibility, TI-Base also spawned a series of commercial applications that were marketed through Texaments, giving the TI-99/4A user a look at what could be done within the TI-Base application, thanks to the talent of TI-Base creator Dennis Faherty.

Dennis also created TI-Sort, a popular, fast and flexible tool to manipulate data in TI-Base and other formats.

Chris and Dennis created their own company named Inscebot, Inc., a Delaware Limited Liability Corporation, to sell their products. Chris says "I chose the name because I didn't want to do a trademark search. It was a word I made up, which reminded me of a video game I used to play in Shakey's Pizza."

Dennis, who has been happily married for 47 years is the father of three children and now enjoys a life of retirement.

Chris, who is unmarried, lives in Florida. Since 1994 he has done programming work under contract for various companies including PRISM Data Systems, Firestone Building Products, Intel, Think Outside, Dejima, Sendia, and most recently Salesforce.com. Initially done with PC desktop programming, but with the purchase in 1998 of a PalmPilot he began mobile development and has developed applications on PalmOS, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and small bits on iPhone.