ArmahSoft was conceived around 1983ish.
It was in the kitchen of my friend, Andrew Heap, that we came up with the idea of writing our own games for the ZX Spectrum and calling the company ArmahSoft. The name was made up of our initials with the obligatory "Soft" after it to show we were going to do some serious software.
Unfortunately, while we could both program BASIC on the Spectrum, neither of us had any idea where to start writing a game and knew nothing about assembly language. Any games written back then had to be done in assembly to get the speed required.
The idea of ArmahSoft soon died a death when we realised we weren't going to be rich and famous games designers.
In 2001 the company I worked for started to use some new software that had a scripting language based on BASIC. This fuelled my desire to start writing programs for PCs. I acquired VB6 and started coding my own small programs. I didn't do as much as I would have liked but I did write a screensaver that displayed pictures as a slideshow.
In 2007 the company I now worked for acquired the same software as the first company had. The same scripting language was used and it got me going again. This time, however, I needed to write something that would allow us to dial a number from the software without using assisted TAPI. I wanted something that would be a single exe without a runtime. That excluded VB6. I searched around until I came across Emergence Basic (now Ionic Wind Basic). It did everything I wanted and was free at the time so I started coding in it. There are some examples on the downloads page including the dialer I came up with.
In 2010 I decided to expand on my programming knowledge and, having struggled with C and C++ in the past, I decided it was time to try again. I found a good tutorial on the web and started trying to rewrite the dialer (also on the downloads page).
I re-wrote the dialer program and it performed even better than the previous version. I then decided to have a go at rewriting a Boggle game I had done in Emergence.
Whilst writing all these programs over the years I have always
branded them as ArmahSoft as a reminder of the idea Andy and I had back in our
youth. ArmahSoft is just me now but the original sentiment lives on.