History

As I recall, the first real line of code for MidWatch was written sometime in the summer of 1997 for another company . It was then called MidWatch as I have this unshakable habit of using nautical metaphors when I write code. That MidWatch was based on SourceSafe and through that project I became all too familiar with Visual Basic. I left that company in December of 1998 and was not able to win intellectual property rights from them when I left. I had offered to continue to support thier incarnation of MidWatch in exchange for rights to it. I had not even heard of open source in 1998, but apparently I was using the Cisco Case argument and I didn't know it. When I joined BMC Software Inc, (BMC Software Inc. where possible, is open source friendly) I had to build MidWatch from scratch having only my experience at the other company to work with.  At that time, I named the new engine "AengelB".

BMC had let me use a month or so to research writing the new Engine in C++, but my COM/ATL skills were still to weak to accomplish the task. I really wanted this engine written in C++, but getting throught the initial development on something this size, was simply too much, and BMC wanted a solution soon. BMC had already shown extra-ordinary patience with me, and it was time to produce. So did it in VB again.

On March 1st, 2000, my good friend, and mentor Dick Schoeller tossed me a photo copy of Cathedral and Bazzar for the first time. I had, for the past year been hearing some of our more geeky developers talk about open source, but it was still a mystery to me. I am a slow reader, so I closed my door and spent most of the day reading C&B. When I finshed the paper, I walked into Dick's office and in a rather groggy voice asked, "So you think AengelB should go open source?"  Dick smiled, handed me The Magic Cauldron, and said "it's something to think about."

On my way back to my office, I passed my manager, Fred Ziegler, and I said, "I'm reading these Eric Raymond papers..." 
Fred lit up and said, "oh, of Catherdral and Bazaar fame!" 
Surprised, I asked, "why does everyone know about this stuff except me?" 
He said, "because you're an NT developer."

Rather than taking that as a *nix bigot snipe at a developer whose environment may soon be on the endangered species list, I took it as an opportunity to join the cool tribe. So I read and read until I became convinced that AengelB was a decent open source candidate, and I figured I'd try it even though I don't know anything about open source.

Thanks to Fred and Dick, I got the encouragement I needed, and enough support to help the BMC decision makers allow the release of this code. The copyright disclaimer was given April 13th, 2000.

Actually, it was because it was in VB, that it was easier for BMC to release it. Dick was charged with the code review to assure BMC that there was no code that BMC wanted to keep closed. Well, as Dick put it : "it's in VB, of course there isn't anything useful in it :)"

It was Fred who turned me on to SourceForge.

Well If was goign to do it, I might as well have my maximum fun, and therefore, AengelB would be re-named back to MidWatch. Its name is all this project shares in common with its predecessor at my old company.  

This current MidWatch does not support SourceSafe, but I believe that that will be easy to add into the project, and then the older company would be free to use it, and the Cisco Case will work for them anyway!  

This background will also help you to understand any left over references to "AengelB", "Aengel", or "ArchAengel".  We shall work to remove these references as they are discovered.