Richard Wiitala, Number Blast

Richard Wiitala was the author of Number Blast, an arithmetic teaching program that was published by Atari Program Exchange. Number Blast first appeared in the winter 1981 APX catalog, where it won third prize in the education category.

This interview took place on February 1, 2016. After we talked, Richard send me 23 pages of scans of his correspondance with Atari Program Exchange, including the letters that included his royalty statements, and info about BASIC language upgrades and software compatibility with the Atari 1200XL computer. Those are now available for your perusal at the Internet Archive.

Teaser quote: "When I applied for a copyright on this, there weren't really a lot of guidelines about copyrighting computer programs back then."

Number Blast in the Winter 1981 APX catalog

Wiitala's APX correspondence: https://archive.org/details/APX_Programmer_Correspondence