One of Six
In 1994, Arcada Software was founded with backing from an executive at Conner Tape Backup Systems and a clear thesis: enterprises needed a reliable, comprehensive solution for backing up their data, and the tools that existed weren't good enough. The founding team was six developers. This was one of those six roles.
Joining a six-person software startup in 1994 means something specific: there is no team to absorb the hard problems. Every technical challenge lands on someone who has to solve it. SCSI device drivers don't write themselves, and there is no senior engineer to escalate to when the tape drive doesn't behave the way the documentation suggests it should. You figure it out or the product doesn't ship.
The initial target was Novell NetWare 3.x — the dominant enterprise network operating system of the early 1990s. Getting backup right on NetWare meant understanding not just file system semantics but the full Novell Bindery and Directory Services (NDS) architecture, because a backup that only captures files but misses the network's identity and permissions infrastructure is a backup that can't actually restore a working network.
The Work
As a founding developer, the scope of work spanned from the lowest level of the operating system — hardware device drivers — to the application layer and into internal tooling that solved distribution problems nobody had off-the-shelf solutions for.
SCSI Device Drivers
Low-level drivers in C and C++ providing reliable communication between the software and physical tape backup hardware. Written to work across NetWare, Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT — each with its own hardware abstraction model, its own quirks, and its own failure modes. Device driver work at this level requires understanding the full hardware-to-OS communication chain with no safety net.
NetWare Backup & Directory Services
Built functionality to back up not just file data but the full Novell Bindery and NDS directory structure — the identity and permissions backbone of a NetWare network. Without this, a restored network would have the files but not the organizational structure that made them accessible. Also designed the communication protocols with ISBX to facilitate backing up data across multiple servers simultaneously.
Backup Scheduling & Compression
Designed the backup scheduling system supporting full, incremental, and differential backups — the three-tier model that became standard across the industry. Built compression support leveraging native tape drive compression capabilities, and optimized restoration performance so that recovering data under a disaster scenario was as fast as the hardware permitted.
Cross-Platform Agent Programs
Data compression and communication agents written in C++ for UNIX and NetWare platforms. These agents ran on the source machines and handled the communication protocol between backup clients and the central backup server — compressing data at the source before transmission, managing the handshake, and ensuring integrity across the wire.
Customer Support & Hardware
Provided 24/7 direct customer support during the product's launch period — hardware selection, system design, installation, and operational troubleshooting. At a six-person startup, the line between development and support is not a line. Bridging between customer-reported failures and the codebase that produced them is how the product improved.
Software Distribution Before the Internet
In 1994, software didn't travel by download link. It traveled by floppy disk, by CD-ROM, and — for updates and patches — by bulletin board systems and online services like CompuServe. Getting a driver update to a customer meant getting it onto the BBS, making sure the right version appeared in the right place, and managing dependencies without a package manager, a registry, or a version control system that anyone outside the company could use.
A Content Management System for 1994
Built a custom content management system using Visual Basic, ASP, and SQL Server 6.5 to automate the distribution of software updates and device drivers across bulletin board systems — including Wildcat BBS — and online services like CompuServe.
The system managed versioning, dependency tracking, and distribution routing: when a new driver was ready, it went to the right BBS categories, the right CompuServe forums, and the right distribution points automatically. What had been a manual, error-prone process became a managed pipeline.
This predated modern software distribution infrastructure by years. The problems it solved — version management, dependency tracking, automated distribution, rollout coordination — are the same problems that NuGet, npm, and software update frameworks would eventually formalize. At Arcada in 1994, the solution was a hand-built CMS and a lot of careful thinking about how information moves.
Every Platform That Mattered in 1994
Enterprise environments in the mid-1990s were not monocultures. A single organization might run NetWare on the file servers, Windows NT on application servers, Windows 3.1 on some desktops, Windows 95 on newer ones, and UNIX somewhere in the mix. Backup software that only worked on one of these was backup software that didn't work for most customers.
Bindery + NDS
SCSI driver support
Device driver layer
Backward compatible
Legacy support
Cross-platform backup
What Arcada Became
Arcada Software was acquired by Seagate Technologies in 1996 — the same year the founding team wrapped its initial work. Under Seagate's ownership, Backup Exec achieved the number-one worldwide market position in the backup software category and continued to grow well beyond the six-person founding team that had written the first version.
The product that started with six developers eventually supported a company of over a hundred employees. It went through multiple ownership changes as the enterprise software market consolidated — each new owner recognizing what the founding team built well enough to keep building on it.
That product is still running in enterprises today. Thirty years later. The code that underlies it has been rewritten many times, but the architectural decisions made by a small founding team in 1994 — how backup schedules work, how agents communicate, how platform support is layered — shaped an entire product category for a generation.
Stack & Craft
The tools of 1994 enterprise software development — low-level C and C++ for driver work, Visual Basic and early ASP for internal tooling, SQL Server 6.5 for data management. The constraints of the era required solutions that worked with the hardware directly, without abstraction layers between code and tape drive.
- C
- C++
- SCSI Device Drivers
- Hardware Abstraction
- Visual Basic
- ASP (Classic)
- SQL Server 6.5
- Novell NetWare 3.x / 4.x
- NetWare Bindery / NDS
- UNIX
- Windows NT / 95 / 98
- Wildcat BBS
- CompuServe
- Custom CMS
- Version Management