One of the successes of the first version of Nucleus was its very fast loading routines (even though most of the users
only know the ROM03 version which does not include them!)
Those fast routines came originally from SpeedySmith, a very fast disk copier but with limited features and raw (not to say crude) interface.
After having written Nucleus during the summer, the FTA team gathered again the next month (just before going back to college) to create a new program that would be a mix between
Speedysmith (for the copying features) and Nucleus (for the fancy graphics) : this is how Photonix started!
Thanks to the speed of the copy, its large set of features (it was often used by Mac users to quickly format disks for example), and its appealing interface, it became
a very successful shareware program, and we were very pleased to receive (snail) mails from people around the world from persons liking our work and asking us to "keep up the good work" :
: it was then that we learnt how popular that expression was!
A commercial version of Photonix was later developed (Photonix II) and sold by Toolbox, before finishing its life as an abandonware.
15 years later, Photonix was recently brought to life as a prior-artifact in an anti-virus
patent infrigment lawsuit
: good programs never die!
