Since that time, various competitors have attempted to clone, swipe, and copy, commandeer, and imitate our nifty, catchy, innovative seminar name. Many pretenders continue to trade shamelessly on the quality reputation of our original VB BOOTCAMP seminar delivered to over 50,000 developers since 1993. Thankfully, developers are not easily fooled and they don’t take any wooden nickels. They know lousy training when they see it, no matter what it’s called.
Developers will always tell friends about a solid, really good training program. We at NewTech are thankful for this market reality.
Between 1994 and 1998 we mailed over 400,000 individual pieces of mail printed with the words “VB BOOTCAMP” on them. We mailed them into every major US city. We dropped them out of airplanes!! It did not take long for less creative, simple-minded folk to begin attempting to shamelessly copy what we were doing. And we were very successful with the VB BOOTCAMP developer seminar, so it was just a matter of time before the snappy sound of ‘Boot Camp” was getting tacked onto training seminars of all kinds, especially software developer training. We started that whole thing. Period! Today, you can go to Sales Bootcamp, Leadership Bootcamp, Web Development Bootcamp, and Blackjack Bootcamp. You name it; you can find a BootCamp for it.
Today, there’s a Bootcamp for everything! But in 1994 there was just us—the VB BOOTCAMP®. And we kicked some butt!!
If anyone can find a nationwide seminar before 1994 that was publicized as a “Boot Camp” of any kind, we will take it all back and return our BOOTCAMP crown to the rightful owner. But for now, we are pretty darn sure we are the guys that started the whole BOOTCAMP thing. Prove us wrong if you can.
Article Title:
Source: searchVB.com
Date: 21 Feb 2001
by: Eric B. Parizo, Assistant News Editor
Being a Visual Basic developer is somewhat akin to serving in the armed forces.
While few developers have written code dangerous enough to put them in the line
of fire, both careers require dedication, perseverance and an ongoing commitment
to training.
To that end, intensive training seminars, or boot camps, have become
popular over the past several years among developers looking to either catch up
quickly on the latest VB release or cram for a comprehensive certification exam.
Boot
camps caught on because the few books and magazines on the market during
the early 1990s could not provide developers with the help they needed.
The first "boot camp" to
gain notoriety was taught by Dan Mezick, CEO and founder of New Technology
Solutions, Inc. in North Haven, Conn.
In 1993, Mezick was working as a consultant for another
company and getting up to speed on the new features available in Visual Basic 3.
"VB3
had a report writer and an Access run-time database built in, data access objects,
and it also had the programmatic access layer. It was pretty cool; the product took
a huge quantum leap forward," said Mezick.
The company he was then working for offered
a multiple day training class on VB3, but Mezick thought it could be taught more
cheaply and quickly. He soon struck out on his own, labeling his classes "boot camps" -
even patenting the name - because of their fast and furious nature.
"It was like a
fire hose approach to content, very structured, ordered, but a very rapid pace,"
Mezick said. As newer versions of Visual Basic offered more features, the courses
naturally grew longer.
"When VB4 came along, it had to be moved to two days because
going from three to four was like going from a tricycle to a ten-speed," said Mezick.
"It was very different. It had classes, and you could build DLLs.
"He said Visual
Basic was becoming widely popular among developers at that time, but the speed with
which new versions were released was causing problems for developers who wanted to
catch up.
"So basically when my seminar came along, we were getting calls from people
who hadn't even seen our brochure. They were calling because their friends were
telling them about it," Mezick said.
***
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