Since MCP is now a year old I thought it would be fun to discuss some historical notes about MCP and to show it in some of its original forms.  The "Ancient Versions" (below) have never been seen by anyone before except myself.  Enjoy!  (Don't laugh too hard!)...

It was the end of Summer 2008.  I had been working with more and more BlackBerry devices around this time and I found it increasingly difficult to manage these devices and also keep up with all of the individual tools on the internet and all of the "rules" for dealing with BlackBerry operating systems.  You had to use one tool to wipe your device, another tool to optimize your OS prior to installation, another tool to manage the memory on the device later and you had to remember certain rules like "uninstall all operating systems except the one you need to install" and "rename your vendor.xml", etc.

Most of the tools of the day were inspiring but I always wanted an application that could handle all of my BlackBerry tasks within a single user interface.  I was also running up against restrictions, limitations and problems with some of the existing tools at the time...  my only option was to email the authors and wait for a fix.

I had been progarmming for a dozen or so years by this time (a few samples are here: http://software.sodpit.com) so I finally decided to take on an entirely new project that would allow me to perform all of my normal operations inside of one graphical user interface.

I started developing a new application to accomplish these tasks for my own personal use and to save myself time (as well as my sanity).  Originally I had no intention of ever making this new application public.  The working title at the time was "Swiss Army Knife" because the intention was that it would (eventually) do everything (possible) that BlackBerry Desktop Manager couldn't (or wouldn't) do.  Again, this was all very "internal" because I was just writing it for myself.  I know, how selfish!  :p~

By the end of the month I had an application that was capable of doing most of the commands provided by javaloader.exe.  The Java Loader EXE (part of the BlackBerry JDE) has been the "engine" for other applications and seemed to be the only way to accompish what I needed to get done.  Of course, the GUI looked like total crap...  but the more important part was that it worked.

It had gotten to a point near the end of September that I started to realize that other people might find my tool useful, so I started "re-thinking" the scope of the project and preparing the application for public consumption that would eventually lead to alpha releases.

By mid October I was getting closer to a public release but I wasn't happy with the original title.  At this point I renamed it to "JL_Exec".  The idea here was...  if JL_Cmder was a command-line (batch file) tool, people would relate my application to the same JL_Cmder functionality via a Windows based EXE named JL_Exec.  My problem now became the fact that JL_Cmder was very limited and my GUI quickly passed it in functionality...  so I didn't want the known limitations of JL_Cmder to be associated to my GUI later.  My thinking was that new users might quickly dismiss my new application if they assumed it could only do the same things as JL_Cmder.

Screenshots of JL_Exec:



All of my testing was still being done internally by this time.  Other working titles around this time included "BlackBerry Commander" and "BlackBerry Control Panel".  I still couldn't come up with a title that I liked.  As can be seen below, the application started out as a "tabsheet" style Windows application.  Over time I grew tired of the dead space on the left side so I started adding icons and eventually hid the tabs.

Screenshots of "BlackBerry Commander" and "BlackBerry Control Panel":



For some reason one day I remembered the Master Control Program from the movie Tron.  The name sorta stuck.  The first public release of MCP was made available on or around October 24/25, 2008.

And that's that.  BlackBerry Master Control Program (MCP) was born.

Screenshot of the first version of MCP, still in pre-release form (available in "Ancient Downloads"):



Some of the builds mentioned above that lead up to this point are now available for download in the new "Ancient Versions" category.  From there it was on to alpha releases and public beta testing.  The "Old Versions" category contains most of the public releases of MCP.  Last week MCP reached 0.9.2.0 Beta 10 and is on its way to a "release candidate" version very soon.

There have been an enormous number of changes over the last year.  Development started out on my old Windows XP box using Borland Delphi 6 Personal Edition.  In December 2008 I was approached about translating MCP to German which I decided to try out and provided translation tables to start with.  Around this time I upgraded to CodeGear Rad Studio 2009 (Delphi) and rolled out new translation tables based on this change.  The German translators stopped contacting me in March of 2009, so I later dropped it.  In February of this year I added the MCP Mesh, created the MCP Facebook Group and finally gave MCP its own website.  In June of this year I upgraded my computer and switched to Windows 7 RC1.  Last month I upgraded to Embarcadero Rad Studio 2010 (Delphi).

And through all of these changes MCP has, in my opinion, continued to improve.  Some news sites have mentioned that it has made those improvements exponentially.  Even when there may have been a month or two of delays there were a lot of things going on behind the scenes.

Not bad for one person!

It's been a crazy effin' year!!!

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER...  OLD AND ANCIENT VERSIONS!!!

For the next week or two the new "Old Versions" and "Ancient Versions" categories will be available to everyone that visits the site.  After a few weeks I will restrict them so only people who are signed up on this site will be able to see these categories...  and I am only going to make it less visible because I don't want everyone wondering which file is the current version.  If you want to access them later make sure you sign up today!

None of these downloads are windows installers.  You can put them in their own folder and then run them.

Ancient Versions Category
http://mcpfx.com/download.php?list.11

Includes:

Working Title #2 - JL_Exec
http://mcpfx.com/download.php?view.23

Working Title #3 - BlackBerry Commander
http://mcpfx.com/download.php?view.24

Working Title #4 - BlackBerry Control Panel (First Build)
http://mcpfx.com/download.php?view.25

Working Title #4 - BlackBerry Control Panel (First Build)
http://mcpfx.com/download.php?view.26

Working Title #5 - BlackBerry Master Control Program
http://mcpfx.com/download.php?view.27

Enjoy!