About the business

The Longwood Wizards Guild is a business founded and operated by Art Cabral in Sunnyvale, California. It was renamed from Longwood Associates due to conflicts with other entities using that same name. The story behind the name Longwood, and behind Seahaven Towers, dates back to 1979 when Art and a number of other storytelling enthusiasts were in graduate school at UCLA, where Art earned the Ph.D. in chemistry in 1981. We estimate that over 200 folks have been involved in the story to varying degrees over that 27 year span (as of 4/25/2006), and a number of them are still fairly active in the story, regardless of the fact that they've moved to many different parts of the world. Several of these fine folks are serving as volunteer Beta Testers for Seahaven Towers, Haniport Levee, and other products in progress.

About the name

The name Longwood Wizards Guild is derived from the Longwood story. In the capital city of the fictional nation of Longwood there exists a rather impressive stone tower which serves as the headquarters of the national guild of mages. A mage is the Longwood equivalent of a physicist, a practitioner of advanced technologies that have all the aspects of fantastical magic but which nonetheless do not violate the laws of thermodynamics. That stone tower was well known as a place where magical devices could be purchased and sold, and thus one day one of our storytelling comrades decided it must be run by Fred Wizard. The name stuck. The structure took on the name Wizards Tower, and the organization that operated it became known as the Longwood Wizards Guild. When the time came to rename the business this name stood out as the best choice – and it has the added advantage that it's not likely to collide with any other company names or trademarks.

About the founder

Dr. Cabral switched his career focus from chemistry to software engineering in 1982, moving to the Silicon Valley at the southern end of the San Franciso Bay Area. He worked for a few startups before beginning a 10 year stint with Apple Computer, Inc., and (with IBM) its Taligent subsidiary. Art also worked for SGI (then Silicon Graphics, Inc.). In September of 1999 Art decided to work full-time to create a business to publish software products based on the Longwood story, There have a few short term assignments with other companies (inViso, PalmSource, and Apple) but working on Longwood products has been his recurring passion. Seahaven Towers 2.0.0, the remake of his 1988 shareware product for Macintosh, was the first delivery from this effort. Since then Haniport Levee has been added and several other titles are in progress.

About our business goals

The business plan for the Longwood Wizards Guild calls for slow and steady growth by releasing new products into the software market for Mac and Windows users. One of our primary goals is to design our products for longevity, preserving our customers' investment. We hope that we are as successful with our new products as we were with the original Seahaven Towers, which, 15 years later, still ran, unmodified, on MacOS X (in the Classic environment). Sadly, with the advent of Apple's new Intel-based Macs, the Classic environment has been abandoned by Apple.