Before we were incorporated we were operating under a BC registered partnership called 'Van Rush Concepts'. And before that we had a website called 'CalicoJacks'. A restaurant in Florida with that name asked to buy 'CalicoJacks' which we sold for the cost to initiate 'CalicoBay', around $250 in 1990 something. The common theme being cats and pirates. We couldn't use the name, 'Van Rush Concepts', to incorporate with, so 'Calico Bay' came to mind.
Calico Bay Concepts Inc. was incorporated in 2001 and was, along with four other entities, one of the founding members of Faronics Corp., makers of Deep Freeze and other fine products. Calico Bay's main contribution was systems and kernel development.
Historically our roots were in early pre-Windows system, graphics drivers, and graphics application development in C. Later we were compiling our own ray tracer apps to produce photo realistic images. Ray tracing could consume more memory than the 640 kilobytes available. DOS extenders were prohibitively expensive so 16-bit Windows at a quarter of the price, running in protected mode, made a fine substitute. We quickly realized we needed something with pre-emptive multi-tasking. Our first endeavour into 32-bit graphical operating systems was OS 2.1 and Warp, simply because the Borland C++ compiler bundled OS 2.1 with it. It soon became apparent, in our opinion anyway, that Windows NT was the way to go.
Calico Bay changed direction in 2006 wanting to get away from low level kernel and systems development to pursue higher level projects for graphics, business and data. As part of the transition, and with our experience with virtual machines, we wanted to develop a means of making virtual hard disks, or any file formatted a certain way, available to the desktop for mounting.
This is when volumizeIT came to mind. If you have a bunch of stuff, docs, exes or data, anything, just volumizeIT. Around then we were also working on a light weight inventory and invoicing project. It diluted our time, so when volumizeIT was near completion it became apparent that the upcoming Windows 7 operating system was including native support for virtual hard disks. Not exactly what we were doing, as we didn't need the vhd header, but we moved on to different ideas, and retained the domain volumizeIT.com .
Calico Bay Concepts was dissolved near the end of 2018 well past the best before date. We still have lots of ideas and use them for entertainment and as a purpose for Big Box Computing.