Software Publishing Corporation
| Industry | Software |
|---|---|
| Fate | Acquired by Allegro New Media, Inc. |
| Successor | Vizacom (formerly Allegro New Media) |
| Founded | April 1980 |
| Defunct | October 1996 |
| Headquarters | Mountain View, California, USA |
|
Key people
|
Fred Gibbons, Janelle Bedke, John Page – Founders |
| Products | pfs:Write, Harvard Graphics |
Software Publishing Corporation (SPC) was a Mountain View, California-based manufacturer of business software, originally well known for its "pfs:" series (and its subsequent "pfs:First" and "pfs:Professional" derivative series) of business software products, it was ultimately best known for its pioneering Harvard Graphics business and presentation graphics program.
Though SPC's earliest product was for the Apple II personal computer, most of its products were for use on text-based DOS desktop computers, with non-graphical-user-interfaces (GUI), long before the graphical GUI either Macintosh or Microsoft Windows existed. A salient benefit of Harvard Graphics, then, was that it brought sophisticated on-screen graphics capabilities to computers running the normally non-graphical, text-based DOS operating system. This factor played a role in the company's ultimate demise in 1996, as Microsoft Windows was shipping on most desktop computers. Windows incorporated built-in graphical capabilities, so much of what Harvard Graphics provided was no longer needed. SPC scrambled to develop a Windows version of Harvard Graphics, but big competitors and their Windows-native business and presentation graphics tools had so penetrated the Windows market by then that it was just . As DOS-based PCs began to disappear, so did SPC's revenues.
SPC was established in 1980 by three former Hewlett-Packard employees, Fred Gibbons, Janelle Bedke, and John Page, with an eye to producing packaged software for personal computers like the Apple II. The first application to be launched was the "Personal Filing System" (PFS), a simple database program for Apple II computers. With the advent of the IBM PC the following year, though, the company quickly shifted focus to the burgeoning DOS-based desktop computer market, which also included a fast-growing number of IBM PC-compatible computers. The Apple II PFS product eventually led to the "pfs:" series of products for DOS.
...
Wikipedia