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 GUIs of 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 too little, too late. As MS-DOS began to disappear, so did SPC's revenues.
Early history
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.
By early 1984, InfoWorld estimated that SPC was the world's ninth-largest microcomputer-software company, with $14 million in 1983 sales. In 1984 IBM executed an OEM-style agreement pursuant to which SPC would develop the IBM Assistant Series, which was an only slightly enhanced, but completely rebranded version of the "pfs:" family of products (described in the next section) such that no mention of SPC was present in the software or its documentation; and which IBM intended to sell with its IBM PC and PCjr computers. IBM advertised the suite using a Chaplin-esque figure getting all of his ducks in a row, in a Super Bowl TV ad, and in print ads. By only a year later, in 1985 SPC company had achieved $50 million in revenue from the IBM deal, alone.
Major products
SPC's first product, its "PFS" brand database for Apple II computers, was reworked, improved, and then released as pfs:File, a flat-file database for DOS. It was the first of a family of products released by SPC under the "pfs:" brand which, when installed onto the same computer, combined to form a sort of office suite which included companion products pfs:Write (a word processor), pfs:Plan (a spreadsheet), pfs:Report (reporting software), and pfs:Graph (business graphics software). Other, mostly utilitarian products bearing the "pfs:" brand subsequently emerged, including pfs:Access (for data communications), pfs:Easy Start (a menuing utility), and pfs:Proof (a proofreading utility). Eventually, SPC offered a low- to mid-level desktop publishing product called pfs:Publisher; and it packaged the core word processing, database and spreadsheet products into a suite named pfs:Office. While relatively limited in their capabilities compared with better-known and more powerful products like the DOS database dBase III, the DOS spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3, and the DOS word processor WordPerfect, the trio of SPC products proved popular, because of their simplicity and ease-of-use, with beginning and intermediate DOS PC users.