Procomm Plus

» see datastorm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

procomm plus's peak years overlap with my first online years, but i came in through the bundled win 95 dialer and a trumpet winsock leftover, not a dos terminal. by 1998 the dial-up internet meant a tcp/ip connection to a ppp server, not a serial session to a bbs. procomm plus had been the king of the bbs session, and the kingdom was already empty by the time i sat down with the modem.

bruce barkelew and tom smith were computer science students at the university of missouri when they shipped procomm in 1985. it was shareware, $25 to register, and it did one thing well. you set the baud rate, dialed a number with your hayes-compatible modem, and got a terminal session against whatever was on the other end. that turned out to be most of what people wanted to do with a pc and a phone line for the next ten years.

datastorm technologies hit #1 on pc magazine's retail software list in november 1993 with procomm plus. they had forty consecutive profitable quarters by the mid 90s. quarterdeck office systems bought the company for seventy million dollars in 1996. symantec bought quarterdeck in october 1998. procomm plus 4.8 was the last release that mattered, and symantec quietly ended support around 2002.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

procomm did terminal emulation right. ansi colors and box drawing rendered correctly. the built-in scripting language automated the bbs login down to a single command that handled the prompts and the password without you typing anything. it was the swiss army knife of the modem-using engineer.

procomm plus added the dialing directory and the dial queue. you would build a list of every bbs you called, then hit connect and let procomm cycle through busy numbers until one picked up. for anyone using a bbs in 1990, that feature alone justified the registration fee.

~ what got buried with it ~

procomm plus did not survive the transition to the web because the model it served stopped existing. tcp/ip dial-up over ppp replaced the serial-to-bbs session, and browsers replaced the text-only terminal. compuserve and prodigy moved to ppp gateways and then to web frontends. the terminal emulator did not have a home anymore.

quarterdeck picked it up at the wrong end of the curve in 1996 because they were trying to add internet products to the dos-utility lineup. symantec inherited it in october 1998 with the rest of quarterdeck and put the entire line in the archive. the v4.8 box stayed on shelves for a while. by 2002 the brand was effectively gone.

~ the funny part ~

the windows version of procomm plus shipped with an early built-in web browser called web zeppelin. you can still find screenshots online. it tried to bolt the new internet onto the terminal model and ended up being neither thing. the bbs people kept the dos version while the web people went to netscape. web zeppelin remains a small monument to how hard the transition was for the companies that lived through it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »