Programma International

~ the obit ~

Programma International was founded by David Gordon in the late 1970s, and the exact year is not written down anywhere I can find. Wikipedia says the late 1970s. The surviving fan archive of the company's catalog says the 1970s. The only hard floor is the hardware: Programma started out publishing for the Apple II, and the Apple II did not exist before June 1977, which is the year this page uses for want of a better one. That vagueness is itself a fact about the period: the business of selling software to individual people was so new in those years that nobody was keeping the kind of records that would later be considered normal, not even about themselves.

What it published was about three hundred programs, mostly games and programming utilities. The platforms were the Apple II first, with the Radio Shack and Commodore machines following. Distribution was cassette tape. The company's reputation, by the accounts of people who bought from it, rested on the tapes being reliable and the programs being good, which in 1979 was a genuine differentiator rather than a baseline.

I was not born when this company started and I was an infant when it ended, so everything here comes from other people's archives. The era gap here is total rather than geographic: the company was gone before I could read, so being online early would not have helped me either. It earns a page because two or three of its products are still named by the people who used them, forty years on, which is more than most software publishers manage.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what was on the tapes ~

The one that people still bring up is LISA, Randy Hyde's assembler for the Apple II, which Programma published. It had two properties that were close to unheard of. It was interactive, reporting syntax errors as you typed the source instead of at the end of a batch run, and by Hyde's own account it assembled in excess of thirty thousand lines per minute on a one-megahertz 8-bit 6502. Both of those come out of working on a machine small enough that every cycle had to be argued for.

The other one worth naming is Pencil Point, which added lowercase and formatting to Michael Shrayer's Electric Pencil, the first word processor for a home computer. That is a very 1979 kind of product, a patch sold as its own item, because the original program could not do lowercase and the hardware could, and somebody had to write the gap closed. Programma also expanded from Apple-only into the Radio Shack machines, which is how a catalog of three hundred items accumulates.

~ the sale and the silence ~

In 1980 Gordon sold the company to Hayden Publishing, a book publisher getting into software the way a lot of book publishers briefly did. The fan archive puts the sale in October of that year; one later account says 1981. Gordon did not stay. He started Datamost in 1981 out of Chatsworth, California, which published Apple II games including Snack Attack and lasted through the early 1980s.

Then in 1983 Hayden went out of business, and this is the detail that is usually recorded wrong. Wikipedia's sentence is that Programma "went out of business in 1983", which reads as though the software company failed; the archive maintained by the people who collected its catalog is specific that it was the parent publisher that collapsed, leaving the whole of Programma International in what they call the black void of abandonware. Three hundred programs with nobody willing to claim them and no legal path to release them. A company can be killed by its own buyer going under, and the software does not get to go anywhere afterward.

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