Transcript — A History of Software Publishing Corporation

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Editor's note: In November 2025, I published an episode of Chronicles Revisited Podcast on the history of Software Publishing Corporation. Below is a lightly edited version of my recording script for that episode.

Introduction<br>Welcome to the Chronicles Revisited Podcast. I’m S.M. Oliva. I write the blog “Computer Chronicles Revisited,” which reviews the people, products, and companies featured on the PBS series that aired between 1983 and 2002. In this podcast, I go in-depth on stories previously featured on the blog.<br>For this episode, I’m looking at Software Publishing Corporation. Formed in 1980, SPC was an early leader in the market for personal computer—or as it was then more commonly called, micro-computer—software. Despite the name, Software Publishing was first and foremost a developer. Its initial "PFS" product line offered an inexpensive, modular, and easy-to-use approach to productivity software for a number of early microcomputer platforms such as the Apple II and the IBM Personal Computer.<br>But as the microcomputer market started to consolidate behind the IBM PC standard, Software Publishing shifted focus, first to more complex application software and then to a professional-grade business presentation program, Harvard Graphics, which came to define the latter half of the company's existence. After hitting its peak in terms of sales and profits in the early 1990s, by the middle of the decade Software Publishing found itself struggling to complete in an ever-more complicated world of application software dominated by Microsoft. This led to Software Publishing's acquisition by an upstart "new media" company that itself disappeared into the ether of the dot-com bust of the early 2000s.<br>John Page's Transition from UK Hardware to US Software<br>While Software Publishing Corporation developed software for personal computers, its three co-founders were veterans of Hewlett-Packard’s mini-computer division. Let's start with the person responsible for SPC's earliest software products, John Page.<br>Born in 1944 in the West Kensington area of London, John Page grew up in the post-war austerity of Great Britain. Page's father owned a small shoe repair business while his mother worked as a seamstress and housecleaner. Page himself attended a boarding school due to a policy implemented by the post-war Labour government requiring private schools to accept a number of students for free each year based on exam results.<br>Page, however, felt isolated from the other kids at school due to his working class background. In his own words, he was a "reclusive nerd." This led him to develop an interest in electronics, specifically amateur radio, and during his teenage years he built his own receivers using money he earned delivering shoes for his father.<br>Sadly, by 1961, his father's health had started to decline and the now-17-year-old Page needed a job to help his family. Through a friend of his father, Page secured an apprenticeship with LEO, the computer division of British conglomerate J. Lyons & Company.<br>LEO, which stood for Lyons Electric Office, manufactured a series of business mainframes modeled on the EDSAC, one of the earliest digital computers. When Page arrived, the LEO mainframes had just completed the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors. And one of new apprentice Page's jobs was counting those transistors as they arrived in boxes.<br>After moving around the different departments of LEO performing similar low-level tasks over the next couple of years, one day Page went to his floor manager and asked if he could work on the actual computers. According to Page, the manager replied, "I don't see why not," and immediately took him to see one of the senior engineers, who took Page under his wing as an assistant.<br>Page subsequently learned how to build and maintain LEO III mainframes for the company's clients. One of the last such machines that Page worked on was in 1968 for the government of Czechoslovakia. While debugging the computer on-site in Prague, Page's boss called and ordered him to come home right away. Page ignored the order as he wanted to finish the job. Eventually, Page's boss showed up in-person and said, "Come on, we're leaving." On the flight back to London, Page's boss explained the reason for their hasty exit: "The Russians are going to invade Prague tomorrow." Tomorrow was August 20, 1968. That day, the Soviet Union and three of its its Warsaw Pact satellite states invaded Czechoslovakia in a successful effort to silence anti-government protesters and strengthen the country's Communist government.<br>Meanwhile, back in the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Harold Wilson's Labour government passed the Industrial Expansion Act, which led to the creation of a new state-backed computer monopoly, International Computers Limited or ICL. Most of the UK's existing computer companies, including LEO, were merged into ICL. This...