Procomm Plus was the ultimate terminal emulator of the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was a product of Datastorm, a small software company based in Columbia, Mo., a college town about halfway between St. Louis and Kansas City. Obsolete for years because of the decline of BBSs and big iron computing, it still has a niche following among hobbyists who like vintage minicomputers and mainframes, because it can emulate almost any terminal you might want.
It was 30 years ago, on March 28, 1996, that Datastorm ended its run as an independent software publisher.
Procomm started out in 1985 as a shareware program, initially called TERMULATOR, written to fill the gap left by the shareware program PC-Talk when its author, Andrew Fluegelman, died in 1985.
Shareware Procomm featured a built in phone directory, multiple popular file transfer protocols for uploading and downloading, and automatic redial. It became popular enough to grow into a commercial product, Procomm Plus. The commercial ProComm Plus included a scripting language, more terminal types, additional file transfer protocols, context sensitive help, support for 8 COM ports, and a professionally written manual.
Procomm Plus: The ultimate terminal software
I will be honest. I rarely used Procomm plus in its heyday. It had far more features than I needed. It could emulate over 30 different terminals, which included pretty much any terminal you could think of, including an ADDS Regent and Lear-Siglar ADM-3A. Procomm Plus even had its own BBS program built in. But that meant it was bigger and slower than other terminal software. My favorite was a program called Telix. It just emulated a VT-100 terminal and it didn’t have the built in BBS, but it was a fraction of the size and it was very fast. I used Procomm when I was connecting to the IBM System 370 mainframe on campus, but for everything else I used Telix.
That said, I admired the company. Datastorm was always looking for ways to give back to the city of Columbia and to the University of Missouri. It was a great local citizen.
And for aspirant masters of telecommunications who needed more capability than other terminal programs offered, Procomm Plus was software to get. It was the one you could count on to do anything and everything you would ever need. The terminal program for power users.
Procomm Plus was originally a DOS program, but Datastorm and its successors later created a Windows version. Later versions incorporated a web browser, based on Spyglass Mosaic, in an effort to fend off obsolescence.
The problem for Procomm Plus and Datastorm
The problem for Datastorm was this was their only product. Having a single product is enough, as long as that product has a large enough market. By 1996, it was starting to look like that market wouldn’t be around forever. On March 28, 1996, Quarterdeck acquired Datastorm. Quarterdeck was a maker of utility software, including the very popular QEMM-386 memory manager for DOS. Quarterdeck moved some of its operations to Columbia after the acquisition because of its location in the middle of the country and its very low cost of living. But Procomm Plus became just one product among many in a larger company.
Another blow for Procomm Plus was that Microsoft licensed a rival program, Hilgraeve HyperAccess, to create Hyperterminal, the terminal program included in Windows. Had Microsoft licensed Procomm instead, it would have provided another revenue stream, and a natural upgrade for those who needed more capability than Windows included.
Quarterdeck in turn was acquired by Symantec on October 15, 1998. Half of Symantec spun off into a company named Veritas in 2015 and the other half was acquired by Broadcom in August 2019. Whether Procomm Plus is technically owned by Veritas or Broadcom now is anyone’s guess. Symantec sold Procomm Plus under its own branding, and the last version available was version 4.8, released in 1999. It was compatible with Windows 2000 but reportedly can have problems running under newer versions of Windows.
What happened to the original developers?
The original developers of Procomm still live in the Columbia area but neither of them are involved day to day in running a technology company. Cofounder Tom Smith bought a vacant tractor dealership and turned it into a popular brew pub called Flat Branch. The other cofounder, Bruce Barkelew, opened a recording studio.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
In the early 90’s, I set up my dad with ProComm Plus to run on a dedicated 286 (later a 486DX-33) system to replace the dial-up terminal an office product supplier had provided to his business. The scripting was a major part of helping his tech savy-deficient nature to know what sequence to follow in the ordering process. I reduced the effort involved to a few function key presses to open, order products, and close the session.
That was the PERFECT use case for Procomm Plus. Some elder classmates may have passed me some scripts to make life on the college mainframe a bit easier. Even if you were tech savvy, automating a series of often-repeated keystrokes was a major productivity gain.
Basically it died of irrelevance. People moved to the world wide web, and most no longer spent time using terminal emulators. The remaining market wasn’t sufficient to justify continued development. So it withered on the vine at Quarterdeck/Symantec and was discontinued.
I’m glad to hear that the developers landed on their feet afterward.