Software Publishing Corporation

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.