The death of
Andrew Fluegelman, creator of
PC-Talk, left a gap in the offerings of dial-up communications and terminal emulation software. Bruce Barkelew and Tom Smith,
computer science students at the
University of Missouri, formed PIL Software Systems in 1985 to develop ProComm. They distributed the program as
shareware through
bulletin board systems. Based on the program's popularity, Barkelew and Smith founded Datastorm Technologies Inc. in 1986 to build a full-fledged company around the product. The founders chose
Columbia, Missouri, as the company's headquarters because of the relatively low cost of living there to tap into the pool of programmers graduating from the University of Missouri's computer science department. The company produced a combination 16/32-bit Procomm Plus for Windows, which included an early web browser called Web Zeppelin. Procomm Plus for Windows supported the
remote imaging protocol (RIP) graphic terminal language. This upgrade enabled the display of higher-resolution images than the
ANSI escape codes that most bulletin board systems used at the time. In November 1993, the
data transmission program reached the number one ranking on
PC Magazine's list of top retail software. In 1995, Datastorm sued Excalibur Communications over software infringement. Datastorm became the first company to sue a vendor for infringement of its software using the shareware model. Quarterdeck was later purchased by
Symantec. Support for the last release of Procomm, version 4.8, was discontinued in 2002. ==Awards==