Oral history interview with John Brackett and Doug Ross

Abstract

Doug Ross and John Brackett focus on the background of SofTech and then its entry into the microcomputer software marketplace. They describe their original contact with the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and licensing the p-System which had been developed there. They discuss the effort required to bring the program to production status and the difficulties in marketing it to the sets of customers. They talk about the transition from 8 bit to 16 bit machines and how that affected their market opportunities. They conclude with a review of the negotiations with IBM and their failure to get p-System to become a primary operating environment. That, and the high performance of Lotus 1-2-3, brought about the demise of the p-System.