Lifeboat Associates was a New York City company that was one of the largest microcomputer software distributors in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Lifeboat acted as an independent software broker marketing software to major hardware vendors such as Xerox, HP and Altos. As such Lifeboat Associates was instrumental in the founding of

Autodesk Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that makes software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquartere ...

and also financed the creation of '' PC Magazine''.

Overview

Lifeboat was founded in 1976Programmers Paradise Inc., Form 10-K, for the fiscal year ended December 31, 199

/ref> or 1977 by Larry Alkoff and Tony Gold. By mid-1981 the company had same-name affiliates in England, Switzerland, France, Germany, Japan and

Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...

. '' PC Magazine'' in 1982 wrote that Lifeboat "has published and marketed more CP/M application programs on more 8-bit machines than anyone in the world", and in 1983 ''InfoWorld'' said that Lifeboat was the largest publisher of microcomputer software in the world. Lifeboat Associates successfully combined many roles, including publisher and distributor, and actively solicited authors for software products that met its standards. The company distributed

T/Maker T/Maker (Table Maker) was one of the first spreadsheet programs designed for the personal computer user and released by Peter Roizen in 1979. The application ran on CP/M, TRSDOS, and later on MS-DOS computers. T/Maker was originally distributed ...

(written by Peter Roizen), one of the first spreadsheet programs designed for the personal computer user, which went a step beyond the similar

VisiCalc VisiCalc (for "visible calculator") is the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for Apple II by VisiCorp on 17 October 1979. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hob ...

program by offering text-processing capability, and The Boss Financial Accounting System (written by John Burns), a $2495 package for CP/M users. It was one of the first accounting programs for micro-computers. In addition Lifeboat Associates started collecting and distributing user-written "free" software, initially for the CP/M operating system. One of the first was XMODEM, which allowed reliable communication via

modem A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by Modulation#Digital modulati ...

and phone line. In June 1986, Voyager Software Corp acquired Lifeboat Associates. Later in 1986, Programmer's Paradise was started by Voyager Software as a catalog marketer of technical software. In 1988, Voyager acquired Corsoft Inc., a corporate reseller founded in 1983, and combined it with the operations of the Programmer's Paradise catalog and Lifeboat Associates, both of which marketed technical software for microcomputers. In May 1995, Voyager Software Corp. changed its name to "Programmers Paradise, Inc." and consolidated its U.S. catalog and software publishing operations in a new subsidiary, Programmers Paradise Catalogs, Inc. and its wholesale distribution operations in a new subsidiary, Lifeboat Distribution, Inc. In July 1995, Programmer's Paradise completed an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investme ...

of its common stock. Programmer’s Paradise, Inc. changed its name to Wayside Technology Group, Inc. in August 2006.Wayside Technology Group, Inc., Form 10-K, for the fiscal year ended December 31, 200

/ref>

Products

(Table Maker) – one of the first

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in c ...

programs designed for the personal computer userSusan Lammers, ''Programmers at Work'', Microsoft Press-1986. p. 198. The

Visicalc VisiCalc (for "visible calculator") is the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for Apple II by VisiCorp on 17 October 1979. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hob ...

spreadsheet program was released while T/Maker was still under development. * The Boss – Financial Accounting System * ''Software Bus-80'', also known as ''SB-80'' – a version of CP/M-80 for

8080 The Intel 8080 (''"eighty-eighty"'') is the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. It first appeared in April 1974 and is an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibil ...

Z80 The Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor introduced by Zilog as the startup company's first product. The Z80 was conceived by Federico Faggin in late 1974 and developed by him and his 11 employees starting in early 1975. The first working samples were ...

8-bit computers * ''Software Bus-86'', also known as ''SB-86'' – a version of

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

for

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...

16-bit computers

References

External links

* {{Official website, www.waysidetechnology.com, name=Official website of Wayside Technology Defunct software companies of the United States Companies established in the 1970s 1970s establishments in the United States

Overview

Products

See also

References

External links