by Joe Piscopo (as told to Luanne Johnson)
Copyright ©1998, Luanne Johnson, All Rights Reserved
I think the way that Pansophic was started was pretty typical of the process that
software entrepreneurs went through in the 1960s. We had a lot of confidence that the
computer field was full of opportunities, a little financing from private sources, and not
much sense, at the beginning, of how to define a good market for ourselves.
I graduated in 1965 from the University of Illinois with a computer science degree and
got a couple of years experience as a programmer working in civil service for a little
while, then for Montgomery Ward in downtown Chicago. It didn’t take me long to figure
out that in a big organization like Montgomery Ward, my compensation increases were going
to be determined by a schedule that applied to all kinds of office workers, not to the
increase in responsibility I was taking on as a programmer, so I started thinking about
going back to school and getting an MBA.
Then I attended some kind of family get-together -- a wedding
or something -- and started talking to my uncle Emil about the
computer business. He got really interested and asked me to put together a presentation on
what kind of opportunities I saw in the computer field. I put together a list of twenty
different kinds of business opportunities: time sharing services, computer processing
services, consulting, feasibility studies, hardware analysis, etc. etc., and gave a
presentation to my uncle and some of his business associates at a country club near
Chicago. They were impressed enough to give me $150,000 in seed money to start a new
company. I called it Pansophic, hired my younger brother, Anthony, and another guy I knew
and we were off and running. This was in April of 1969. I was 24 years old at the time.
That $150,000 sounded like a lot of money at the beginning but it didn’t take me
long to realize that we were running through it pretty fast. We were naive enough to
believe that the business leads provided to us by our backers would result in a lot of big
contracts but we just ended up thrashing around among our 20 different business
possibilities and didn’t have any real focus.
After about three months, I came to the conclusion that we better learn how to do
something and do it on purpose rather than wait around for something to happen. What we
ended up doing since none of the three of us had any marketing or sales experience was to
sign up an executive recruiter to find us a vice president of marketing.
The person we brought in had a background in chemical engineering and a lot of sales
and marketing experience with chemical type products but he knew nothing about computers.
We sat down with him and went through my list of 20 items in great detail, covering the
pluses and minuses on every item because, frankly, we didn’t have anything else to
do. When we got to the end of the list, he said he’d like to hear more about No. 13,
which was software packages. We talked some more about that and he said he thought it was
a really appealing idea to be able to invent something that you could sell over and over
again without ever having to build factories or create inventories.
So we said, OK, what can we come up with to invent? I thought back to my job at
Montgomery Ward and how I had to cart around huge trays of punched cards, which were the
source decks of my programs, and how I had once spend hours getting them back in sequence
when I dropped the trays. So I came up with the idea of creating a program which would let
you keep the program source decks on a disk and let you edit, update and compile the
program directly from the library on disk so that you never had to physically handle the
punched cards. We named the program Panvalet. It was our first software product and an
instant success.
Pansophic went on to develop a whole line of products that helped our customers’
programmers to be more productive. It became one of the world’s largest independent
software companies with offices throughout the U.S. and in 27 countries around the globe
until it was acquired by Computer Associates in the late 1980s.
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