Polytron (software)

Polytron Corp. was founded in 1982 by Richard Kinnaird, Don Kinzer, Charlie Perkins, and Doug Root. With the exception of Root, all of them had worked at Tektronix in various hardware and/or software engineering positions. The original concept around which the company was organized was to create a line of instrumentation products for, or based on, the then-recently introduced IBM Personal Computer. The first product developed was a GPIB controller plug-in board for the IBM PC. With an operational prototype in hand, the founders embarked on a campaign to raise venture capital to take the company to the next step. After giving numerous presentations and receiving a few funding offers, they decided that the traditional VC route was not going to yield funding on acceptable terms so they began researching alternate funding methods.

With their collective software development experience, the founders eventually came up with the idea of creating one or more software development tools for the PC which they could sell to provide working capital for the original product idea. The first such product was PolyLibrarian, an object module library utility written by Kinzer, which was introduced in late 1982. At the time, there were few, if any, object module librarians available to PC programmers. Microsoft had such a utility that they used to create the libraries that they shipped with the early versions of Microsoft C but they didn't include it as part of the package.

In 1983, Polytron introduced PolyMake, an MS-DOS version of the well known Unix make utility, written initially by Perkins. Here again, it is likely that Microsoft had such a utility that they used in-house but it was not distributed with any of their language products at that time. The PolyMake product was followed in 1985 by the Polytron Version Control System (PVCS), also written by Kinzer, that was loosely based on the RCS change control system authored by Walter F. Tichy while at Purdue University.

By the time that PVCS was released, Perkins had left the company and the three remaining founders came to the realization that the business that they had developed creating and selling software development tools was more interesting and likely more profitable than the original product idea would have been. Consequently, no more effort was applied to realizing the original product plan.

By 1989, the remaining founders accepted an offer to be acquired by Sage Software Inc., which merged with Index Technology in 1991 to become Intersolv Inc. Then, in 1998 Intersolv merged with Micro Focus which was later renamed Merant PLC. In 2004, Serena Software acquired Merant and was itself acquired in 2006 by Silver Lake Partners.