Datastorm Technologies, Inc., was a computer software company that existed from 1986 until 1996. Bruce Barkelew and Thomas Smith founded the company to develop and publish ProComm, a general purpose communications program for
personal computers. ProComm flourished in the pre-
World Wide Web world, when personal computers used
modems to connect over
telephone lines with other individual computers, online services such as
CompuServe,
bulletin board systems (BBSs),
Telnet and
Gopher sites, and the like. Datastorm was the first company to grow from a
shareware publisher into a large commercial software publisher. ProComm 2.4.3 for
MS-DOS is still available as shareware.