The Company that invented the KAMAS™ Software

KAMAS is a Knowledge And Mind Augmentation System™. This software originated as a product in the early days of personal computing. KAMAS was invented and marketed by Kamasoft as an outline-based (hierarchical) knowledge organizing and manipulation tool. The flagship versions of KAMAS were fully programmible text/knowledge management systems. Spanning from 1983 to 1989 the company offered several versions of its Kamas and Out-Think products for the CP/M, IBM PC-DOS, and Microsoft MS-DOS operating systems. Kamasoft was founded as a partnership of Adam Trent (President, product design, software engineering, tech support) and Dorothy Anne Hickman (Vice President, tech writing, marketing, accounting). At its peak in 1986, Kamasoft was offering its products and publishing a support newsletter to a world-wide community of users.

The very earliest hierarchical data retrieval software technology which became the core innovation in KAMAS was invented and coded in the BASIC programming language on a MITS-Altair computer in 1980 by software engineer Adam Trent. Starting with full-time development in 1981, the core KAMAS technology evolved in various incarnations as coded in a personal computer implementation of the BASIC programming language offered by a company called Micropolis. With the advent of the Digital Research CP/M operating system on personal computers, the KAMAS technology was recoded numerous times to aim at that early blossoming market. When feasibility of KAMAS's inner search and hierarchical data storage algorithms was thereby confirmed on the relatively slow 8-bit microprocessors of the time, the implementation culminated in a Z80 Assembly Language virtual machine kernal whereby KAMAS bacame self-programmable in its own built-in Forth-derived programming language. The KAMAS Language was a unique and powerful self-extensible programming language with an Indirect Threaded Code interpreter at its core. Thus the first published version of KAMAS was coded almost entirely in the KAMAS language itself.

KAMAS was launched as a product in 1984 for the expanding variety of personal computers then running the CP/M operating system. After rave reviews in various of the personal computing magazines of the day (eg, Byte Magazine), Kamasoft was off and flying especially with success serving the exploding user bases of the Kaypro and Osborne portable CP/M computers. Because KAMAS was programmable, it was an application development platform for text-based applications. Its programming language was itself uniquely user-extensible. KAMAS's utility was especially powerful in applications requiring fast search and retrieval into deep hierarchical organizations of huge amounts of text content. It found its best-fit home in such applications as cataloging the vast hierarchy of seed varieties for all North American corn cultivars or as capturing/cataloging the hierarchical complexity of threatened spoken languages among isolated primitive tribes in the Philippine Islands. From its earliest success, Kamasoft publised (on diskettes) applications and enhancements contributed by folks in an enthusiastic world-wide user community which included those who learned to program in the KAMAS language. Those were the super-charged days that fuel obsession and never leave the memory of an entrepreneur.

Sadly, like so many of the early high-tech startups which developed and self-published software in that earliest phase of the personal computer revolution, Kamasoft couldn't finance growth fast enough in a publishing environment that evolved into three-tiered distribution especially with the rise of the IBM PC. Past that tipping point, getting on the shelves of major distributers required proof of sufficiently large "pull" advertising budgets.

KAMAS was far ahead of its time in an environment where the typical need of users new to personal computers was for the simple outlining and editing of text. To target those more modest needs alone, two less-expensive non-programmable "outline editor" versions of KAMAS (Out-Think for CP/M and KAMAS for PC/MS-DOS) were developed and had considerable success until late 1987 when the Stock Market crash put the nail in the coffin by killing a major distribution deal covering all of Southeast Asia. A subsequent short-lived version of the MS-DOS KAMAS outline editor was developed and marketed as FastLine for the HP-95/100 hand-held computers. But by 1989, though it never went bankrupt, the company had to discontinue development, sales, and support of its product line and revert to a sole business of software (engineering/consulting/website) development.

For some additional historical information see the Wikipedia article on KAMAS at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KAMAS_(program). That article includes a scanned image of Kamasoft's very earliest brochure for KAMAS which was used for a short duration after the new company had named itself "Compusophic Systems". The company improved its marketing considerably after branding itself as Kamasoft.

Click the following image which is a link to a .PDF file containing some scanned images of representative Kamasoft marketing material from 1985:

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