Computer Applications, Inc.

Founded in 1960 in New York City, it grew to encompass contract programming, computer services, and various subsidiary businesses.

[6] A number of other subsidiaries would be part of the company as well, including two located in Silver Spring, Maryland, and one in Fairfield, New Jersey.

[1] An instance of the latter was a contract the company had to develop the Indexed Sequential Access Method (ISAM) for the IBM OS/360 mainframe platform.

[9] Also in the same midtown Manhattan building was a competitor of sorts, Advanced Computer Techniques, and at a time when finding programming talent was an exercise in creativity, that company's executives poached several Computer Applications programmers whom they happened to see riding the elevators holding a deck of punched cards.

[12] Besides being a computer services provider, it also had units that were engaged in market research; direct mail; and book distribution activities.

[3] CAI was one of several large software companies in the late 1960s that made significant investments into offering teleprocessing services and the so-called "Computer Utility", meaning remotely hosted hardware and software on which customers could run their applications; however, the market for the computer utility never materialized at that time.

[3] The company's immediate ruin was in the Speedata project, which was intended to provide inventory control for warehouses belonging to grocery stores.

[14] The reorganization request was denied, and with liabilities essentially double those of its assets and its bank accounts seized by a creditor, Computer Applications, Inc. could not continue.