John Appel Postley (November 29, 1924, Scarsdale, New York – August 1, 2004, Los Angeles, California) was an American entrepreneur.
AIS focused on the development of the Generalized Information Retrieval and Listing System (GIRLS) for the IBM 704.
[8][9] In April, 1963, Postley sold AIS to Hughes Dynamics as a funding strategy and to increase product reach.
When Howard Hughes began to lose interest in the computer services market in 1964, Postley facilitated the sale of AIS with its renamed and evolved the file-management product, Mark III, to Informatics General.
Informatics tried and failed to patent Mark IV in the United States (it did, however, succeed in Great Britain and Canada).
However, since the US government plays no role in either investigation or enforcement of copyright, the net effect was that of removing most protections of software from smaller vendors.
This was a precursor to an antitrust investigation into the computing industry that began in 1967 and focused on, among other things, the practice of bundling.
IBM narrowly avoided dismemberment as a result of the suit, which continued until 1980, by agreeing to stop bundling business applications with hardware.
Mark IV was the highest revenue generating software product from the beginning of the mainframe era[6][15] until it was surpassed by WordStar on DOS in 1984.