[6][4][2] The company was founded in the middle of Joe Piscopo's MBA studies; although he had formal training as a computer scientist in his prior job at Montgomery Ward, Joe was convinced to found Pansophic only after his uncle Emil had encouraged him to start his own business in the computing industry.

The inspiration for Panvalet came from Piscopo's own anxieties delivering the easily shufflable punched cards from Montgomery Ward's headquarters to outside institutions such as NYSE Chicago.

[6][4] Joe Piscopo sought to have Panvalet bought outright to one of the large computer services companies then in business, but there were no takers; instead, he began marketing and selling the product directly to data processing development shops that were using IBM mainframes.

One such product was CA-SORT, made by the Switzerland-based Computer Associates International Ltd, which Pansophic sold in North America for a couple of years in the mid-1970s under the name Pansort.

[12]) Another such product was Easytrieve, an early instance of a report generator, which was developed by Ribek Corporation but marketed and sold by Pansophic.

[14] In November 1984, by which point it was worth $53 million and had 7,600 installations, Pansophic acquired Christensen Systems, Inc., of Quincy, Massachusetts.

[20][21][22][23] Joe Piscopo left the company in 1987 to enter retirement at the age of 42, at which point his net worth was $20 million.

Pansophic was further hurt by migration away from mainframe systems toward large deployments of personal computers in corporate environments.