Published by Westlake Data Corporation of Austin, Texas, and designed by Albert Nurick and Brittain Fraley, it was first released on 30 September 1984 and became fairly popular.
PathMinder had several key features which contributed to its success, including a virtual loader that required only 4 KB of RAM when other programs were running, an important feature when less than 640 KB of RAM were available on systems of the day.
A version of PathMinder was independently developed in 1988 to run on the CP/M operating system.
[1] PathMinder suffered a terminal decline after the widespread usage of Microsoft Windows.
Westlake Data released a version of PathMinder designed for the Windows 3.1 operating system called PathMinder Does Windows, but it met with little critical or commercial success.