Bruce Barkelew and Thomas Smith founded the company to develop and publish ProComm, a general-purpose communications program for personal computers.

The death of Andrew Fluegelman, creator of PC-Talk, left a gap in the offerings of dial-up communications and terminal emulation software.

Bruce Barkelew and Tom Smith, computer science students at the University of Missouri, formed PIL Software Systems in 1985 to develop ProComm.

Based on the program's popularity, Barkelew and Smith founded Datastorm Technologies Inc. in 1986 to build a full-fledged company around the product.

In November 1993, the data transmission program reached the number one ranking on PC Magazine's list of top retail software.