Semaphore Corporation

Semaphore Corporation was a company notable for being the first to provide public access to selected U.S. Postal Service databases, and for its early computer publications in the 1980s.

Founded in January 1982, the company operated for 35 years through September 2017. The firm's initial products were for Pick operating system programmers and users, followed by offerings for Lisa and Macintosh users, then finally concentrating solely on the Windows market.





== Software, services, and periodicals by Semaphore ==

ADOsort was a Windows program for sorting and printing postal mail to allow qualifying for first and third class mail postage discounts. Originally bundled with a $19 companion database for ZP4 in 2005, ADOsort became a free downloadable program along with a number of other tools in 2016. Complete source code was released in 2017, and is still downloadable with the MAF installer. ADOsort includes editable data tables and a postal form editor, making it notable as a program that allowed adjusting for Postal Service pricing and form layout changes from year to year without making any source code changes.

B-TREE-P was a $395 collection of subroutines for using B-trees with the Pick operating system. First distributed in April 1986 and last updated in December 1989, source code is still available online. Selections of new customers were listed in advertisements in each edition of Pragma's Product Profiles.