Throwback Thursday: The First Genealogy Software

Today’s Throwback Thursday is going to cover one of the first two publicly-available genealogy programs. This is in fact the first publicly-available genealogy software, by John J. Armstrong, and was fully available in the September, 1979 issue of Personal Computing. Armstrong apparently made it available as a self-contained program, for $250 USD (over $1,000 USD when adjusted for inflation to 2024).

Note: If you just want to look at the magazine/code, scroll down to the bottom of the article.

First I will apologize – I thought I could get decent photos of it, but I will need to fully scan it and will do that at a later date. I had also hoped to run it through OCR so that I could present the actual program along with a way to run it, but my OCR software (and the “AI” tools I found online) choked on it, as you’ll see why (it was mostly very tiny black text that was printed on dark blue – copy protection in 1979?).

I don’t know what to call it formally – the article says “Roots & Branches” in the header, but the actual programs are named “ADDNAME” and “TREE” (and their functions match their names). Was this an influential program? This came out one month before another computer program (not as complex) was released in the pages of BYTE Magazine in October of 1979, and looks to have been written at least a year before Herb Drake started working on “Roots” for COMMSOFT for for the Heath Disk Operating System (started development in 1980, released in April of 1981). Personal Ancestral File 1.0 would not come out for another four years (1983).

The author, John J. Armstrong, originally wrote this to help his his elderly aunt, and his hardware and software consisted of:

• Tandy TRS-80 (Radio Shack!)
• 48K RAM
• 2x floppy disks (5.25-inch, and he counted every free sector)
• Version 1.1 of Radio Shack Disk BASIC
• A tractor-fed line printer (needed for output/reports)

A side note: The TRS-80 became very popular and was very influential in its own right, and interestingly enough, it came out of a merger between the Tandy Leather Company and Radio Shack just 14 years earlier.

This program would handle about 230 persons on a single floppy disk formatted to 85K (not the fancy 360K we had later on), if there was nothing else on the floppy disk – you had to store the two programs on a separate diskette to max out at 230 persons.

It could print out up to seven generations, which is 127 individuals (it says 61, but me thinks that was an error missed in editing):

• 32 sets of great-great-great-great-grandparents (64)
• 16 sets of great-great-great-grandparents (32)
• 8 sets of great-great-grandparents (16)
• 4 sets of great-grandparents (8)
• 2 sets of grandparents (4)
• 1 set of parents (2)
• 1 root individual (1)

Those of you who are software developers will really like this, and as I said, I will be putting together something more comprehensive in the future – what I thought would be a quick throwback turned into something else when I realized that my plans were not going to be realized (in terms of putting the code up) and my photos weren’t the best. With that said, I’ll get the code copied out, and find a decent TRS-80 emulator (or open up a book I have and make a few code changes to accommodate MS-DOS).

I want to point out some major things – he included his logic/flow charts, his variables, etc. in the magazine, separate from the BASIC code. This is at a time when there was no GEDCOM files, no standards, and you can see that he really was thinking about how to do this within the limitations of 48K of RAM.

As for why it was published in a magazine and not on floppy, floppies were expensive, and there wasn’t much of a distribution channel at the time, outside of either mail-order or people putting a floppy and a Xerox-ed manual in a Ziplock bag and dropping it off at the local computer store. Shareware was not a thing yet, and yes, people were accustomed to typing in programs from magazines and books.

In 1979, when this was written, the TRS-80 had only been out for two years (as was the Apple II and Commodore PET), and cost $599.95 USD (around $3,000 in 2024), and the required floppy drive and hardware could push that up to over the equivalent of $4,000 – $5,000 in 2024 terms). The amount of people who could even think about using a computer for genealogy research was extremely limited, and it would be easy to get a BASIC manual and crank out something simple and useless.

And to put things in perspective – prior to 1977/1978, most “personal” computers prior to the TRS-80, Apple II, and PET, had to be literally assembled. You didn’t bring them home, take them out of the box, and plug them in.

Instead, Armstrong created a very elegant program (technically two) that could print useful pedigree charts, and he was I think, in the running as the “Father of Genealogy Software”. Was he first? A sample printout in the magazine shows a date of 4-15-1979, which makes me think he probably started writing it either in early (January/February 1979) or late 1978 as it was obviously fully-functioning by April of 1979. I think the argument could be made that he was, or at the very least shared the title with Herb Drake (of Roots fame, which would eventually become Ultimate Family Tree in the late 90s).

I have heard of people using mainframes for genealogy work earlier, but those were one-off programs that were probably never seen by others and probably very crude (and possibly related to census information being compiled). I also believe there were genealogists who probably put together some genealogy programs around this time or earlier – as I said, the TRS-80, Commodore PET, and Apple II had been out for two years.

But John J. Armstrong got his program “out to the masses” before anybody else did, and he did it through Personal Computing magazine, a popular magazine at the time (and somehow I have a near-pristine copy that I purchased a few years ago) that was aimed at home users. BYTE Magazine, from what I recall was aimed at more tech-savvy users. And to his credit, he put a lot of thought into it. And to Personal Computing magazine’s credit, they allowed him the space to show show off quite a few sample printouts, all of his code (which would have helped sell plenty of issues), along with charts and information showcasing his decision-making processes when it came to writing the code.

Magazine Source: Personal Collection

Icon Source: Wikimedia Commons