Apex Software – The Early Days

Apex Software was established in 1984 by Tim Cimbura. At that time, two applications were released for the Apple II: (1) ApexText, a character generator that made it possible to use upper/lower case, full color, bold, tall, wide, and large text and (2) Inventory Plus, a powerful and easy to use inventory management application. ApexText was used as the graphics engine for many entertainment and educational software packages distributed by Scholastic, TIES, MECC-Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium (later The Learning Company and now Broderbund), EduComp, CompuKeys, and other companies.

Later, many applications were developed in HyperCard including a language translator, a meeting decision support system, and a multi-user contact management system. For several years, Apex Software developed and marketed the Bible Helps electronic Bible study reference library for the Macintosh.

Apple IIe Software

Just for fun and a little bit of nostalgia, some of the original Apple IIe applications developed by Apex Software are available here for free. These products are no longer sold or supported. You may run them using an Apple IIe emulators for the Macintosh or PC. Virtual II by Gerard Putter is the best emulator I’ve found.

ApexText System Disk
ApexText is a character generator for the Apple II. When released it was THE best of class character generator allowing any Apple II to display upper and lower case characters in multiple sizes, colors, fonts, graphic symbols, etc. (Believe it or not computers didn’t used to do this.) Included are a couple of nice demos (including the first magic trick programmed on a computer), fonts, font editors, etc. The manuals are here: Features, Documentation, Quick Reference, Hex Chart

CompuKeys Demo Disk
At its release in 1986, CompuKeys was THE premier application for teaching keyboarding from the elementary to high school level. It included many advanced features like class and student management, accurate timings (the Apple had no timeclock!), correction of errors like a real typing teacher, word wrap, etc. It also featured animated graphics of all hand positions and games to develop speed and accuracy in typing.

“Our school has been using CompuKeys for the past 10 years on our Apple IIs. However, this year we got rid of those computers and we still want to use the Compukeys program. Is there anyway we can use the software on our Macs?” – Cheryl Lenz – Spencer, WI, April 2000 …No…Sorry…but that is a long time to use one program without an update!