Pygmy Software is the friendly name given to the technical exploits of Adrian Sampson. He finds threefold purpose in the existence of his one-man software company:

• Resources can be more logically organized on a Web site when not mingled with personal information.
• J. Random Consumer tends to be put to ease by the respectability inherent in a company name and logo.
• If some poor soul one day decides to cooperate with him, they will have a digital place and identity to cooperate within.

Adrian also acknowledges that he gets a kick out of referring to himself as we and writing as if he were not here.

Pygmy Software began as Pygmy Softwyr Co. somewhere in the first half of 1998 with what may perhaps have been the most ill-conceived venture in the history of computing. It was an application called TTROMaker, which, to the benefit of the world as a whole, has apparently disappeared as might a bad stand-up comedian the morning after his or her act was booed off the stage in favor of a band whose goal it was to fuse the musical styles polka, soft jazz, and early-nineties grunge. It will not be discussed here at length, but we ask you to imagine, if you will, an application whose every window sported a different background color, whose about box could only be closed by moving the mouse into the window and moving it out again, and whose sole purpose was to make SimpleText files read-only.

The company's logo was then as it remained for many more years than it ought to have: a stylized letter "P" in front of a hastily drawn yellow sun in the upper-left.

Later in 1998, work began on a HTML parser named Hutmull (which is what HTML sounds like if pronounced like a word — clever, eh?), which, when deemed ready, was folded into a Web browser called, creatively, MiniWeb. It was text-only and an eyesore of eyesores. MiniWeb became Pygmy Softwyr Co.'s primary occupation for the years to come.

In November of 1998, KeepPPPalive 1.0 was released. Since MiniWeb was intended to be free and open-source from the start, KeepPPPalive became the first real source of income for Pygmy Softwyr, whose "Co." suffix was being slowly phased out. KeepPPPalive was in keeping with our well-established naming pattern defined by its total lack of creativity. Its purpose was to prevent occasional PPP disconnects due to inactivity by generating a small amount of Internet traffic at regular intervals. It cost $20, was distributed on floppy disks through the postal service, was for some reason well-received, and went through two major revisions, finishing as KeepPPPalive 3.0 in 1999.

The year of 1999 brought great, if at times shameful, things to Pygmy Softwyr Co. It brought a Web presence, made up of bright red and brighter green, creating a medley of such expert design that its very memory should be enough to make any witnesses feel at least slightly queasy. The site eventually evolved to be slightly less horrid, but employed the overuse of a certain peach/light blue color combination as MiniWeb matured to actual usability and its final version, 0.6. The year also saw the release of iPad, a replacement for Apple's Note Pad application that rode on the wave of software designed to feel kind of like an iMac, and Activate!, a little window that sits in the corner of a screen and launches items when their names are typed.

The Web site ushered in by the year 2000 was tabular and had curves and sometimes worked. Mercuri, an application for instant messaging that didn't require a central server, was released in that year. It was something of a milestone as it was the first Pygmy Softwyr product to have any sort of semi-creative name. As far as we can tell, nobody ever used it, its developer notwithstanding.

In the first half of 2001, Pygmy Softwyr became Pygmy Software, in a valiant effort to take a wild, thrashing stab at the great beast that was widespread confusion. It moved to the domain name pygmysoftware.com to reflect the change. Its Web site was, at last, tasteful. CSS Suitcase was developed during this time, which we regard as Pygmy Software's most misunderstood product. It was relatively proficient at editing Cascading Style Sheets, but it did not attempt to provide any assistance to people who didn't know CSS already. It also crashed a lot and we, under careful retrospective consideration, have found it to be utterly useless. It did, however, have an attractive and functional user interface and was the first of our products to be ported to Mac OS X.

A long, long hiatus followed this update, wherein we experienced a paradigm shift in our programming. We shifted our primary development environment from REALbasic (we cower in embarrassment) to Cocoa. We found that we could no longer ethically release shareware but that all our software would be open-source and funded by donations. In March of 2003, Strangelove became the first application we released under this new paradigm. It was a simple utility based upon DOCtor by Stone Design that used the command-line utilities antiword and ghostscript to form an effective Word-to-PDF converter with a nifty interface. It went through problematic version 1.0b to stagnate at 1.0b2 to finally become obsolete in October of 2003 with the release of Mac OS X 10.3, which could open Word documents in TextEdit and other applications.

Focus moved to iCAR, the iChat Auto-Reply, our most popular and only current release. iCAR is a plugin for iChat that adds simple auto-reply functionality. It was released in May of 2003 and is still maintained.

The latest design of Pygmy Software's Web site went live in August of 2004. It retains an homage to the sun logo of its humble origin — the logo is the letter "P" on a bright yellow orb.