The Sphere was real, and it was spectacular! 😂😂 I'm the author of the book (and the guy running the Kickstarter) and it was a wild excursion into a strangely vanished history of a genius founder and a good team and some bad luck and bad calls. But Sphere really did show up first to market with a number of things that others have long gotten credit for, and the story of Mike Wise and his company are riveting in their own right. Thank you for sharing the link and I am hopeful the campaign will connect with people who are interested in new ideas in an important era.

Here's the relevant portion of Tom Crossley's 2017 email to me. (If you're interested in this sort of thing.)

I originally wrote PIE as a screen editor to replace the one in ROM that came with my very first computer, the Sphere 6800 -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_1  This was before the Apple // came out.  I liked the instruction set of the Motorola 6800 better than the Intel 8080 (used in the Altair 8800, the more popular hobby computer at the time).  The Sphere had something called the PDS (Programmer Development System, os something similar), so PIE originally stood for PDS Improved Editor. Programma, run by a fellow named Mel Norell (and later also Dave Gordon) was selling Sphere software and asked to include it in their catalog (along with a compiler I wrote, for a language called SPL/M).  So they renamed it as you noticed.  PIE was originally written in assembly language but Format was written in SPL/M.  The UI for PIE was based on a visual editor written at the RAND Corporation that I liked.  Format was based on the Unix roff program.

When the Apple // came out, Dave immediately realized its potential, bought me one and asked me to port PIE and Format on to it, and it became Apple PIE, quite by coincidence.    Programma got bought by Hayden Software, mostly to obtain Programma's chess program and PIE.  So they renamed the product again to PIE: Writer.  When the IBM PC came out, Hayden bought me one of those.

Yes! I'm the author of the Sphere book above. I spoke to Tom for the book and the story of Programma is central to understanding how the Sphere community persisted as long as it did. Programma, too, is a fascinating and largely untold story from that era and it was great to be able to include a bunch of it in the book. Thank you for the pledge!