The Upheaval at Platinum Software : Computers: The latest problems are not the first that company founder Gerald Blackie has encountered.

Platinum Software Corp. seemed aptly named. Just last year, the Irvine maker of accounting software tripled its payroll, made seven acquisitions and reported $39 million in revenue.

But with Monday’s announcement that the company’s top managers quit and that Platinum had overstated revenue for 15 months, Platinum’s explosive growth drew closer attention--as did its architect, Gerald R. Blackie, the firm’s founder, who stepped aside as chairman and chief executive.

Blackie’s first computer venture, Heritage Computing Inc. in Costa Mesa, was sued for copyright infringement in 1983. The suit ended in an out-of-court settlement four years later--by which time Heritage had gone bankrupt.

In 1991, a trade group sued Advanced Business Microsystems Inc.--which became Platinum--for illegally duplicating software. That suit was also settled out of court.

Blackie has been unavailable for comment on the recent developments. Carmelo J. Santoro, the company’s acting chief executive, on Thursday described Blackie as “concerned and sad.”

But Santoro also said the company is still trying to assess the full extent of the overstated revenue and exactly how the overstatement occurred. Santoro said he met Tuesday with investigators from the Securities and Exchange Commission, adding that he expects an SEC investigation.

The story of Platinum began, incongruously enough, with sportswear. In the late 1970s, Blackie opened a store in Huntington Beach that specialized in skiing paraphernalia. To balance his books, he bought an accounting program made by a Woodland Hills software maker, Occupational Computing Co.--one of the first companies in the nation to offer such a product.

Blackie, a handsome New Zealand native who had moved to California a few years earlier, was so impressed with the software that he offered to market it. According to public records, the 29-year-old entrepreneur signed a contract in January, 1983, granting him a license to manufacture and distribute OCC’s software.

At about the same time, Blackie opened Heritage Computing. He brought in three men who had operated the small financial consulting firm that introduced Blackie to OCC’s software: its owner, Brett Wilson, and Wilson’s two right-hand men, Kevin P. Riegelsberger and Timothy J. McMullen.

Riegelsberger and McMullen, who would later help Blackie found the company that became Platinum, were two of the executives at the company who last week gave up their board seats.

“Gerald was as charming a person as I have ever met,” said Wilson, now the director of information services for Navicert Financial, a consulting firm in Carson. “He could make you feel that you were the most wonderful, smartest person in the world.”

But the relationship between OCC and Heritage soon soured. OCC sued Heritage in December, 1983, alleging that Blackie sold the software without paying royalties.

Heritage filed for bankruptcy in 1985. Two years later, OCC and Heritage’s insurer settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. In a deposition in the case, Wilson said he left Heritage in 1983 because he “would not be a party to stealing OCC’s software.”

Joseph Price, an Irvine patent attorney who represented Blackie in the suit, said his client argued that Heritage distributed its own software, not OCC’s. “He didn’t take their product,” Price said. “Heritage devised its own accounting package with its own programmers.”

Blackie, Riegelsberger and McMullen founded another company, Advanced Business Microsystems, in 1984. The Irvine-based company made new accounting software called Platinum, and a few years later it adopted Platinum as its name.

In 1991, the company landed in a legal dispute with the Software Publishers Assn., a trade group. The SPA sued ABM on behalf of eight software makers, including Microsoft Corp., WordPerfect Corp. and Lotus Development Corp.

The suit alleged that ABM illegally duplicated software. The SPA files dozens of such suits every year, but it has targeted “an extremely small number” of software makers, said the association’s litigation manager, Peter Beruk.

ABM settled out of court in 1992 for $85,000 after agreeing “to ensure that all unlicensed copies of computer software have been eliminated from its personal computers,” according to an SPA news release.

Blackie said in that release: “We did find some areas where we were in technical violation, and we took immediate steps to correct the situation. ABM firmly believes in the right of all software producers to be paid for their products.”

*

Times staff writer Dean Takahashi contributed to this report.