home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Shareware Grab Bag
/
Shareware Grab Bag.iso
/
002
/
nyword.arc
/
HISTORY.DOC
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1985-12-14
|
3KB
|
58 lines
THE HISTORY OF NYW
In January of 1984 I had met an old college friend who was
starting a company specializing in the UNIX market, and particularly
the Charles River Data Systems super-micro. They had seen a need for
a good word processing package in the UNIX market, and then proceeded
to ask me to write on for their fledging company. They had convinced
me that they would sell thousands at $950 apiece; I was to take no
money for development, but I would get a substantially higher
percentage of the royalties from the sales.
I believed, and still do, that with the proper marketing, this
package could have done well in the UNIX marketplace. At that time,
the most prevelant word processors found in the UNIX area were Q-ONE
and LEX, both plauged by various problems. Therefore, I accepted their
offer on the condition that I would receive 25% of the net income from
the sales. Work was commenced in late January of 1984, and the product
was shown publicly for the first time at the New York UNIX Expo in
October 1984. At that time, the product was called WPScribe.
The product was well received by certain important people,
including the people who decide which office automation software was
to be used internally by AT&T Information Systems. Unfortunately, my
friend's company didn't respond to this opportunity, as well as other
opportunities that arose from this show.
For various economic reasons, this company never advertised the
word processor (save a small ad in one issue of ATTAGE). They also
made a mess of a potential deal with Charles River to sell the word
processor as part of their system. To date, they have sold very few
copies of the word processor.
Fortunately, I owned the copyright to the product, and retained
all rights to it. In the fall of 1985, I started porting the word
processor to the IBM PC. Since all of the code was written in the 'C'
programming language, I found the port to be remarkably easy (a
tribute to the designers of the language). The I/O routines were
rewritten in 8088 assembly language, and some of the UNIX system calls
were eliminated (such as popen()). The UNIX version had interfaced
with the UNIX program "spell", but that couldn't be done on the PC.
But the UNIX and PC versions both work similarly.
I have decided to put the PC version of this word processor into
the public domain under the user-supported software concept. The price
of software is much too high, and some packages are out of reach to
the home user. Since I was introduced to the world of bulletin boards
in the summer of 1985, I have downloaded much quality software. I feel
that with the quality of the public domain offerings, I would not ever
need to buy an expensive commercial package.
I still feel enthusiastic about the word processor, and I am
always looking to improve some aspect of it. I feel that if enough
people use it, I can gather enough suggestions and advice to make the
package a truly excellent one. It's a lot more gratifying knowing that
there are people who are using and who appreciate your product than
sitting back and waiting for sporadic royalty checks. Please support
this package so I can continue to improve it.