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| Industry | Software industry |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1993 |
| Products | Grasshopper |
| Website | Company website |
Mainsoft is a software company, founded in 1993, that develops interoperability software products for Microsoft Windows and Linux/Unix platforms. [1]
Mainsoft was founded in 1993, mainly to propose integration products between Windows and other systems. [2]
Mainsoft was one of the main providers for the Microsoft Windows Interface Source Environment (WISE) program, a licensing program from Microsoft that allowed developers to recompile and run Windows-based applications on Unix and Macintosh platforms. [3] Its first product, MainWin, was an implementation of the Windows API for Unix systems such as Sun Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and UnixWare, offering "most of 600 Windows calls" and reportedly allowing Windows 3.0, and later 3.1, applications recompiled for target platforms to run natively at acceptable performance without recourse to emulation. [4]
WISE software development kits (SDKs) were not directly provided by Microsoft. Instead Microsoft established partnerships to several software providers which in turn sold WISE SDKs to end-users. [5]
After the WISE program, Microsoft extended its agreements with Mainsoft to port Windows Media Player 6.3 and Internet Explorer to Unix. [6]
Since then, Mainsoft activity shifted to integration of Microsoft SharePoint into IBM products [7] [8] [9] (IBM Lotus Notes, IBM WebSphere, Rational Jazz) and products focusing on .NET Framework and JavaEE.
To be able to develop WISE SDKs, software providers needed to have access to Windows internals source code. In 2004, more than 30000 source files from Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0 were leaked to the internet. It was later discovered that the source of the leak originated from Mainsoft. [10] [11]
OS/2 is a proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was initially created and developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, intended as a replacement for DOS. The first version was released in 1987; a feud between the two companies beginning in 1990 resulted in Microsoft leaving development exclusively to IBM, who continued development on their own. OS/2 Warp 4 in 1996 was the last major upgrade, after which IBM slowly halted the product as it failed to compete against Microsoft's Windows; updated versions of OS/2 were released by IBM until 2001.
In computing, cross-platform software is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software requires a separate build for each platform, but some can be directly run on any platform without special preparation, being written in an interpreted language or compiled to portable bytecode for which the interpreters or run-time packages are common or standard components of all supported platforms.
A computing platform, digital platform, or software platform is the infrastructure on which software is executed. While the individual components of a computing platform may be obfuscated under layers of abstraction, the summation of the required components comprise the computing platform.
The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is the foundational application programming interface (API) that allows a computer program to access the features of the Microsoft Windows operating system in which the program is running. Programs access API functionality via dynamic-link library (DLL) technology.
In computing, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing database management systems (DBMS). The designers of ODBC aimed to make it independent of database systems and operating systems. An application written using ODBC can be ported to other platforms, both on the client and server side, with few changes to the data access code.
Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Novell technology contributed to the emergence of local area networks, which displaced the dominant mainframe computing model and changed computing worldwide.
In computer science, message queues and mailboxes are software-engineering components typically used for inter-process communication (IPC), or for inter-thread communication within the same process. They use a queue for messaging – the passing of control or of content. Group communication systems provide similar kinds of functionality.
The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is a graphical widget toolkit for use with the Java platform. It was originally developed by Stephen Northover at IBM and is now maintained by the Eclipse Foundation in tandem with the Eclipse IDE. It is an alternative to the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) and Swing Java graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits provided by Sun Microsystems as part of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE).
HCL Sametime Premium is a client–server application and middleware platform that provides real-time, unified communications and collaboration for enterprises. Those capabilities include presence information, enterprise instant messaging, web conferencing, community collaboration, and telephony capabilities and integration. Currently it is developed and sold by HCL Software, a division of Indian company HCL Technologies, until 2019 by the Lotus Software division of IBM.
unixODBC is an open-source project that implements the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) API. The code is provided under the GNU GPL/LGPL and can be built and used on many different operating systems, including most versions of Unix, Linux, Mac OS X, IBM OS/2 and Microsoft's Interix.
Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) is a discontinued software package produced by Microsoft which provided a Unix environment on Windows NT and some of its immediate successor operating-systems.
A GIS software program is a computer program to support the use of a geographic information system, providing the ability to create, store, manage, query, analyze, and visualize geographic data, that is, data representing phenomena for which location is important. The GIS software industry encompasses a broad range of commercial and open-source products that provide some or all of these capabilities within various information technology architectures.
Internet Explorer for UNIX is a discontinued version of the Internet Explorer graphical web browser that was available free of charge and produced by Microsoft for use in the X Window System on Solaris or HP-UX. Development ended with a version of Internet Explorer 5 in 2001 and support for it was completely discontinued in 2002.
Simba Technologies Inc. is a software company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Simba specializes in products for ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO) and XML for Analysis (XMLA). The company licenses data connectivity technologies, and provides software development for Microsoft Windows, Linux, UNIX, Mac and mobile device platforms. Simba Technologies was founded as PageAhead Software in Vancouver and Seattle, Washington in 1991 and changed its name in 1995. Customers include Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, MIS AG, SAP AG and Descisys.
Bristol Technology Inc. was a software development company founded in January 1991 by Keith, Ken, and Jean Blackwell. The company's original product idea, Wind/U, was an implementation of the Windows API on non-Windows operating systems. In March 2007, Bristol was purchased by the information technology corporation Hewlett-Packard for an undisclosed amount.
Locus Computing Corporation was formed in 1982 by Gerald J. Popek, Charles S. Kline and Gregory I. Thiel to commercialize the technologies developed for the LOCUS distributed operating system at UCLA. Locus was notable for commercializing single-system image software and producing the Merge package which allowed the use of DOS and Windows 3.1 software on Unix systems.
Windows Interface Source Environment was a licensing program from Microsoft which allowed developers to recompile and run Windows-based applications on UNIX and Macintosh platforms.
The Application Programming Interface for Windows (APIW) Standard is a specification of the Microsoft Windows 3.1 API drafted by Willows Software. It is the successor to previously proposed Public Windows Interface standard. It was created in an attempt to establish a vendor-neutral, platform-independent, open standard of the 16-bit Windows API not controlled by Microsoft.
Mono is a free and open-source software framework that aims to run software made for the .NET Framework on Linux and other OSes. Originally by Ximian which was acquired by Novell, it was later developed by Xamarin which was acquired by Microsoft. In August 2024, Microsoft transferred ownership of Mono to WineHQ.
Mainsoft extended its WISE agreement with Microsoft in March 2000 to include access to the Windows 2000 source. Microsoft subsequently employed Mainsoft to port Windows Media Player 6.3 and Internet Explorer to Unix.
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