Reference Software International

Last updated
Reference Software International
Company typePrivate [1] : E-1 
Founded1985;39 years ago (1985) in Walnut Creek, California, United States
Founders
  • Donald Emery
  • Bruce Wampler
Defunct1993;31 years ago (1993)
FateAcquired by WordPerfect Corporation
Headquarters Albuquerque, New Mexico (research and development)
Products Grammatik
Number of employees
140 (1992, peak)

Reference Software International, Inc. (RSI), was an American software developer active from 1985 to 1993 and based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and San Francisco, California. The company released several productivity and reference software packages during their lifespan, including the highly popular Grammatik grammar checker, for IBM PCs and compatibles running DOS. The company was acquired by WordPerfect Corporation in 1993.

Contents

History

Background (1980–1985)

Reference Software International, Inc., was founded by Donald "Don" Emery and Bruce Wampler in 1985 in San Francisco, California. Both Wampler and Emery were college professors when they founded RSI: Wampler at the University of New Mexico as a professor of computer science and Emery a professor of marketing at San Francisco State University. [2] After graduating from the University of Utah in around 1978, Wampler founded his first software company, Aspen Software, in Tijeras, New Mexico, in 1979. [3] [4] Wampler founded Aspen to develop an early spell checker software package, called Proofreader, for the Apple II, licensing Random House's Webster's Unabridged Dictionary for the package's lexicon. In 1980, he began development on a grammar checker inspired by Writer's Workbench, a pioneering grammar checker for Unix systems. Walz used Writer's Workbench heavily during the writer of his doctoral dissertation but disliked having to jump between the Apple II on which he composed the dissertation and the mainframe on which Writer's Workbench ran, and so wanted to develop a version of the latter for microcomputers. [3]

Wampler's work came to fruition as Grammatik in 1981, eventually ported to several other microcomputer platforms in the early 1980s. In 1983, by which point the company had 12 employees and sold a combined 80,000 units of Grammatik and Proofreader, Wampler sold Aspen to Dictronics, a software company best known for developing the Electronic Thesaurus, an early thesaurus program for microcomputers. [3] [4]

Dictronics was in turn purchased by Wang Laboratories; [5] according to Wampler, "Wang bought [Aspen] and sat on it. They did nothing with it". [3] Wampler moved on to teach for the University of New Mexico, but, frustrated by Wang's inaction, got the urge to resurrect his work. In 1985, he was able to license back Grammatik and Proofreader from a small California-based software firm that had grandfathered rights to a forked version of both. [3] In the same year, he met Emery, who, impressed by Wampler's, founded Reference Software International to market his software. [2] RSI's research and development headquarters were based in Albuquerque, while the company's sales and marketing department was based in Walnut Creek, California. [3] [6] : 130 

Success (1985–1992)

In August 1985, RSI released their first product: the Random House Reference Set, a new version of Proofreader for the IBM Personal Computer and compatibles, revised to be a terminate-and-stay-resident program that ran atop other word processors such as WordStar or WordPerfect. [2] [7] [8] At the time, Reference Set was the only such program on the market that functioned like this. [2] RSI netted $114,000 from sales of Reference Set by the end of 1985. [9] In June 1986, they released version 2.0 of Grammatik as Grammatik II for the PC. The latter was a breakout hit for RSI, receiving praise in the press (including technology journals such as PC Magazine ) and RSI selling 1,000 units a month. [2] [10] : 64  In spring 1987, they released Reference Set II, which allowed users to import their own words into the built-in dictionary and added a thesaurus of 300,000 words. [2] In November 1987, they released version 3.0 of Reference Set, which comprised two new field-specific dictionaries for the medical and legal professions. As well as the general Random House dictionary and thesaurus, it included Stedman's Medical Dictionary and Black's Law Dictionary . [11] Emery consulted Paul Brest and Bob Jackson—professors of law at Stanford Law School and San Francisco State respectively—for the curation of the law dictionary; and Burton Grebin—at the time the executive director of Mount Saint Mary's Hospital—for the curation of the medical dictionary. [2]

In fall 1988, the company released Grammatik III, a total rewrite that made use of artificial intelligence to more accurately judge the grammar of sentences by breaking them down into a syntactic hierarchy. [12] Grammatik III received universal acclaim, with Gloria Morris of InfoWorld calling it the apparent leader in the grammar checking field and Sandra Anderson of Mac Home Journal calling it "hands down ... the best of the industry" six years after its release. [12] By 1989, the product had competitors in Correct Grammar by Lifetree Software and RightWriter by Rightsoft, Inc. [13]

By 1990, RSI achieved annual sales of $9.7 million. [9] In the same year they released Grammatik IV, which was the first to offer direct integration with WordPerfect on both DOS and Windows. [14] : 394  [15] : 76  In March 1992—by which point RSI had sold 1.5 million copies of Grammatik across all versions—the company released version 5 of the program, another rewrite that updated the lexicon further and added new functions such as word redundancy detection. [16] Around the same time, the company introduced Easy Proof, a pared-down version of Grammatik intended for novice writers, students, and family computers. [9]

In 1991, the company was engaged in a trademark dispute with Systems Compatibility Corporation (SCC) of Chicago, Illinois, over the rights to the Software Toolkit title. Both companies had published software bundles bearing the name in the turn of the 1990s; SCC had published theirs first in 1988 and registered the trademark with the USPTO. SCC was granted a restraining order against RSI in January 1991. [17] The following month, RSI agreed to rename their product, preventing a protracted legal battle. [18]

Decline and acquisition (1992–1993)

By early 1992, RSI achieved annual sales of more than $13 million, employed 120 people, and had opened international offices in London, Belgium, and Antwerp to sell foreign versions of Reference Set and Grammatik. [9] [3] The company reached peak employment in the middle of 1992, with 140 employees. [1] : E-3  However, RSI's launch of six disparate titles in the year proved problematic for the company when they failed to sell as well as they had projected, and the company laid off employees by the dozens. [1] : E-1–E-3  By December 1992, only 71 employees were left, 32 from their San Francisco office. [1] On the last day of 1992, RSI received an acquisition offer from WordPerfect Corporation, makers of the namesake word processor based in Orem, Utah. [3] The deal was inked in January 1993, RSI's stakeholders receiving $19 million. [3] The company's remaining employees were absorbed into WordPerfect in Orem. [19] WordPerfect continued selling Grammatik as a standalone product for several years. [3]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WordPerfect</span> Word processing application

WordPerfect (WP) is a word processing application, now owned by Alludo, with a long history on multiple personal computer platforms. At the height of its popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the dominant player in the word processor market, displacing the prior market leader WordStar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spell checker</span> Software to help correct spelling errors

In software, a spell checker is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grammar checker</span> Computer program that verifies written text for grammatical correctness

A grammar checker, in computing terms, is a program, or part of a program, that attempts to verify written text for grammatical correctness. Grammar checkers are most often implemented as a feature of a larger program, such as a word processor, but are also available as a stand-alone application that can be activated from within programs that work with editable text.

Hunspell is a spell checker and morphological analyser designed for languages with rich morphology and complex word compounding and character encoding, originally designed for the Hungarian language.

Dictionary.com is an online dictionary whose domain was first registered on May 14, 1995. The primary content on Dictionary.com is a proprietary dictionary based on Random House Unabridged Dictionary, with editors for the site providing new and updated definitions. Supplementary content comes from the Collins English Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary and others.

SoftMaker Office is an office suite which aims for compatibility with Microsoft Office. It is available as a one-time purchase, as well as a subscription. A freeware version with a slightly reduced feature set is released under the name SoftMaker FreeOffice.

A foreign language writing aid is a computer program or any other instrument that assists a non-native language user in writing decently in their target language. Assistive operations can be classified into two categories: on-the-fly prompts and post-writing checks. Assisted aspects of writing include: lexical, syntactic, lexical semantic and idiomatic expression transfer, etc. Different types of foreign language writing aids include automated proofreading applications, text corpora, dictionaries, translation aids and orthography aids.

Grammatik was the first grammar checking program developed for home computer systems. Aspen Software of Albuquerque, NM, released the earliest version of this diction and style checker for personal computers. It was first released no later than 1981, and was inspired by the Writer's Workbench.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MicroPro International</span> American software company (1978–1993)

MicroPro International Corporation was an American software company founded in 1978 in San Rafael, California. They are best known as the publisher of WordStar, a popular early word processor for personal computers.

OpenTaal is a Dutch foundation which provides free Dutch language files to be used in open-source software spell checking, hyphenation, thesaurus and grammar checking.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LibreOffice Writer</span> Open-source word processor

LibreOffice Writer is the free and open-source word processor and desktop publishing component of the LibreOffice software package and is a fork of OpenOffice.org Writer. Writer is a word processor similar to Microsoft Word and Corel's WordPerfect with many similar features, and file format compatibility.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ginger Software</span> American-Israeli software startup

Ginger Software is an American and Israeli start-up specialized in natural language processing and AI. The main products are tools aiming to improve written communications, develop English speaking skills and boost productivity. The company was founded in 2008 by Yael Karov and Avner Zangvil. Ginger Software uses the context of complete sentences to suggest corrections. In December 2011, Ginger Software was one of nine projects approved by the Board of Governors of the Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation for a funding of $8.1 million. The company also raised $3 million from private Israeli and US investors in 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grammarly</span> Online grammar checker, spellchecker, and plagiarism-detection service

Grammarly is a Ukraine-founded cloud-based typing assistant, headquartered in San Francisco. It reviews spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement, and delivery mistakes in English texts, detects plagiarism, and suggests replacements for the identified errors. It also allows users to customize their style, tone, and context-specific language.

Perfect Writer is a word processor computer program published by Perfect Software for CP/M. In 1984, Thorn EMI Computer Software acquired an exclusive marketing and distribution licence for Perfect Software's products, and the program was rewritten and released as Perfect II for IBM PC compatible computers. Written in C and famous for its stability, it was an enhanced version of MINCE, which itself was a version of Emacs for microcomputer platforms. Emacs itself was too heavyweight to fit within the 64 KB RAM limit of most microcomputers. Like MINCE, it included a floppy disk based virtual memory system.

The Writer's Workbench (wwb) is a grammar checker created by Lorinda Cherry and Nina Macdonald of Bell Labs. It is perhaps the earliest grammar checker to receive wide usage on Unix systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OCR Systems</span> American computing company

OCR Systems, Inc., was an American computer hardware manufacturer and software publisher dedicated to optical character recognition technologies. The company's first product, the System 1000 in 1970, was used by numerous large corporations for bill processing and mail sorting. Following a series of pitfalls in the 1970s and early 1980s, founder Theodor Herzl Levine put the company in the hands of Gregory Boleslavsky and Vadim Brikman, the company's vice presidents and recent immigrants from the Soviet Ukraine, who were able to turn OCR System's fortunes around and expand its employee base. The company released the software-based OCR application ReadRight for DOS, later ported to Windows, in the late 1980s. Adobe Inc. bought the company in 1992.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DTK Computer</span> Taiwanese computer company

DTK Computer is the name for international branches of Datatech Enterprises, a Taiwanese computer manufacturer. Founded in 1981, the company was an early supplier of peripherals for IBM PCs as well as PC compatible motherboards. In the late 1980s, the company switched to developing complete systems under the DTK name as well as serving as an OEM for motherboards and cases, as bought by other small computer companies and systems integrators.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Librex Computer Systems</span>

Librex Computer Systems Inc. was a short-lived American subsidiary of the Nippon Steel Corporation that manufactured notebook computers from 1990 to 1992. Librex had roots in Nippon Steel's Electronics and Information Systems Division (EISD) back in Japan, which starting in 1986 had formed joint ventures with several high-profile American computer companies. Librex was Nippon Steel EISD's first venture in the United States; it also set up Nippon Steel Computer PLC in the United Kingdom to sell identical products. The company's notebooks received praise in the technology press, but a fierce price war in the market for laptops in the early 1990s combined with dwindling profit margins compelled Nippon Steel to dissolve Librex in 1993.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aox Inc.</span> American technology corporation

Aox Inc. was a privately run American technology corporation founded by Michael and Linda Aronson in 1978. Over the course of its 22-year lifespan, the company chiefly developed software and hardware for IBM's PC and compatibles, for the Personal System/2, and for the Macintosh. In its twilight years, the company designed multimedia and teleconferencing devices and chip designs. Aox was founded after Michael Aronson graduated from Harvard University with a doctorate in physics; he stayed with the company until 2000, when he incorporated EndPoints Inc. and switched to full-time fabless semiconductor design.

Spell Catcher, originally known as Thunder!, is a stand-alone spell checker for Atari ST, Macintosh and Microsoft Windows systems. It was published continually from 1985 until the untimely 2012 death of the primary developer, Evan Gross. Its original name refers to its lightning-fast speed, which set it apart from other spell checkers on the platform like Spellswell.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Abate, Tom (January 7, 1993). "S.F. software maker is sold". The San Francisco Examiner: E-1, E-3 – via Newspapers.com.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Carlsen, Clifford (April 13, 1987). "Reference tries to make people better writers". San Francisco Business Times. American City Business Journals. 1: 8 – via Gale.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Walz, Nancy (September 5, 1994). "Pioneering Grammar Software Born at Home". Albuquerque Journal. Associated Press: 3 – via Newspapers.com.
  4. 1 2 Fallows, James (March 1983). "Computer Romance, Part II". The Atlantic. 251 (3): 107 – via Gale.
  5. ↑ Weeks, Linton (April 25, 2000). "In the Beginning". The Washington Post: C1. Archived from the original on August 17, 2023.
  6. ↑ Sullivan, Kristina B. (January 7, 1986). "WP Users Say Spelling Checker Is Indispensible". PC Week. Ziff-Davis. 3 (1): 130–131 – via Gale.
  7. ↑ McWilliams, Peter (March 2, 1986). "Program spells convenience". Chicago Tribune: 6.4 – via Newspapers.com.
  8. ↑ Albright, Rick (February 1, 1992). "This dictionary is for home PCs". Merced Sun-Star: A11 – via Newspapers.com.
  9. 1 2 3 4 "Grammar enterprise spells success for software maker". The Sacramento Bee: F2. April 15, 1992 – via Newspapers.com.
  10. ↑ Schwartz, John (September 24, 1986). "Studious Software". Newsweek on Campus: 63, 64 – via Newspapers.com.
  11. ↑ Staff writer (November 16, 1987). "Software applications packages". Computerworld. IDG Publications. XXI (46): 44 – via Google Books.
  12. 1 2 Morris, Gloria (October 10, 1988). "Grammatik III Forges Ahead as Best Product in Its Field". InfoWorld. IDG Publications. 10 (41): 72–76 – via Google Books.
  13. ↑ Morris, Gloria (September 11, 1989). "Strictly Writing". InfoWorld. IDG Publications. 11 (37): 43–53 – via Google Books.
  14. ↑ Rabinovitz, Rubin (September 24, 1991). "Write on Target: 15 Writer's Tools". PC Magazine. Ziff-Davis: 321–369 – via Google Books.
  15. ↑ Lombardi, John; Kyla K. Carlson (October 28, 1991). "Grammar Checkers: Keeping your writing in line". InfoWorld. IDG Publications. 13 (43): 64–80 – via Google Books.
  16. ↑ Hudkins, Lonnie (March 29, 1992). "Grammar Program Helps People Write". The Buffalo News: E7. Archived from the original on August 17, 2023.
  17. ↑ Pane, Patricia J. (January 21, 1991). "SCC Granted Restraining Order Against Reference". InfoWorld. IDG Publications. 13 (3): 39 – via Google Books.
  18. ↑ Pane, Patricia J. (February 4, 1991). "Reference Renames Its Software Tool Package". InfoWorld. IDG Publications. 13 (5): 42 – via Google Books.
  19. ↑ "WordPerfect expands marketing, sales". The Daily Herald: C3. May 30, 1993 – via Newspapers.com.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.