MultiMate
From Free net encyclopedia
MultiMate is a word processor developed by Softword Systems Inc. (later renamed Multimate International) for IBM-PC MS-DOS computers in the early 1980s. Wilton H. Jones, a progammer turned entrepreneur (W.H. Jones & Associates), brought on board 10 young programmers to write the software after winning a contract to develop a word processor for the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance company. He negotiated the right to sell the program elsewhere.
By 1984, with the success of the PC, MultiMate had more than $1 million in orders a month and the company had more than 150 employees. Jones sold the company to Ashton-Tate for more than $20 million a few years later.
MultiMate was not marketed heavily to end-users, but was quickly popular with insurance companies, law firms and other business computer users. It also was bundled with a portable PC made by Corona, and was offered in custom versions for other "PC clones" by Radio Shack, Texas Instruments, Toshiba and other companies. MultiMate's greatest advantage was that it allowed companies to easily replace dedicated Wang Word Processor workstations with PCs, with an order of magnitude reduction in cost. The user interface, although different than Wang's, was close enough to allow a Wang user to rapidly switch over.
The detailed MultiMate word processor documentation, which quickly grew to three volumes, gave the product a solid "office production" feel, using high-quality paper with its main reference section presented in a padded binder with fold-out easel. (A company legend was that the MultiMate user manual was written first, by an experienced Wang WP manager, then the programmers were told to write software to match it.)
Early versions of the program came with both color-coded key stickers and a plastic full-keyboard template to make Wang operators more comfortable with the smaller IBM PC keyboard. MultiMate eventually sold a hardware keyboard with dedicated function keys and issued versions of its software for networked PCs. It adapted list-management, graphics and outlining software from other vendors to the look-and-feel of MultiMate, shipping the expanded version as MultiMate Advantage, with additional volumes of MultiMate-style documentation for the add-on programs.
Early releases of MultiMate also gave users unlimited access to a toll-free support number and a promise of low-cost upgrades, which contributed to its dedicated user population. Support policies later were brought in line with Ashton-Tate's standard practices.
In the DOS days, MultiMate was especially good at supporting a variety of PC clones and hundreds of computer printers, each of which required its own printer driver. Such printer support was very strong with daisy-wheel and dot-matrix printers, but did not take much advantage the development of Postscript fonts and laser printers.
Ashton-Tate never released a Windows version of MultiMate and discontinued MultiMate's development efforts on VMS and Unix platforms. The product was dropped after the company was purchased by Borland.