Way back when, just after the IBM PC came out in the early 1980s, a company named Triad Computing was formed by J. Mack Adams, Roger Hunter, and Barry MacKichan, with the goal of creating a WYSIWYG technical text editing system. I was their first employee. Roger, Barry, and I did all the programming. Venture capital for this sort of thing wasn't common then; we raised operating capital by contract work (e.g. I wrote a floating-point arithmetic library for the PDP-11). After about a year our product debuted, named T^3. Shortly after there was a company name dispute and we changed ours to TCI Software Research. I could go on at some length, but that's where MacKichan Software started.
Now that's a name I hadn't heard in a long time. It wasn't my cup of tea -- I prefer just writing latex directly, but it's a pity, as I'd rather see more people get into writing tex/latex, even if via GUI.
I understand why it's not that mainstream outside certain academic fields, though, because it can be pretty annoying frustrating at times. But almost anything is better than word at writing long technical documents, specially in a collaborative way. (Went through that once for a grant proposal; very painful).
I used Scientific Word to write my dissertation and my first academic papers. It was a great piece of software in the late 1990s, at least relative to the alternatives, which were writing .tex files yourself or typing in a word processor. I have a coauthor that still uses SW.
I can't say this is surprising. I moved to LyX long ago, and then after markdown became popular I ditched LyX and went with that. There are lots of strong alternatives today. There probably aren't many people willing to pay for something they can get for free, that they already have, or that doesn't provide features for collaboration.
I feel terrible when I come across great products while they shutdown.. why I didn't know it?
Our course instructor on "Estimation and Detection Theory" was a big fan of Scientific WorkPlace. It did such a great job at replacing the chalk-board during lockdown.
That's a shame... science/math focused software is such a niche, and the people inside that niche(I imagine) _really_ appreciate that type of software.
There could be some type of consulting opportunity here though for licensees that are still wanting to pay for that type of software. Depending on their use case, a consultant could try to shift what they currently are dependent on to a semi-customized collection of jupyter notebooks etc.
Another example of abusive license:
"If you need to install your software on a new or different computer, you will need to re-activate the software on that computer using that serial number. [..] This contacts the MacKichan Software licensing server, which we will keep running for at least two years."
The hope:
"We expect to make Scientific Word an open source product eventually. Since both Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Notebook contain the proprietary computer algebra system MuPAD, they cannot be made open source. When the open source project for Scientific Word is established, an announcement will be made here."
Is the market for this software gone or is it that Mr. MacKichan is ready to retire and there wasn't a buyer for the company?
I could imagine being tired and ready to close up shop after 40 years as well.
Will everyone switch to TeXmacs, which is truly WYSIWYG and does not use TeX/LaTeX?
It's a unique kind of business that commits to doing substantially more development work after announcing they have ceased sales with no plan to restart.
Upon reading this article I thought I should check the fate of one of my favourite astronomy software (SkyMap). Looks like it had the same fate last year, Chris Marriott (the sole developer) decided to retire. I don't really get though why shut up shop and not open source such one man projects :(
Good to see that they at least plan to open source an old version before they shut down. This does happen sometimes, for example Synfig Animation Studio had this happen.
Hmmm I've never heard about this software but I found some screenshots in google search, the UI looks a lot like another old CAS that I used in high school, "Derive" [1]. Derive was great :-)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_(computer_algebra_syste...
I am so sorry to hear that.
I wish that when companies such as this do go out of business that they should transition the licensing model to perpetual.
It is gracious to keep running the licesnse server ut once it ends that is it.
If the company is not going to lose any money because of it, which they will not since they are out fo the busness entirely, let the users have a chance to keep using it.
(without support, without bugfixes, without upgrades to new platforms)
Presumably this could lead to people sharing licensing detals and non paying customers may over time start using it, that should be an acceptable risk, given that there is no monetary gain nor loss.
It would be awesome to have access to a rich library of dead software that people could use for free.
i suppose its too dreamy to think you could open source parts of the other software and some how modularize the properitary code.
What kind of alternatives there are for these? At least Matlab and Wolfram Mathematica come into my mind, but are there anything else?
I never used this software, sadly. What made it different from Mathematica or from Maple?
This is sad, but I'm glad that they plan on making Scientific Word open source.
Which word did they make? Was it "Mitochondria"? I bet it was mitochondria
Sorry to hear
This trend is accelerating; small, one person companies founded near the beginning of personal computing are shutting down.
Others that come to mind are MicroCAP for SPICE simulation, WRCAD for IC layout.
Yes but was it able to share selfie and video ?
My best friend's dad's boss is named Barry MacGoughener. I wonder if they are from the same place in Scotland?
In the age of Jupyter, Pluto.jl, SageMath, LaTeX/Overleaf Wolfram (for rich) who needs this? Better to spend time and resources improving those.
The sibling thread I was going to reply in has been deleted, but I wanted to share what I learned this morning, as a young-blood who was hardly alive at the time:
a. Laptops of the time sport specs that assure me they'd be perfectly capable of proforming the majority of tasks I engage in on my computer, and education especially sets a low bar; I'm sure they could run a terminal, CLI text editor, calculator, interpreters, and Wikipedia like any modern PC (thanks to Wikipedia for staying accessible!). Selfies simply aren't the most important thing.
b. According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcam
> The released in 1993 SGI Indy [sic] is the first commercial computer to have a standard video camera
> The first widespread commercial webcam, the black-and-white QuickCam, entered the marketplace in 1994 [ . . . ] $100
> The first widely known laptop with integrated webcam option, at a pricepoint starting at US$ 12,000, was an IBM RS/6000 860 laptop and his ThinkPad 850 sibling, released in 1996.
> Around the turn of the 21st century, computer hardware manufacturers began building webcams directly into laptop and desktop screens, thus eliminating the need to use an external USB or FireWire camera.
So, yes! Idk exactly what OP had, but if laptops of the time were starting to include built in webcams, and could run a 20fps webcast, then they could certainly "take and share selfies and video". Interestingly, 2000 was also the year of the first Presidential Webcast in the US, though I'm pretty sure Clinton didn't stream it from his iBook.
Wow, very sad to hear this. My high school ran a trial project back in 2000 and my class became the first in my country where every student received a laptop to use in all classes. We used Scientific Notebook for math. Being able to solve any equation and draw any graph with the click of a button was a huge boost in my ability to grasp trig, polynomials, logarithms, etc.
I actually went from D-level math student pre-HS to graduating HS with an A+ and went on to get a degree in physics+math at uni. I honestly doubt if that would've been possible if not for SN.