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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. A word processor (also more formally known as a document preparation system) is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of viewable or printed material. ...
Events and trends The 1980s marked an abrupt shift towards more conservative lifestyles after the momentous cultural revolutions which took place in the 1960s and 1970s and the definition of the AIDS virus in 1981. ...
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. Ashton-Tate (Ashton-Tate Corporation) is a former US based software company best known for developing the popular dBASE database application. ...
MultiMate was not marketed heavily to end-users, but was quickly popular with insurance companies, law firms and other business computer users. It allowed companies to easily replace dedicated Wang Word Processor workstations with a PC, 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. Wang logo circa 1980. ...
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. The original product price also included unlimited free technical support with a toll-free number. 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.
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 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. Microsoft Windows is a range of operating environments for personal computers and servers. ...
Borland Software Corporation (formerly Borland International, Inc. ...
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