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MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

mackichan.com

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Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#121

Post by dunham »

SloopJon wrote: post #117
bachmeier wrote: post #47

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 lot…

How does Markdown fill the niche of TeX or Scientific Word? Is there a mathematically oriented fork? You mentioned R Markdown in another comment, but I don't see anything in the gallery that looks germane.

pandoc will turn markdown with TeX formatted equations into PDF or html (relying on tex and mathjax, respectively). It can also turn it into TeX if you need to tweak stuff.

A number of other systems like Obsidian (for note taking) use markdown and integrate MathJaX or KaTeX to render TeX formatted equations.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#122

Post by bachmeier »

SloopJon wrote: post #117
bachmeier wrote: post #47

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 lot…

How does Markdown fill the niche of TeX or Scientific Word? Is there a mathematically oriented fork? You mentioned R Markdown in another comment, but I don't see anything in the gallery that looks germane.

Pandoc includes math support out of the box. R Markdown is actually built on top of Pandoc. I know many academics that write their papers in (Pandoc) markdown and then convert to PDF. It creates an intermediate .tex file that is then converted to PDF.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#123

Post by [deleted] »

qurashee wrote: post #120

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 :(

[deleted]

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#124

Post by keid »

low_common wrote: post #119
keid wrote: post #87

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…

What did J. Mack Adams do?

As a founder/part-owner, like the other two he kicked in some money to get it started. Despite being a computer science professor he wasn't an effective real-world programmer so he in effect became a silent partner. He eventually got cold feet and his initial investment was bought out by the other two. (The other two ultimately went all-in and effectively gave up their professorships; J. Mack stayed in academia.)

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#125

Post by SiempreViernes »

GiovanniP wrote: post #85
SiempreViernes wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mainly tables and to some extent figures that are intrinsically harder to read when written in TeX. The bulk of the text is just text , so if that's hard to read that's down to your editor settings.

I have an example on-hand for that---it is also equations, look at this, I need to compile it to understand it (it needs the amsmath package): { \def \l {\mathrm{l}} \def \r {\mathrm{r}} \def \Bl {\mathrm{Bl}} \def \Br {\mathrm{Br}} \def \B {\mathrm{B}} \def \nIIom {n_{2\omega}} \begin{equation}\label{eq:interface_conditions} \begin{aligned} F_{1\l} &= F_{2\r} + F_{2\l} \exp (i\,k_2 L) + F_{\Br} + F_{\Bl} \exp(i\,k_\…

Ok, equations can get much trickier, but I don't think this is example too bad, you didn't even write a single multiline nested fraction.

On the other hand, you don't write complicated mathematical equations quickly if you've got any sense anyway.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#126

Post by lowercased »

handrous wrote: post #118
lowercased wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This hypothetical young programmer could - I believe - invest some time to understand not so much the actual codebase, but rather the workflow of the program and re-write it along that same workflow in a new language/platform/whatever. > I am pretty sure that those niche users would be ready to pay a fair amount of money to have something modern/updated that actually works and works like the old one. I don't know.…

> I don't know. My experience is, for many smaller niche things, they're entrenched in orgs and used The One Way, and any deviation - change a button label, add a menu, etc - will result in a lot of complaints from existing users. They'll have to 'retrain', etc. People hate this just as much in almost any software (or, most any UI, physical or virtual, for that matter), they just often don't have a way to push back.…

The other pushback, in the context of the 'indie/solo' niche software stuff, is to actually call or email the original person and complain.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#127

Post by musingsole »

dang wrote: post #104
iamgopal wrote: post #24

Yes but was it able to share selfie and video ?

Please don't post unsubstantive comments.

The previous comment made a joke of how despite being a capable device for education, it didn't have the features that drive commercial success. How was it unsubstantive?

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#128

Post by gopiandcode »

marcodiego wrote: post #75

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 S…

> Since both Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Notebook contain the proprietary computer algebra system MuPAD, they cannot be made open source.

Don't you just hate the viral nature of infectious *proprietary* code?

To co-opt some propaganda used against GPL in the past:

Using a proprietary library in your application mandates that significant swaths of your application be released proprietary as well. That's not a problem if you wanted to release proprietary software to start with, but it's a problem for anyone else on either side of the spectrum.

For this reason, developers have to be quite careful about how they use proprietary software to make sure that it doesn't impose unwanted licensing restrictions.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#129

Post by marcodiego »

gopiandcode wrote: post #128
marcodiego wrote: post #75

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 S…

> Since both Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Notebook contain the proprietary computer algebra system MuPAD, they cannot be made open source. Don't you just hate the viral nature of infectious *proprietary* code? To co-opt some propaganda used against GPL in the past: Using a proprietary library in your application mandates that significant swaths of your application be released proprietary as well. That's not a…

> Don't you just hate the viral nature of infectious proprietary code?

Sure, I agree with you.

I'm currently looking for a term to replace "infectious" and "viral" since I want to talk about the GPL without bad health connotations. Any suggestion?

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#130

Post by bsder »

airbreather wrote: post #4
madengr wrote: post #2

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.

Is it due to the market, or the owners are retiring/giving up?

> Is it due to the market, or the owners are retiring/giving up?

Bit of both.

Certainly people who tripped into a niche back in the 1980s/1990s are getting old.

However, modern customer support has gotten stupidly expensive and annoying as hell. I blame the fact that modern users are significantly less sophisticated and significantly more demanding.

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