Earlier quoted context omitted.
More importantly, was it collecting usage information and dumping it onto data markets?
America: "Ethics is for chumps who want to finish last"
"hah, you did the right thing? Idiot, I made MONEY"
MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
81–90 of 143 posts
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#82I feel terrible when I come across great products while they shutdown.. why I didn't know it?
In 2021 there's honestly not any good reason to know about Scientific Word. It was a good product 20 years ago, but it doesn't bring much to the table today that you'd have a reason to pay for.
What is a replacement? I’ve been thinking about buying it as an easy way to write nice latex looking pdf files
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#83The 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.
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#84Will everyone switch to TeXmacs, which is truly WYSIWYG and does not use TeX/LaTeX? See: https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html
It's a pity it's called "TeXmacs" when, as you say, it really has no connection to TeX (except the ability to typeset mathematics). Another alternative is LyX, which actually does use LaTeX. Even that is not really a "LaTeX editor" though: it produces/exports excellent LaTeX, and uses that for typesetting, but does pretty poorly at importing LaTeX (as the developers freely admit). Depending on your situation that may…
[deleted]
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
My main "for" point towards GUIs is that one is able to read back easily what one wrote. On the other hand, to read comfortably a LaTeX equation I have to compile it; then for editing I have to move my attention back and forth from the compiled document to the source. (corrected a mistype)
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_\B L) \\
F_{1\r} &= -\nIIom \, F_{2\r} + \nIIom \, F_{2\l} \exp (i\,k_2 L) - \nIIom \, F_{\Br} +
\nIIom \, F_{\Bl} \exp(i\,k_\B L)\\
F_{3\r} &= F_{2\r} \exp (i\,k_2 L) + F_{2\l} + F_{\Br} \exp(i\,k_\B L) + F_{\Bl} \\
-F_{3\l} &= \nIIom \, F_{2\r} \exp (i\,k_2 L) + \nIIom \, F_{2\l} -
\nIIom \, F_{\Br} \exp(i\,k_\B L) + \nIIom \, F_{\Bl}
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
}
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#86Will everyone switch to TeXmacs, which is truly WYSIWYG and does not use TeX/LaTeX? See: https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html
It's a pity it's called "TeXmacs" when, as you say, it really has no connection to TeX (except the ability to typeset mathematics). Another alternative is LyX, which actually does use LaTeX. Even that is not really a "LaTeX editor" though: it produces/exports excellent LaTeX, and uses that for typesetting, but does pretty poorly at importing LaTeX (as the developers freely admit). Depending on your situation that may…
Interestingly, the "X" in LyX is not pronounced the same way as the "X" in TeX/LaTeX. Would have been a nice pun, but they probably didn't want to have any "resurrected"/"undead" associations.
OTOH, Wikipedia informs me that "Lich" is actually pronounced "ˈlɪtʃ", so the pun wouldn't have worked anyway. I was pronouncing the "ch" like the one in "Leiche" in German until now. Oh well...
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#87Way 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.
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if I may, there is something that doesn't sound (to me) "rational". I have seen quite a few of these cases where a larger company buys the old one (essentially to get a list of their current customers) and then terminates the product replacing it with some crappy new stuff that usually completely fails to work, but in this case the soon-to-retire programmer at least gets some (little) money (and knowledge is lo…
Yes, that young, entrepreneurial programmer can be found, but won’t have the domain knowledge. Look at the examples above. You can’t sell Marine mapping software without knowing something about marine navigation. You can’t sell beekeeping software without understanding beekeeping. Plus you need the general business operation skills. Finding a programmer who knows beekeeping and wants to take on a low growth business…
Yep. There may be 'takers', but will the existing customers want to work with them? So many solo/indie niche packages are built on the relationships, and replacing those - and the trust around them - is hard.
A client told me about someone they knew who did ballroom dancing software - it kept track of competitions, standings, etc. And... it seemed like decent money, looking at the pricing, and the size of the market. But the market didn't seem big enough for multiple players, and everyone trusted/knew/used the one main player. If/when he goes (or perhaps already has), I'm sure people will find another way to manage their stuff, but before then... who's going to come in to a market like that? How do you 'beat' the incumbent? Lower price? Who would switch? How do you convince people to switch to something unknown, potentially losing years of data, having new training costs, to ... save a couple hundred bucks maybe?
I'm sure there's hundreds of these sorts of services out there that are surviving, but don't have a huge market for competition, because the barriers to entry are too high relative to the return.
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#89Way 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…
I wrote my physics dissertation using t3. For what it did at the time, it was fantastic.
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I suspect that, although there is a market for the products, noone is interested in taking on the software they worked on. It may be extremely difficult to do that, for at least a few reasons. In some cases, the tech is going to be very niche/old, and it will be difficult for people to get up to speed on it. The business is likely built on a lot of personal contacts, and not all will want to switch to some 'newcome…
Well, if I may, there is something that doesn't sound (to me) "rational". I have seen quite a few of these cases where a larger company buys the old one (essentially to get a list of their current customers) and then terminates the product replacing it with some crappy new stuff that usually completely fails to work, but in this case the soon-to-retire programmer at least gets some (little) money (and knowledge is lo…
> 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. 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.
No doubt some people will appreciate and welcome 'new/modern' stuff, but many won't. And figuring that out ahead of time is... time. and effort. And along with that, there's usually heaps of institutional/domain knowledge that just can't be replaced without... time in the trenches.
It's not that it's not possible, it's just not typically 'worth it' for most people. ROI is too low compared to other options.