|
| From: | Robert Slover |
| Subject: | Re: Lotus Improv |
| Date: | Thu, 19 Nov 2015 13:54:29 -0500 |
Improv was written for NeXTstep, and was killed long before OpenStep even arrived. The concept itself was resurrected in the form of Quantrix by LightHouse Design. Sun Microsystems acquired LightHouse and much of its staff in 1996 when they were still somewhat involved with OpenStep. The software was mothballed, though Sun did post binaries that could run on the OpenStep environment for Solaris for a while, if I remember correctly. More than a decade ago, I had an email conversation with Scott McNealy at Sun and Jonathan Schwartz, a founder of LightHouse who was by then a VP at Sun, about releasing the sources of these applications. Sun had recently released what became Open Office. Both seemed receptive to the idea, but there were encumbrances such as third-party code that would have to be vetted and removed. I was asked to contact Mr. Schwartz again in March of the following year to discuss more, but never got the opportunity. Only a couple of months later, there was an interview published in which Mr. Schwartz emphatically stated that the code would remain in Sun's morgue. I had too much going on at the time to follow up with inquiries - including my father's stroke, my mother's diagnosis with ALS, a tornado dropping a tree on my house, and several other less serious but still draining events. Quantrix the concept lives on as Java code, rewritten from the ground up by a new company founded by its product manager from Lighthouse. It focuses now solely on the financial services market, which is where the originals had the most success. There is a project named FlexiSheet that attempts something similar, but I know too little about it. --Robert
|
| [Prev in Thread] | Current Thread | [Next in Thread] |