Re:MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone ou...
by keid on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @11:35AM
(#27822232)
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.
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Re:MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone ou...
by analog31 on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @11:41AM
(#27822331)
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 ou...
by keid on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @11:48AM
(#27822433)
When I went to Oxford University in 1985 I learned that, at the time, theses in the mathematics department were required to be written with T^3. I did not advertise my background--I did not want to be tech support. I actually went back to TCI for a while after finishing my degrees there.
Re:MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone ou...
by low_common on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @04:11PM
(#27825685)
What did J. Mack Adams do?
Re:MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone ou...
by keid on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @05:32PM
(#27826574)
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.)