Sprint (word processor)
Encyclopedia
Sprint was a powerful and programmable text-based
word processor
for DOS
, first published by Borland
in 1987.
__FORCETOC__
- a company (headquartered in Cambridge, MA) which is now better known for its music software products. As The FinalWord, the package met with some success: for example, the manuals of the Lotus
software package were written on it, as was Marvin Minsky
's book The Society of Mind.
FinalWord II was renamed Sprint when it was acquired by Borland, which added a new user interface, new manuals, and features to the application. The editor speed was considered blazing at the time, running with no delays on machines as slow as 8 megahertz.
This was the time of European development for Borland: SideKick
and Turbo Pascal
had been founded in Denmark
; and the management of the European subsidiary comprised former Micropro France managers (Micropro was at the time the world leader in Word processing software with the famous WordStar
line-up. They had success with the launch of WordStar 2000 - the first word processor package with a spelling dictionary in French.)
This is why the development and marketing of the product was conducted in France. Sprint is one of the very few major products from an American software publisher that had a French version shipped before the American version.
Sprint v1.0 shipped in France with notable initial success, capturing a 30 percent market share and getting the jump on competing word processors. MicroPro was weakening with old Wordstar products and still-new WordStar 2000; WordPerfect
was having problems with the translation and the user interface; and MS-Word was a decent but less polished or powerful product, and was also DOS and text-based.
The lack of beta-test combined with pressure to ship for back-to-school time resulted in a Sprint 1.0 which had a number of minor glitches and bugs that had to be corrected with version 1.01 and a whole new set of diskettes for every single registered user.
Version 1.0 (equivalent of French 1.01) shipped a few months later in the US and rest of world, with a mixed reception from customers. Traditional Borland fans who bought Sprint were happy with the editor, but wondered why the package included a sophisticated formatter, while business users who wanted a word processor just to write their memos and letters wondered what to do with the heavy manual and powerful features of the formatter language. In any event, word processing was shifting to WYSIWYG
.
Version 1.5 did ship with a number of new features and real stability in France, but never made it elsewhere, although a number of localized versions had been built for various European countries. At this time, Borland Scandinavia had gone bankrupt, while Borland France had to be saved by massive financial help from the US. The developers who once worked in Europe had to move to the Scotts Valley CA premises. Version 1.5 was a reasonable success in France for some years, but Microsoft Word
and Windows
gained momentum and obscured all the other products.
In North America, Sprint never really gained traction in the marketplace, as it was overshadowed by WordPerfect and then Microsoft Word. It built up a small, but loyal and often enthusiastic, following among professional writers, researchers, academics, and programmers who appreciated its power, speed, and ability to handle large documents. Borland did not believe that there was enough of a market to warrant updating the product, and it eventually stopped supporting it.
Spell-as-you-type: With this feature, Sprint could beep at you in real time when detecting a typo. (Microsoft Word needed almost ten years to have the red snakes under the suspect words.)
Multilingual editing: Sprint included dictionary switching, support for hyphenation, and spelling and thesaurus
dictionaries that have yet to be matched by the competitors.
Separate formatter and programmable editor: These have been very useful features for corporate environments aiming at standardizing documents or building "boilerplate" contracts. In France, for example, sophisticated applications were built for Banques Populaires (loan contracts) or Conseil d'Etat, while some local government agencies created specific applications for tenders and contracts.
Powerful programming language: Programming in Sprint was done with the internal language of the word processor - a language which is very much like C
. Programmers have the ability to "get under the hood" and to add modifications and extensions to an extent not possible with other word processors. Once written, Sprint programs are compiled into the interface, and run at full speed.
Interface switching: Modifications and extensions to Sprint can be saved into separate interfaces which can be easily and quickly switched. This is very useful for people working in different languages, as the keys can be mapped to the accents and characters of each language, depending on the interface.
File handling: Users could work in up to 24 files at once. All open files could be saved on exit or not -- and nevertheless automatically reopened as left, including each file's cursor position, cut and paste buffer contents, and spell check status. Because this behavior was accomplished using the crash-proof swap file (see above), it allowed an "instant-on" behavior using the saved state from the previous run; this was unusual for its time.
Handling large documents: Sprint has the ability to publish very large documents (hundreds of pages) with strict formatting consistency and automatic table of contents, index generation, tables of figures, and tables of authorities. These features made Sprint a leader in the production of technical documents - and Borland itself did all its manuals on Sprint, for years.
PostScript capabilities: Sprint could print in-line EPS
images with dimensioning, and also had the ability to add in-line PostScript
procedures. This made the product rather popular in the printing industry. For example, making a 200-page novel fit into 192 pages was simply a matter of changing the point size from 11 to 10.56. Sprint could size by 0.04 increment and scale the line spacing and kerning
accordingly. (The 192 pages size is important in the printing industry, where the number of pages often has to be divisible by 32. A 200-page book would have to be printed using 224 pages, the extra 24 pages being empty.)
Consistency with familiar environments: The default editor key bindings were a subset of those provided by EMACS
, and the mark-up language was a subset of Scribe (markup language)
, making it easy for people familiar with those tools to use Sprint.
Text-based
Usually used in reference to a computer application, a text-based application is one whose primary input and output are based on text rather than graphics or sound. This does not mean that text-based applications do not have graphics or sound, just that the graphics or sound are secondary to the...
word processor
Word processor
A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
for DOS
DOS
DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...
, first published by Borland
Borland
Borland Software Corporation is a software company first headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, Cupertino, California and finally Austin, Texas. It is now a Micro Focus subsidiary. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn.-The 1980s:...
in 1987.
__FORCETOC__
History
Sprint originally appeared as the "FinalWord" application, developed by Jason Linhart, Craig Finseth, Scott Layson Burson, Brian Hess, and Bill Spitzak at Mark of the UnicornMark of the Unicorn
Mark of the Unicorn is a music-related computer software and hardware supplier. It is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has created music software since 1984.Products by MOTU include:*Digital Performer*AudioDesk*BPM*MachFive*MX4*Unisyn...
- a company (headquartered in Cambridge, MA) which is now better known for its music software products. As The FinalWord, the package met with some success: for example, the manuals of the Lotus
Lotus Software
Lotus Software is a software company with headquarters in Westford, Massachusetts...
software package were written on it, as was Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence , co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.-Biography:...
's book The Society of Mind.
FinalWord II was renamed Sprint when it was acquired by Borland, which added a new user interface, new manuals, and features to the application. The editor speed was considered blazing at the time, running with no delays on machines as slow as 8 megahertz.
This was the time of European development for Borland: SideKick
SideKick
SideKick was an early Personal Information Manager software application by Borland launched in 1983 under Philippe Kahn's leadership. It was notable for being a Terminate and Stay Resident program, which enabled it to load into memory then return the computer to the DOS command prompt, allowing...
and Turbo Pascal
Turbo Pascal
Turbo Pascal is a software development system that includes a compiler and an integrated development environment for the Pascal programming language running on CP/M, CP/M-86, and DOS, developed by Borland under Philippe Kahn's leadership...
had been founded in Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
; and the management of the European subsidiary comprised former Micropro France managers (Micropro was at the time the world leader in Word processing software with the famous WordStar
WordStar
WordStar is a word processor application, published by MicroPro International, originally written for the CP/M operating system but later ported to DOS, that enjoyed a dominant market share during the early to mid-1980s. Although Seymour I...
line-up. They had success with the launch of WordStar 2000 - the first word processor package with a spelling dictionary in French.)
This is why the development and marketing of the product was conducted in France. Sprint is one of the very few major products from an American software publisher that had a French version shipped before the American version.
Sprint v1.0 shipped in France with notable initial success, capturing a 30 percent market share and getting the jump on competing word processors. MicroPro was weakening with old Wordstar products and still-new WordStar 2000; WordPerfect
WordPerfect
WordPerfect is a word processing application, now owned by Corel.Bruce Bastian, a Brigham Young University graduate student, and BYU computer science professor Dr. Alan Ashton joined forces to design a word processing system for the city of Orem's Data General Corp. minicomputer system in 1979...
was having problems with the translation and the user interface; and MS-Word was a decent but less polished or powerful product, and was also DOS and text-based.
The lack of beta-test combined with pressure to ship for back-to-school time resulted in a Sprint 1.0 which had a number of minor glitches and bugs that had to be corrected with version 1.01 and a whole new set of diskettes for every single registered user.
Version 1.0 (equivalent of French 1.01) shipped a few months later in the US and rest of world, with a mixed reception from customers. Traditional Borland fans who bought Sprint were happy with the editor, but wondered why the package included a sophisticated formatter, while business users who wanted a word processor just to write their memos and letters wondered what to do with the heavy manual and powerful features of the formatter language. In any event, word processing was shifting to WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
.
Version 1.5 did ship with a number of new features and real stability in France, but never made it elsewhere, although a number of localized versions had been built for various European countries. At this time, Borland Scandinavia had gone bankrupt, while Borland France had to be saved by massive financial help from the US. The developers who once worked in Europe had to move to the Scotts Valley CA premises. Version 1.5 was a reasonable success in France for some years, but Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...
and Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
gained momentum and obscured all the other products.
In North America, Sprint never really gained traction in the marketplace, as it was overshadowed by WordPerfect and then Microsoft Word. It built up a small, but loyal and often enthusiastic, following among professional writers, researchers, academics, and programmers who appreciated its power, speed, and ability to handle large documents. Borland did not believe that there was enough of a market to warrant updating the product, and it eventually stopped supporting it.
Features
Crash-proof: Sprint had incremental back-up, with its swap file updated every 3 seconds, enabling full recovery from crashes. At trade shows, demos were made with one person pulling out the power cord, and the typist resuming work as soon as the machine restarted!Spell-as-you-type: With this feature, Sprint could beep at you in real time when detecting a typo. (Microsoft Word needed almost ten years to have the red snakes under the suspect words.)
Multilingual editing: Sprint included dictionary switching, support for hyphenation, and spelling and thesaurus
Thesaurus
A thesaurus is a reference work that lists words grouped together according to similarity of meaning , in contrast to a dictionary, which contains definitions and pronunciations...
dictionaries that have yet to be matched by the competitors.
Separate formatter and programmable editor: These have been very useful features for corporate environments aiming at standardizing documents or building "boilerplate" contracts. In France, for example, sophisticated applications were built for Banques Populaires (loan contracts) or Conseil d'Etat, while some local government agencies created specific applications for tenders and contracts.
Powerful programming language: Programming in Sprint was done with the internal language of the word processor - a language which is very much like C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
. Programmers have the ability to "get under the hood" and to add modifications and extensions to an extent not possible with other word processors. Once written, Sprint programs are compiled into the interface, and run at full speed.
Interface switching: Modifications and extensions to Sprint can be saved into separate interfaces which can be easily and quickly switched. This is very useful for people working in different languages, as the keys can be mapped to the accents and characters of each language, depending on the interface.
File handling: Users could work in up to 24 files at once. All open files could be saved on exit or not -- and nevertheless automatically reopened as left, including each file's cursor position, cut and paste buffer contents, and spell check status. Because this behavior was accomplished using the crash-proof swap file (see above), it allowed an "instant-on" behavior using the saved state from the previous run; this was unusual for its time.
Handling large documents: Sprint has the ability to publish very large documents (hundreds of pages) with strict formatting consistency and automatic table of contents, index generation, tables of figures, and tables of authorities. These features made Sprint a leader in the production of technical documents - and Borland itself did all its manuals on Sprint, for years.
PostScript capabilities: Sprint could print in-line EPS
Encapsulated PostScript
Encapsulated PostScript, or EPS, is a DSC-conforming PostScript document with additional restrictions which is intended to be usable as a graphics file format...
images with dimensioning, and also had the ability to add in-line PostScript
PostScript
PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...
procedures. This made the product rather popular in the printing industry. For example, making a 200-page novel fit into 192 pages was simply a matter of changing the point size from 11 to 10.56. Sprint could size by 0.04 increment and scale the line spacing and kerning
Kerning
In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning is the adjustment of the space between individual letter forms vs. tracking which is the uniform adjustment of spacing applied over a...
accordingly. (The 192 pages size is important in the printing industry, where the number of pages often has to be divisible by 32. A 200-page book would have to be printed using 224 pages, the extra 24 pages being empty.)
Consistency with familiar environments: The default editor key bindings were a subset of those provided by EMACS
Emacs
Emacs is a class of text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. GNU Emacs has over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work.Development began in the mid-1970s and continues actively...
, and the mark-up language was a subset of Scribe (markup language)
Scribe (markup language)
Scribe is a markup language and word processing system which pioneered the use of descriptive markup. Scribe was revolutionary when it was proposed, because it involved for the first time a clean separation of structure and format.-Beginnings:...
, making it easy for people familiar with those tools to use Sprint.