From: "John Beamish" 

" ... and Ability Plus Softwareƒ ™s word processor and office
applications ..."

Ability Plus was previously Xanaro Technologies.  Nice little tax-paid
boondoggle:  massive write-offs for software development found millions and
millions of dollars of risk (risk?  RISK!!!!!) capital invested into
companies such as Xanaro (on Bloor Street just a couple of subway stops
 from where I worked).  Back in the days of DOS, it had a graphical
interface and nice linkages between the spreadsheet, word processor and
database (as in a forms front end to a spreadsheet).  The comms package
came with built in stuff to make accessing bulletin boards quite easy.

It was actually a very nice package, definitely ahead of its time.  It was
marketed in a molded plastic box that, I'm led to believe, cost
$100,000+ just for the molds.  It was one of the first, if not *the*
first, product that had a demo 5 1/4" floppy bundled with PCWeek.  And
then, suddenly, instead of cost $700 (back in the late 80's), it cost
$80.  I went to one place and bought copies for $50.

The company went tits up (a technical expression for bankrupt) and I went
to the sale of assets.  I bid on (but did not win, perhaps fortunately) the
source code.  It reappeared on the market a couple of years later as
Ability Plus.

You may remember some of its competitors:  Context MBA (which run under the
USCD Pascal environment) and a spreadsheet company, Lotus.  There was also
a company called Microsoft which had released a DOS based, somewhat
graphical, product called Word 1.0.


On Mon, 02 Oct 2006 14:06:30 -0400, Phil Payne
 wrote:

> http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=25409
>
> "Even at such a low price, it's doubtful that Tesco will gain much market
> share, one analyst said, pointing to Microsoft's continued dominance of
> the
> office software market, despite the availability of competing
> applications
> for much lower prices, or even for free."
>
> Heh.  Heh heh.  Heh heh heh.
>
> http://business.scotsman.com/retail.cfm?id=1454922006
>
> "TESCO is the headline FTSE 100 player announcing results this week, its
> interims coming out tomorrow, with City consensus estimates suggesting it
> will break the ƒœ1 billion half-year profits barrier."
>
> Heh.  Heh heh.  Heh heh heh.
>

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