Talk:Sprint (word processor)

Note on Sources

Given that Sprint was discontinued by Borland nearly 20 years ago, it's very difficult to include any Web links to sources. That's a common problem with older articles which either lack Web sources in the first place or which lose them over time, either because the original sources disappear or because they get edited out in various revisions of the articles.

No doubt there has been some general discussion of the disappearing-sources problem. It would be nice to have some Web archives which could preserve some of the older links or which could allow for taking "snapshots" of the sources. This would enhance the historical value of Wikipedia, which is already considerable. Maybe there already are some initiatives along these lines.

Which reminds me - I need to contribute some $ to the Wikimedia Foundation for worthwhile initiatives such as saving the sources and retaining the older articles, as well as the many other good things that Wikipedia does.

On this particular article, I can certainly vouch for the "Features" list, because I'm one of the few who still uses Sprint regularly, after all these years. It's easy to program Sprint to do all sorts of useful, time-saving things - and that gives it perennial value.

JD Fan (talk) 21:45, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Did a copy edit and clean-up on the article.

May add a bit more on Sprint, down the road. I still use Sprint for all my drafts because of its blazing speed and the ability to get under the hood and modify it to do just about anything you want it to do, especially in handling and navigating large documents. This enables you to jump around your whole set of documents in random-access, non-linear fashion, rather than having to scroll through them. Everything is instantaneous. As for compatibility with the rest of the world, Word Perfect 12 can read Sprint files (with all the formatting, including footnotes) and then convert them easily to Word Perfect or Microsoft Word files using the "Save As" feature.

Sprint is still useful because it is fast and programmable: using a language which is much like "C", you can program new capabilities and include them in the interface, which can readily be customized (e.g., with menus).

--JD_Fan, June 21/06

Based on MINCE?

The Emacs article says that Sprint's predecessor, "Final Word", was based on MINCE - an Emacs clone. This article has no mention of it. Does anyone know this history? (FWIW, "MINCE" stood for "MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs") Gronky 12:16, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi, I was one of the original founders of Mark of the Unicorn. Funny to see Brian Hess get credit for all of FinalWord; in fact, as I'm sure he would insist, it was very much a group effort (I've corrected the article). It all started with MINCE, developed mostly by Jason Linhart based on material that became Craig Finseth's book, The Craft of Text Editing; the original, experimental versions of MINCE were developed in late 1979, if memory serves, on a homebrew CP/M system cobbled together by Phillip Apley, using Leor Zolman's BDS_C. (All of us were MIT undergrads at this time.) When Jason, Craig, and I graduated in spring of 1980, we rented a house in Belmont, MA and started MotU. Brian joined us sooner or later -- I don't recall exactly when. Anyway, I built us a machine (with dual 8" floppies -- wow :-) and we set out to productize Mince and to write a formatter to go with it. Having had good experiences with the Scribe formatter developed by Brian Reid at CMU, we took it as our model and called our version Scribble. For a while we were selling Mince and Scribble bundled to form a product called Amethyst.

Although our business grew we soon found ourselves competing with WordStar, which had a lot more money behind it, not to mention management with actual business experience :-) So we improved the product, of course, and tried for a more mainstream image with the name FinalWord. Our first licensee was Perfect Software; their version (the tech work being done by Barry Dobyns) was called Perfect Writer.

This is all I have time to write at the moment. I guess I should expand the MOTU page. Feel free to ask questions. ScottBurson 06:24, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

It was sooner rather than later: June of 1981. Also, since Bill touched everywhere and re-wrote so much before Borland got it, his name deserved a spot. Suanla (talk) 00:09, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

My memory is that at the time, there was a story that FinalWord was called that because it finally could now be a complete Emacs unlike MINCE. Presumably unless the macro language was changed between it and Sprint, that's not right. How much of FinalWord is in Sprint? 86.26.44.251 (talk) 09:27, 24 October 2013 (UTC)