MultiMate

MultiMate is a word processor developed by Softword Systems Inc. (later renamed Multimate International) for IBM-PC MS-DOS computers in the early 1980s. Wilton H. Jones, a progammer turned entrepreneur (W.H. Jones & Associates), brought on board 10 young programmers to write the software after winning a contract to develop a word processor for the Connecticut Mutal Life Insurance company. He negotiated the right to sell the program elsewhere.

By 1984, with the success of the PC, MultiMate had more than $1 million in orders a month and the company had more than 150 employees. Jones sold the company to Ashton-Tate for more than $20 million a few years later.

MultiMate was not marketed heavily to end-users, but was quickly popular with insurance companies, law firms and other business computer users. It allowed companies to easily replace dedicated Wang Word Processor workstations with a PC, with an order of magnitude reduction in cost. The user interface, although different than Wang's, was close enough to allow a Wang user to rapidly switch over.

Early versions of the program came with both color-coded key stickers and a plastic full-keyboard template to make Wang operators more comfortable with the smaller IBM PC keyboard. The original product price also included unlimited free technical support with a toll-free number. MultiMate eventually sold a hardware keyboard with dedicated function keys and issued versions of its software for networked PCs. It adapted list-management, graphics and outlining software from other vendors to the look-and-feel of MultiMate, shipping the expanded version as MultiMate Advantage.

In the DOS days, MultiMate was especially good at supporting a variety of PC clones and hundreds of computer printers, each of which required its own printer driver. Such printer support was very strong with daisy-wheel and dot-matrix printers, but did not take much advantage the development of Postscript and laser printers.

Ashton-Tate never released a Windows version of MultiMate and discontinued MultiMate's development efforts on VMS and Unix platforms. The product was dropped after the company was purchased by Borland.