Applixware is a suite of modular applications edited by Vistasource, Inc. Applixware was originally created by Applix, Inc. photo by Scott Evernden 2018

Alis

Applix's first office suite, introduced in 1986, was called Alis, and was marketed with

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (also known as ''Alice in Wonderland'') is an 1865 English Children's literature, children's novel by Lewis Carroll, a mathematics university don, don at the University of Oxford. It details the story of a ...

themed promotional items. One such was a mug depicting the tea party scene from the book, with a

Cheshire Cat The Cheshire Cat ( ) is a fictional cat popularised by Lewis Carroll in ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' and known for its distinctive mischievous grin. While now most often used in ''Alice''-related contexts, the association of a "Chesh ...

that disappeared when the mug was filled with a hot beverage. Alis was available for

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

workstations from

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

and others. Two site licenses were sold for Digital's VMS operating system, one to

ExxonMobil Exxon Mobil Corporation ( ) is an American multinational List of oil exploration and production companies, oil and gas corporation headquartered in Spring, Texas, a suburb of Houston. Founded as the Successors of Standard Oil, largest direct s ...

and one to a brokerage in New York City. In addition to providing a graphical office suite environment with a number of modules including graphics editor and word processing functions, very advanced for the time, Alis was distinguished by a very powerful scripting language called "ELF" (Extended Language Facility), which was capable of, for example, reading spreadsheet data, performing calculations on it, and merging results into text documents.

Aster*x and Applixware

Applixware's next major project was called Aster*x, but was renamed to Applixware to avoid confusion with

Asterix ''Asterix'' ( or , "Asterix the Gauls, Gaul"; also known as ''Asterix and Obelix'' in some adaptations or ''The Adventures of Asterix'') is a Franco-Belgian comics, French comic album book series, series about a Gaulish village which, thanks ...

the comic book hero. During the mid-1990s, Applixware was one of a small number of WYSIWYG word processors available for Unix systems. Competitors included products from Island Software and proprietary software from the computer hardware companies. In the late 1990s,

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

began to emerge as a desktop operating system, and Applixware was ported to Linux, becoming the first graphical office suite for the platform. Sales expanded to the point where Applixware was available across the USA as shrink-wrapped software on retail shelves at stores like

CompUSA CompUSA, Inc. was a retailer and reseller of Personal computer, personal computers, consumer electronics, technology products and computer services. Starting with one Brick and mortar, brick-and-mortar store in 1986 under the name Soft Warehouse, ...

and

Micro Center Micro Center is an American computer retail store chain, headquartered in Hilliard, Ohio. It was founded in 1979, and has 29 stores in 19 states. History Micro Center was founded in Columbus, Ohio in 1979 by John Baker and Bill Bayne, two ...

. In 1999, Sun Microsystems bought a competing product,

StarOffice StarOffice is a discontinued proprietary software, proprietary office suite. Its source code continues today in derived open-source office suites Collabora Online and LibreOffice. StarOffice supported the OpenOffice.org XML file format, as well ...

, and turned it into the

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

OpenOffice OpenOffice or open office may refer to: Computing Software * OpenOffice.org (OOo), a discontinued open-source office software suite, originally based on StarOffice * Apache OpenOffice (AOO), a derivative of OOo by the Apache Software Foundation, ...

software suite. That destroyed the market for competing software, and Applixware sales declined.

After OpenOffice

Applix Inc. began to seek other software markets, leveraging the power of their scripting engine and flexible architecture to expand into

business intelligence Business intelligence (BI) consists of strategies, methodologies, and technologies used by enterprises for data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of BI technologies include Financial reporting, reporting, online an ...

software markets such as

OLAP In computing, online analytical processing (OLAP) (), is an approach to quickly answer multi-dimensional analytical (MDA) queries. The term ''OLAP'' was created as a slight modification of the traditional database term online transaction processi ...

. Applixware is often used in the industrial world as a means of developing large scale Unix and Linux applications, and glueing together other applications. The Applixware unit of the company was rename
Vistasource, Inc.
and sold t
Parallax Capital Partners
in 2001. Vistasource now offers a freely available limited version for home users on Linux.

References

External links

Vistasource, Inc.Parallax Capital PartnersOffice Wars: Applixware and StarOffice , Linux Journal
{{Office suites Word processors 1980s software 1986 software Office suites for Linux Office suites