Just a random footnote, though of course this isnât anything anyone here will give much of a $#!+ about, but Paige has its own internal âstyled textâ format that was used in quite a few applications in the 90âs (though it can read and write, at the very least, to plain-text,. HTML, and Iâm almost certain also RTF).
This is something I attempted to use as a selling point with James Rea over at ProVUE, but word-processing is a little-used feature of his RDBMS product, Panorama (competing with FileMaker), and in any case macOS X has its own rich-edit toolkit.
Of DataPakâs other clients that we managed to trace, most are either acquired or bankrupt (tantamount to the fact that of the people who have ever lived, most are now deadâI know, quelle surprise, /s). Of those that have been acquired, most were bought by blue-chip corporations, and I donât exactly fancy my chances selling to Oracle, Adobe, or SAP; my small shop would be laughed out of the room.
On top of that, my small shop (which, by our reckoningâno $#!+, we actually went over the list togetherâwould be nearly the sole viable sales prospect, if we didnât own the whole bloody thing ourselves) is already planning to reduce our Paige load for very sound, practical engineering reasons that go quite a bit deeper than âI donât like this toolkit, letâs get rid of itâ.
And this is what was basically the straw that broke the proprietary camelâs back. Itâs pretty much Open Source or bust at this moment; I didnât rate the chances of âbustâ, but thatâs now looking like a possibility (though not probable).
At a certain point in the product development lifecycle, the choice of fish-or-cut-bait simply dwindles down to the latter, and, like Old Yeller, itâs best not to prolong the inevitable EoLâsomething I promised myself. (For the record, this is not a stage Paige has reached IMHO; itâs still perfectly good as a rich-text toolkit for Windows, which is a pretty big remaining chunk of what it was meant to do in 1997, but I would never use it as an HTML viewer, i.e. a browser engine, on any operating system, and Iâd also never use it for macOS X.)
In any case, these kinds of strategic dilemmata (particularly the blue-chip thing mentioned above) make me almost wish for a return of the âcowboy eraâ of computing (i.e. the early 1990s). But only almost. Iâm neither a psychotherapist nor a psycho-the-rapist.
