Just a random footnote, though of course this isn’t anything anyone here will give much of a $#!+ about, but Paige has its own internal “styled text” format that was used in quite a few applications in the 90’s (though it can read and write, at the very least, to plain-text,. HTML, and I’m 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 DataPak’s 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 dead—I know, quelle surprise, /s). Of those that have been acquired, most were bought by blue-chip corporations, and I don’t 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 reckoning—no $#!+, we actually went over the list together—would be nearly the sole viable sales prospect, if we didn’t 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 “I don’t like this toolkit, let’s get rid of it”.
And this is what was basically the straw that broke the proprietary camel’s back. It’s pretty much Open Source or bust at this moment; I didn’t rate the chances of “bust”, but that’s 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, it’s best not to prolong the inevitable EoL—something I promised myself. (For the record, this is not a stage Paige has reached IMHO; it’s 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 I’d 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 “cowboy era” of computing (i.e. the early 1990s). But only almost. I’m neither a psychotherapist nor a psycho-the-rapist.