26 ms·

MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

223 points by uger 5y ago

madengr 5y ago
This trend is accelerating; small, one person companies founded near the beginning of personal computing are shutting down. Others that come to mind are MicroCAP for SPICE simulation, WRCAD for IC layout.
- airbreather 5y ago
  Is it due to the market, or the owners are retiring/giving up?
  - scrdhrt 5y ago
    My father (67, retired) has a couple of friends his age with long time, small businesses in the IT industry. One has been making some sort of map software for a very small niche in the marine industry, another has been making software for bee keepers or something similar. A third in image scanning software. They have been doing well since the late 80s, and still could be. They chose to go out of business and enjoy retired life instead. I suspect that, although there is a market for the products, noone is interested in taking on the software they worked on.
    - lowercased 5y ago
      > I suspect that, although there is a market for the products, noone is interested in taking on the software they worked on. It may be extremely difficult to do that, for at least a few reasons. In some cases, the tech is going to be very niche/old, and it will be difficult for people to get up to speed on it. The business is likely built on a lot of personal contacts, and not all will want to switch to some 'newcomer'. Many of these smaller business reliant on niche software will go out of business themselves, or be acquired by larger companies that will replace the niche software and process with something else. The current customers may not actually want anything other than regular updates while paying minimal support/maintenance contracts. Someone established can live off that, but someone new will have to spend a lot of time learning, and the income may not be sufficient to justify all the learning. I worked on a project in 2018 where some of the (small) company was still running on a combination of foxpro/db2, with a bunch of custom code by an indie/solo vendor who had 'retired' probably 5 years earlier. He'd 'sold' the company to another individual who ... kept it going, but couldn't easily deal with new needs (new reports, etc). Another vendor did an upgrade on the hosting server, and nothing worked after that. The upgrade was a base NT upgrade, and there wasn't any easy way to 'go back' quickly. Things ran off an RDP session to a laptop in Canada running some weird trial emulation tool under windows 7 (this was how it was translated to me from various parties).
      - jaclaz 5y ago
        Well, if I may, there is something that doesn't sound (to me) "rational". I have seen quite a few of these cases where a larger company buys the old one (essentially to get a list of their current customers) and then terminates the product replacing it with some crappy new stuff that usually completely fails to work, but in this case the soon-to-retire programmer at least gets some (little) money (and knowledge is lost forever). But if the one man company is going to shut down because the programmer is going to retire, the acquisition cost for a young, willing programmer is 0. This hypothetical young programmer could - I believe - invest some time to understand not so much the actual codebase, but rather the workflow of the program and re-write it along that same workflow in a new language/platform/whatever. I am pretty sure that those niche users would be ready to pay a fair amount of money to have something modern/updated that actually works and works like the old one. What I have seen often is that the new program, for no real reason, has been written by someone that most probably is much more brilliant at programming but that knows nothing about how the program is actually used, has no idea about how to deal with some "edge" cases (that already surely happened in the tens of years of life of the old software), etc., in some ways it is like all the experience accumulated over the years is suddenly lost and the new program repeats the same (or worse) mistakes/issues that already happened (and that were already solved). Maybe the problem is that there is not an easy way to tell to the world "I am going to retire, any taker?"
        spoonjim 5y ago
        Yes, that young, entrepreneurial programmer can be found, but won’t have the domain knowledge. Look at the examples above. You can’t sell Marine mapping software without knowing something about marine navigation. You can’t sell beekeeping software without understanding beekeeping. Plus you need the general business operation skills. Finding a programmer who knows beekeeping and wants to take on a low growth business is not as easy as finding a programmer on Upwork.
        lowercased 5y ago
        Yep. There may be 'takers', but will the existing customers want to work with them? So many solo/indie niche packages are built on the relationships, and replacing those - and the trust around them - is hard. A client told me about someone they knew who did ballroom dancing software - it kept track of competitions, standings, etc. And... it seemed like decent money, looking at the pricing, and the size of the market. But the market didn't seem big enough for multiple players, and everyone trusted/knew/used the one main player. If/when he goes (or perhaps already has), I'm sure people will find another way to manage their stuff, but before then... who's going to come in to a market like that? How do you 'beat' the incumbent? Lower price? Who would switch? How do you convince people to switch to something unknown, potentially losing years of data, having new training costs, to ... save a couple hundred bucks maybe? I'm sure there's hundreds of these sorts of services out there that are surviving, but don't have a huge market for competition, because the barriers to entry are too high relative to the return.
  - madengr 5y ago
    The latter. Profitable enough to make a living from, but not profitable enough (in these days) to be purchased and sustained.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      Especially in an era of very high programmer salaries.
  - Waterluvian 5y ago
    First we need to understand if there is a trend and if it is accelerating. If so, it feels like “retirement” is a good first guess at why.
    - asah 5y ago
      why not sell the business? too much hassle to operate? someone surely would want it...
      - tibbetts 5y ago
        One person businesses often require a unique collection of skills to operate and don’t make enough money to hire a team of professional operators. This is also true of traditional small businesses like restaurants and car mechanics. The phenomenon is discussed extensively in the “E-myth” series of books. The TLDR is if you ever want to get someone else to run your business, you have to be careful to systematize and document how it works.
        catmanjan 5y ago
        Pretty sure restaurants and car mechanics aren't unique skills and when they retire in my area someone usually buys them out and continues operating under the same name...
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
        From what I recall from reading one of the "E-myth" books a while ago, whether the newly-owned shop will operate similarly to the old one, and also how difficult was it for the original owners to sell it, will depend on the documentation GP mentioned. Going from my memory, "E-myth" book(s) insist on thoroughly documenting operating procedures and turning them into playbook. Rigid in terms of personnel training, but open to change if someone figures out an improvement. The goal is to be able to scale up operations into multiple venues (franchise models) while maintaining highly consistent appearance and level of quality. As much as having such documentation will make it easier for a franchisee to get the business running (the books call it "turn-key business", IIRC), it will also make it easier for a potential buyer to take over and immediately hit the ground running.
  - TheFreim 5y ago
    > small, one person companies founded near the beginning of personal computing are shutting down. It could also be that they didn't appropriately expand, or expanded too much.
  - 7thaccount 5y ago
    If it is due to retirement, the other employees might not be able to take over the product if it has been a 1 person show. I know of similar software where if the main developer were to leave, I have zero confidence they could do much besides maintenance. It isn't just the code, but having the mathematical understanding of the problem. Also, without looking at this in general, I wonder if it's hard to compete with Mathematica which is ~$1000 for a professional license (very reasonable in the industry compared to most others) or free on raspberry pi with free or near free for most students. Also, there is open source software as well that could eat into their niche.
    - padthai 5y ago
      Mathematica is at least ~$1.5k/year, ~$3k if you want only the desktop application, no WolframAlpha-like features. Licenses on the desktop are not per user, but per machine (8 core limitation). If you want to move the installation to another machine, you have to send them a signed document and contact Wolfram (the company, not the person). I could go on all day about the friction and restrictions. They have an excellent and unique product and I would love to pour them money (between me and my employer we pay about EUR 1000 /year to Intellij, and this is only one provider). But for some reason I do not feel comfortable between the immense power imbalance between them and myself. It makes me uneasy to invest in the ecosystem. I wonder how many clients they have their CAP users in the academic world.
      - 7thaccount 5y ago
        Fully agreed on the friction. It is quite annoying if you have a license, but it's not widespread at your company. The core restrictions are rediculous as well for such an expensive product. I use it for things I need, but similar to you, I try to stick to other tools (Python for me) just to avoid the frustrations. They can move a license fairly easily, but there ended up being some other annoying issues for me recently that made me want to wash my hands entirely.
  - bsder 5y ago
    > Is it due to the market, or the owners are retiring/giving up? Bit of both. Certainly people who tripped into a niche back in the 1980s/1990s are getting old. However, modern customer support has gotten stupidly expensive and annoying as hell. I blame the fact that modern users are significantly less sophisticated and significantly more demanding.
- simonh 5y ago
  MacKichan Software was founded in 1981. MicroCAP was launched in 1982. Stephen R. Whiteley who wrote WRCAD is 66. I suppose there's only so long a one person company can go on for.
  - itsoktocry 5y ago
    >I suppose there's only so long a one person company can go on for. These were my thoughts exactly. These people got a an entire career out of independently working on software they (presumably) enjoyed developing. And if they open source it, the product lives on. It's not sad, it's great! Some of us should be so lucky.
amichail 5y ago
Will everyone switch to TeXmacs, which is truly WYSIWYG and does not use TeX/LaTeX? See: https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html
- mr_gibbins 5y ago
  I doubt it, since in academia there are two gods, Word and LaTeX. It is very rare to find journals/conferences who don't specify one template or the other (with the possible exception of ACM, who are a law unto themselves). TexMacs might be OK for final preparation of camera-ready PDFs but by that point you're already invested in Word/LaTeX so there's no point switching typesetter.
  - amichail 5y ago
    TeXmacs is better than Word for documents containing math.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Given that Word does LaTeX math, why would that be?
      - amichail 5y ago
        In TeXmacs, switching between math and non-math mode while writing up a document is seamless and fast. Moreover, typesetting quality is comparable to TeX/LaTeX.
      - asdf_snar 5y ago
        Writing math in Word has the following disadvantages: - referencing is a nightmare (this is probably the worst aspect). \label and \ref or \eqref? No, remember the equation number, click the References tab, Cross-Reference, select "equation" from the "Reference type" dropdown list, scroll down to the equation whose number you should remember, click "Insert". Did you add remove/an equation, thereby changing all subsequent equation numbers? Let's hope "Update all fields" works on the first try (hint: it won't). - AMS math standards, \mathbb{R}, \mathcal{R}? No, \doubleR, \scriptR. - \bar{x}? No, \bar SPACE SPACE left-arrow x right-arrow. - \begin{align*}? No, good luck. (Actually I haven't even figured this one out). - Version control? No, "Track changes". Oh, you changed a subscript or superscript? Your file is corrupted and cannot be saved, Ctrl-z until you can save and hope you remember all your changes. - Seamless math typing if you are fast and proficient at LaTeX? No, Alt+= and hold on while I catch up. Did you go too fast? Sorry, Word has stopped responding. (This is a real problem in a 50+ page Word document full of math.) Those are just the ones off the top of my head. +1 for TeXmacs being superior to both Word and LaTeX. After using LaTeX for years I tried TeXmacs for a week and never looked back.
codebolt 5y ago
Wow, very sad to hear this. My high school ran a trial project back in 2000 and my class became the first in my country where every student received a laptop to use in all classes. We used Scientific Notebook for math. Being able to solve any equation and draw any graph with the click of a button was a huge boost in my ability to grasp trig, polynomials, logarithms, etc. I actually went from D-level math student pre-HS to graduating HS with an A+ and went on to get a degree in physics+math at uni. I honestly doubt if that would've been possible if not for SN.
- neilv 5y ago
  I bet the developer would be glad to hear this. That's one of the optimistic earlier visions of computers.
deleted 5y ago
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dimatura 5y ago
Now that's a name I hadn't heard in a long time. It wasn't my cup of tea -- I prefer just writing latex directly, but it's a pity, as I'd rather see more people get into writing tex/latex, even if via GUI. I understand why it's not that mainstream outside certain academic fields, though, because it can be pretty annoying frustrating at times. But almost anything is better than word at writing long technical documents, specially in a collaborative way. (Went through that once for a grant proposal; very painful).
imvetri 5y ago
Sorry to hear
iamgopal 5y ago
Yes but was it able to share selfie and video ?
- musingsole 5y ago
  More importantly, was it collecting usage information and dumping it onto data markets?
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    America: "Ethics is for chumps who want to finish last"
    - pope_meat 5y ago
      "hah, you did the right thing? Idiot, I made MONEY"
  - mukesh610 5y ago
    How is that relevant?
    - musingsole 5y ago
      Hahaha it was a joke you yokels
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments.
  - musingsole 5y ago
    The previous comment made a joke of how despite being a capable device for education, it didn't have the features that drive commercial success. How was it unsubstantive?
    - 5y ago
xvilka 5y ago
In the age of Jupyter, Pluto.jl, SageMath, LaTeX/Overleaf Wolfram (for rich) who needs this? Better to spend time and resources improving those.
- codebolt 5y ago
  Do any of those have a CAS which is as powerful and easy to use as Scientific Notebook/Workplace?
  - xvilka 5y ago
    Of course they are. Sage Math and Wolfram Mathematica are top-notch.
jnieminen 5y ago
What kind of alternatives there are for these? At least Matlab and Wolfram Mathematica come into my mind, but are there anything else?
- tomrod 5y ago
  Python's Sage, Jupyter, Octave
- fluidcruft 5y ago
  Maxima
- carlob 5y ago
  The MuPad CAS that was used by this software has since been bought by Mathworks and integrated into the symbolic functionality of Matlab.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
I am so sorry to hear that. I wish that when companies such as this do go out of business that they should transition the licensing model to perpetual. It is gracious to keep running the licesnse server ut once it ends that is it. If the company is not going to lose any money because of it, which they will not since they are out fo the busness entirely, let the users have a chance to keep using it. (without support, without bugfixes, without upgrades to new platforms) Presumably this could lead to people sharing licensing detals and non paying customers may over time start using it, that should be an acceptable risk, given that there is no monetary gain nor loss. It would be awesome to have access to a rich library of dead software that people could use for free.
- DannyBee 5y ago
  One issue you hit, and it sounds like they may be hitting here, is the need to pay yearly royalties or other yearly licensing fees for some of the components in their software. The company that they are paying fees to is unlikely to give them a a pass. In these cases, which are not uncommon, there is not a lot they can do. (Lots of companies have a mix of perpetual and non-perpetual users and pay royalties on the yearly folks and a one time fixed fee for the forever folks)
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    Exactly... and software today, more than ever, is built upon products from a gazillion different vendors.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    Or the software, as written, NEEDS to contact a server to ask the question "am I legit" - and to remove this need would require modifying the software and redistributing it. Of course, if the companies funds run dry, they will stop renewing the url registration, and one of us can register it, throw up a server that says "you are legit!" To every request and the problem is solved.
    - Someone 5y ago
pabs3 5y ago
Good to see that they at least plan to open source an old version before they shut down. This does happen sometimes, for example Synfig Animation Studio had this happen.
zerop 5y ago
I feel terrible when I come across great products while they shutdown.. why I didn't know it?
- bachmeier 5y ago
  In 2021 there's honestly not any good reason to know about Scientific Word. It was a good product 20 years ago, but it doesn't bring much to the table today that you'd have a reason to pay for.
  - liketochill 5y ago
    What is a replacement? I’ve been thinking about buying it as an easy way to write nice latex looking pdf files
    - bachmeier 5y ago
      LyX is very popular. TeXmacs is not exactly latex, but it does a good job. Things built on markdown like RStudio/R markdown. Many like Overleaf, though I haven't used it much. Even MS Word isn't terrible these days.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    What was it good at 20 years ago? What is it missing now?
    - bachmeier 5y ago
      It made it easy to create latex documents without having to type latex code. It was especially handy for creating equations and tables. I don't know that it's missing anything today, it just doesn't provide a lot of value over something like LyX (that is open source and doesn't cost anything) or even a good markdown editor.
bachmeier 5y ago
I used Scientific Word to write my dissertation and my first academic papers. It was a great piece of software in the late 1990s, at least relative to the alternatives, which were writing .tex files yourself or typing in a word processor. I have a coauthor that still uses SW. I can't say this is surprising. I moved to LyX long ago, and then after markdown became popular I ditched LyX and went with that. There are lots of strong alternatives today. There probably aren't many people willing to pay for something they can get for free, that they already have, or that doesn't provide features for collaboration.
- SloopJon 5y ago
  How does Markdown fill the niche of TeX or Scientific Word? Is there a mathematically oriented fork? You mentioned R Markdown in another comment, but I don't see anything in the gallery that looks germane.
  - dunham 5y ago
    pandoc will turn markdown with TeX formatted equations into PDF or html (relying on tex and mathjax, respectively). It can also turn it into TeX if you need to tweak stuff. A number of other systems like Obsidian (for note taking) use markdown and integrate MathJaX or KaTeX to render TeX formatted equations.
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    Pandoc includes math support out of the box. R Markdown is actually built on top of Pandoc. I know many academics that write their papers in (Pandoc) markdown and then convert to PDF. It creates an intermediate .tex file that is then converted to PDF.
danaos 5y ago
Our course instructor on "Estimation and Detection Theory" was a big fan of Scientific WorkPlace. It did such a great job at replacing the chalk-board during lockdown.
londons_explore 5y ago
It's a unique kind of business that commits to doing substantially more development work after announcing they have ceased sales with no plan to restart.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  That’s my plan. I doubt my business will be viable for many more years but I do feel a responsibility towards my existing customers.
clipradiowallet 5y ago
That's a shame... science/math focused software is such a niche, and the people inside that niche(I imagine) _really_ appreciate that type of software. There could be some type of consulting opportunity here though for licensees that are still wanting to pay for that type of software. Depending on their use case, a consultant could try to shift what they currently are dependent on to a semi-customized collection of jupyter notebooks etc.
deleted 5y ago
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marcodiego 5y ago
Another example of abusive license: "If you need to install your software on a new or different computer, you will need to re-activate the software on that computer using that serial number. [..] This contacts the MacKichan Software licensing server, which we will keep running for at least two years." The hope: "We expect to make Scientific Word an open source product eventually. Since both Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Notebook contain the proprietary computer algebra system MuPAD, they cannot be made open source. When the open source project for Scientific Word is established, an announcement will be made here."
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Would be nice if they open sourced it now that the company doesn't exist anymore. But it seems to never pan out and people just lose access to the thing they paid for.
- gopiandcode 5y ago
  > Since both Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Notebook contain the proprietary computer algebra system MuPAD, they cannot be made open source. Don't you just hate the viral nature of infectious *proprietary* code? To co-opt some propaganda used against GPL in the past: Using a proprietary library in your application mandates that significant swaths of your application be released proprietary as well. That's not a problem if you wanted to release proprietary software to start with, but it's a problem for anyone else on either side of the spectrum. For this reason, developers have to be quite careful about how they use proprietary software to make sure that it doesn't impose unwanted licensing restrictions.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    > Don't you just hate the viral nature of infectious proprietary code? Sure, I agree with you. I'm currently looking for a term to replace "infectious" and "viral" since I want to talk about the GPL without bad health connotations. Any suggestion?
LanternLight83 5y ago
The sibling thread I was going to reply in has been deleted, but I wanted to share what I learned this morning, as a young-blood who was hardly alive at the time: a. Laptops of the time sport specs that assure me they'd be perfectly capable of proforming the majority of tasks I engage in on my computer, and education especially sets a low bar; I'm sure they could run a terminal, CLI text editor, calculator, interpreters, and Wikipedia like any modern PC (thanks to Wikipedia for staying accessible!). Selfies simply aren't the most important thing. b. According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcam > The released in 1993 SGI Indy [sic] is the first commercial computer to have a standard video camera > The first widespread commercial webcam, the black-and-white QuickCam, entered the marketplace in 1994 [ . . . ] $100 > The first widely known laptop with integrated webcam option, at a pricepoint starting at US$ 12,000, was an IBM RS/6000 860 laptop and his ThinkPad 850 sibling, released in 1996. > Around the turn of the 21st century, computer hardware manufacturers began building webcams directly into laptop and desktop screens, thus eliminating the need to use an external USB or FireWire camera. So, yes! Idk exactly what OP had, but if laptops of the time were starting to include built in webcams, and could run a 20fps webcast, then they could certainly "take and share selfies and video". Interestingly, 2000 was also the year of the first Presidential Webcast in the US, though I'm pretty sure Clinton didn't stream it from his iBook.
keid 5y ago
Way back when, just after the IBM PC came out in the early 1980s, a company named Triad Computing was formed by J. Mack Adams, Roger Hunter, and Barry MacKichan, with the goal of creating a WYSIWYG technical text editing system. I was their first employee. Roger, Barry, and I did all the programming. Venture capital for this sort of thing wasn't common then; we raised operating capital by contract work (e.g. I wrote a floating-point arithmetic library for the PDP-11). After about a year our product debuted, named T^3. Shortly after there was a company name dispute and we changed ours to TCI Software Research. I could go on at some length, but that's where MacKichan Software started.
- analog31 5y ago
  I wrote my physics dissertation using t3. For what it did at the time, it was fantastic.
  - keid 5y ago
    When I went to Oxford University in 1985 I learned that, at the time, theses in the mathematics department were required to be written with T^3. I did not advertise my background--I did not want to be tech support. I actually went back to TCI for a while after finishing my degrees there.
- low_common 5y ago
  What did J. Mack Adams do?
  - keid 5y ago
    As a founder/part-owner, like the other two he kicked in some money to get it started. Despite being a computer science professor he wasn't an effective real-world programmer so he in effect became a silent partner. He eventually got cold feet and his initial investment was bought out by the other two. (The other two ultimately went all-in and effectively gave up their professorships; J. Mack stayed in academia.)
cosban 5y ago
This is sad, but I'm glad that they plan on making Scientific Word open source.
- coldacid 5y ago
  Too bad it'll be an older version instead of the latest.
emmanueloga_ 5y ago
Hmmm I've never heard about this software but I found some screenshots in google search, the UI looks a lot like another old CAS that I used in high school, "Derive" [1]. Derive was great :-) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_(computer_algebra_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_(computer_algebra_syste...
- submeta 5y ago
  „Derive“ was an excellent piece of software. Loved it. Until I came across Mathematica years later.
robbmorganf 5y ago
I never used this software, sadly. What made it different from Mathematica or from Maple?
MelvinButtsESQ 5y ago
My best friend's dad's boss is named Barry MacGoughener. I wonder if they are from the same place in Scotland?
rietta 5y ago
Is the market for this software gone or is it that Mr. MacKichan is ready to retire and there wasn't a buyer for the company? I could imagine being tired and ready to close up shop after 40 years as well.
qurashee 5y ago
Upon reading this article I thought I should check the fate of one of my favourite astronomy software (SkyMap). Looks like it had the same fate last year, Chris Marriott (the sole developer) decided to retire. I don't really get though why shut up shop and not open source such one man projects :(
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cyanydeez 5y ago
i suppose its too dreamy to think you could open source parts of the other software and some how modularize the properitary code.
mnowicki 5y ago
Which word did they make? Was it "Mitochondria"? I bet it was mitochondria

223 points by uger 5y ago

This trend is accelerating; small, one person companies founded near the beginning of personal computing are shutting down. Others that come to mind are MicroCAP for SPICE simulation, WRCAD for IC layout.

airbreather 5y ago
Is it due to the market, or the owners are retiring/giving up?
- scrdhrt 5y ago
  My father (67, retired) has a couple of friends his age with long time, small businesses in the IT industry. One has been making some sort of map software for a very small niche in the marine industry, another has been making software for bee keepers or something similar. A third in image scanning software. They have been doing well since the late 80s, and still could be. They chose to go out of business and enjoy retired life instead. I suspect that, although there is a market for the products, noone is interested in taking on the software they worked on.
  - lowercased 5y ago
    > I suspect that, although there is a market for the products, noone is interested in taking on the software they worked on. It may be extremely difficult to do that, for at least a few reasons. In some cases, the tech is going to be very niche/old, and it will be difficult for people to get up to speed on it. The business is likely built on a lot of personal contacts, and not all will want to switch to some 'newcomer'. Many of these smaller business reliant on niche software will go out of business themselves, or be acquired by larger companies that will replace the niche software and process with something else. The current customers may not actually want anything other than regular updates while paying minimal support/maintenance contracts. Someone established can live off that, but someone new will have to spend a lot of time learning, and the income may not be sufficient to justify all the learning. I worked on a project in 2018 where some of the (small) company was still running on a combination of foxpro/db2, with a bunch of custom code by an indie/solo vendor who had 'retired' probably 5 years earlier. He'd 'sold' the company to another individual who ... kept it going, but couldn't easily deal with new needs (new reports, etc). Another vendor did an upgrade on the hosting server, and nothing worked after that. The upgrade was a base NT upgrade, and there wasn't any easy way to 'go back' quickly. Things ran off an RDP session to a laptop in Canada running some weird trial emulation tool under windows 7 (this was how it was translated to me from various parties).
    - jaclaz 5y ago
      Well, if I may, there is something that doesn't sound (to me) "rational". I have seen quite a few of these cases where a larger company buys the old one (essentially to get a list of their current customers) and then terminates the product replacing it with some crappy new stuff that usually completely fails to work, but in this case the soon-to-retire programmer at least gets some (little) money (and knowledge is lost forever). But if the one man company is going to shut down because the programmer is going to retire, the acquisition cost for a young, willing programmer is 0. This hypothetical young programmer could - I believe - invest some time to understand not so much the actual codebase, but rather the workflow of the program and re-write it along that same workflow in a new language/platform/whatever. I am pretty sure that those niche users would be ready to pay a fair amount of money to have something modern/updated that actually works and works like the old one. What I have seen often is that the new program, for no real reason, has been written by someone that most probably is much more brilliant at programming but that knows nothing about how the program is actually used, has no idea about how to deal with some "edge" cases (that already surely happened in the tens of years of life of the old software), etc., in some ways it is like all the experience accumulated over the years is suddenly lost and the new program repeats the same (or worse) mistakes/issues that already happened (and that were already solved). Maybe the problem is that there is not an easy way to tell to the world "I am going to retire, any taker?"
      - spoonjim 5y ago
        Yes, that young, entrepreneurial programmer can be found, but won’t have the domain knowledge. Look at the examples above. You can’t sell Marine mapping software without knowing something about marine navigation. You can’t sell beekeeping software without understanding beekeeping. Plus you need the general business operation skills. Finding a programmer who knows beekeeping and wants to take on a low growth business is not as easy as finding a programmer on Upwork.
        lowercased 5y ago
        Yep. There may be 'takers', but will the existing customers want to work with them? So many solo/indie niche packages are built on the relationships, and replacing those - and the trust around them - is hard. A client told me about someone they knew who did ballroom dancing software - it kept track of competitions, standings, etc. And... it seemed like decent money, looking at the pricing, and the size of the market. But the market didn't seem big enough for multiple players, and everyone trusted/knew/used the one main player. If/when he goes (or perhaps already has), I'm sure people will find another way to manage their stuff, but before then... who's going to come in to a market like that? How do you 'beat' the incumbent? Lower price? Who would switch? How do you convince people to switch to something unknown, potentially losing years of data, having new training costs, to ... save a couple hundred bucks maybe? I'm sure there's hundreds of these sorts of services out there that are surviving, but don't have a huge market for competition, because the barriers to entry are too high relative to the return.
- madengr 5y ago
  The latter. Profitable enough to make a living from, but not profitable enough (in these days) to be purchased and sustained.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Especially in an era of very high programmer salaries.
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  First we need to understand if there is a trend and if it is accelerating. If so, it feels like “retirement” is a good first guess at why.
  - asah 5y ago
    why not sell the business? too much hassle to operate? someone surely would want it...
    - tibbetts 5y ago
      One person businesses often require a unique collection of skills to operate and don’t make enough money to hire a team of professional operators. This is also true of traditional small businesses like restaurants and car mechanics. The phenomenon is discussed extensively in the “E-myth” series of books. The TLDR is if you ever want to get someone else to run your business, you have to be careful to systematize and document how it works.
      - catmanjan 5y ago
        Pretty sure restaurants and car mechanics aren't unique skills and when they retire in my area someone usually buys them out and continues operating under the same name...
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
        From what I recall from reading one of the "E-myth" books a while ago, whether the newly-owned shop will operate similarly to the old one, and also how difficult was it for the original owners to sell it, will depend on the documentation GP mentioned. Going from my memory, "E-myth" book(s) insist on thoroughly documenting operating procedures and turning them into playbook. Rigid in terms of personnel training, but open to change if someone figures out an improvement. The goal is to be able to scale up operations into multiple venues (franchise models) while maintaining highly consistent appearance and level of quality. As much as having such documentation will make it easier for a franchisee to get the business running (the books call it "turn-key business", IIRC), it will also make it easier for a potential buyer to take over and immediately hit the ground running.
- TheFreim 5y ago
  > small, one person companies founded near the beginning of personal computing are shutting down. It could also be that they didn't appropriately expand, or expanded too much.
- 7thaccount 5y ago
  If it is due to retirement, the other employees might not be able to take over the product if it has been a 1 person show. I know of similar software where if the main developer were to leave, I have zero confidence they could do much besides maintenance. It isn't just the code, but having the mathematical understanding of the problem. Also, without looking at this in general, I wonder if it's hard to compete with Mathematica which is ~$1000 for a professional license (very reasonable in the industry compared to most others) or free on raspberry pi with free or near free for most students. Also, there is open source software as well that could eat into their niche.
  - padthai 5y ago
    Mathematica is at least ~$1.5k/year, ~$3k if you want only the desktop application, no WolframAlpha-like features. Licenses on the desktop are not per user, but per machine (8 core limitation). If you want to move the installation to another machine, you have to send them a signed document and contact Wolfram (the company, not the person). I could go on all day about the friction and restrictions. They have an excellent and unique product and I would love to pour them money (between me and my employer we pay about EUR 1000 /year to Intellij, and this is only one provider). But for some reason I do not feel comfortable between the immense power imbalance between them and myself. It makes me uneasy to invest in the ecosystem. I wonder how many clients they have their CAP users in the academic world.
    - 7thaccount 5y ago
      Fully agreed on the friction. It is quite annoying if you have a license, but it's not widespread at your company. The core restrictions are rediculous as well for such an expensive product. I use it for things I need, but similar to you, I try to stick to other tools (Python for me) just to avoid the frustrations. They can move a license fairly easily, but there ended up being some other annoying issues for me recently that made me want to wash my hands entirely.
- bsder 5y ago
  > Is it due to the market, or the owners are retiring/giving up? Bit of both. Certainly people who tripped into a niche back in the 1980s/1990s are getting old. However, modern customer support has gotten stupidly expensive and annoying as hell. I blame the fact that modern users are significantly less sophisticated and significantly more demanding.
simonh 5y ago
MacKichan Software was founded in 1981. MicroCAP was launched in 1982. Stephen R. Whiteley who wrote WRCAD is 66. I suppose there's only so long a one person company can go on for.
- itsoktocry 5y ago
  >I suppose there's only so long a one person company can go on for. These were my thoughts exactly. These people got a an entire career out of independently working on software they (presumably) enjoyed developing. And if they open source it, the product lives on. It's not sad, it's great! Some of us should be so lucky.

amichail 5y ago

Will everyone switch to TeXmacs, which is truly WYSIWYG and does not use TeX/LaTeX? See: https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html

mr_gibbins 5y ago
I doubt it, since in academia there are two gods, Word and LaTeX. It is very rare to find journals/conferences who don't specify one template or the other (with the possible exception of ACM, who are a law unto themselves). TexMacs might be OK for final preparation of camera-ready PDFs but by that point you're already invested in Word/LaTeX so there's no point switching typesetter.
- amichail 5y ago
  TeXmacs is better than Word for documents containing math.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Given that Word does LaTeX math, why would that be?
    - amichail 5y ago
      In TeXmacs, switching between math and non-math mode while writing up a document is seamless and fast. Moreover, typesetting quality is comparable to TeX/LaTeX.
    - asdf_snar 5y ago
      Writing math in Word has the following disadvantages: - referencing is a nightmare (this is probably the worst aspect). \label and \ref or \eqref? No, remember the equation number, click the References tab, Cross-Reference, select "equation" from the "Reference type" dropdown list, scroll down to the equation whose number you should remember, click "Insert". Did you add remove/an equation, thereby changing all subsequent equation numbers? Let's hope "Update all fields" works on the first try (hint: it won't). - AMS math standards, \mathbb{R}, \mathcal{R}? No, \doubleR, \scriptR. - \bar{x}? No, \bar SPACE SPACE left-arrow x right-arrow. - \begin{align*}? No, good luck. (Actually I haven't even figured this one out). - Version control? No, "Track changes". Oh, you changed a subscript or superscript? Your file is corrupted and cannot be saved, Ctrl-z until you can save and hope you remember all your changes. - Seamless math typing if you are fast and proficient at LaTeX? No, Alt+= and hold on while I catch up. Did you go too fast? Sorry, Word has stopped responding. (This is a real problem in a 50+ page Word document full of math.) Those are just the ones off the top of my head. +1 for TeXmacs being superior to both Word and LaTeX. After using LaTeX for years I tried TeXmacs for a week and never looked back.

codebolt 5y ago

Wow, very sad to hear this. My high school ran a trial project back in 2000 and my class became the first in my country where every student received a laptop to use in all classes. We used Scientific Notebook for math. Being able to solve any equation and draw any graph with the click of a button was a huge boost in my ability to grasp trig, polynomials, logarithms, etc. I actually went from D-level math student pre-HS to graduating HS with an A+ and went on to get a degree in physics+math at uni. I honestly doubt if that would've been possible if not for SN.

neilv 5y ago
I bet the developer would be glad to hear this. That's one of the optimistic earlier visions of computers.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dimatura 5y ago

Now that's a name I hadn't heard in a long time. It wasn't my cup of tea -- I prefer just writing latex directly, but it's a pity, as I'd rather see more people get into writing tex/latex, even if via GUI. I understand why it's not that mainstream outside certain academic fields, though, because it can be pretty annoying frustrating at times. But almost anything is better than word at writing long technical documents, specially in a collaborative way. (Went through that once for a grant proposal; very painful).

imvetri 5y ago

Sorry to hear

iamgopal 5y ago

Yes but was it able to share selfie and video ?

musingsole 5y ago
More importantly, was it collecting usage information and dumping it onto data markets?
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  America: "Ethics is for chumps who want to finish last"
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    "hah, you did the right thing? Idiot, I made MONEY"
- mukesh610 5y ago
  How is that relevant?
  - musingsole 5y ago
    Hahaha it was a joke you yokels
dang 5y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments.
- musingsole 5y ago
  The previous comment made a joke of how despite being a capable device for education, it didn't have the features that drive commercial success. How was it unsubstantive?
  - 5y ago

xvilka 5y ago

In the age of Jupyter, Pluto.jl, SageMath, LaTeX/Overleaf Wolfram (for rich) who needs this? Better to spend time and resources improving those.

codebolt 5y ago
Do any of those have a CAS which is as powerful and easy to use as Scientific Notebook/Workplace?
- xvilka 5y ago
  Of course they are. Sage Math and Wolfram Mathematica are top-notch.

jnieminen 5y ago

What kind of alternatives there are for these? At least Matlab and Wolfram Mathematica come into my mind, but are there anything else?

tomrod 5y ago
Python's Sage, Jupyter, Octave
fluidcruft 5y ago
Maxima
carlob 5y ago
The MuPad CAS that was used by this software has since been bought by Mathworks and integrated into the symbolic functionality of Matlab.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

I am so sorry to hear that. I wish that when companies such as this do go out of business that they should transition the licensing model to perpetual. It is gracious to keep running the licesnse server ut once it ends that is it. If the company is not going to lose any money because of it, which they will not since they are out fo the busness entirely, let the users have a chance to keep using it. (without support, without bugfixes, without upgrades to new platforms) Presumably this could lead to people sharing licensing detals and non paying customers may over time start using it, that should be an acceptable risk, given that there is no monetary gain nor loss. It would be awesome to have access to a rich library of dead software that people could use for free.

DannyBee 5y ago
One issue you hit, and it sounds like they may be hitting here, is the need to pay yearly royalties or other yearly licensing fees for some of the components in their software. The company that they are paying fees to is unlikely to give them a a pass. In these cases, which are not uncommon, there is not a lot they can do. (Lots of companies have a mix of perpetual and non-perpetual users and pay royalties on the yearly folks and a one time fixed fee for the forever folks)
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Exactly... and software today, more than ever, is built upon products from a gazillion different vendors.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  Or the software, as written, NEEDS to contact a server to ask the question "am I legit" - and to remove this need would require modifying the software and redistributing it. Of course, if the companies funds run dry, they will stop renewing the url registration, and one of us can register it, throw up a server that says "you are legit!" To every request and the problem is solved.
  - Someone 5y ago

pabs3 5y ago

Good to see that they at least plan to open source an old version before they shut down. This does happen sometimes, for example Synfig Animation Studio had this happen.

zerop 5y ago

I feel terrible when I come across great products while they shutdown.. why I didn't know it?

bachmeier 5y ago
In 2021 there's honestly not any good reason to know about Scientific Word. It was a good product 20 years ago, but it doesn't bring much to the table today that you'd have a reason to pay for.
- liketochill 5y ago
  What is a replacement? I’ve been thinking about buying it as an easy way to write nice latex looking pdf files
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    LyX is very popular. TeXmacs is not exactly latex, but it does a good job. Things built on markdown like RStudio/R markdown. Many like Overleaf, though I haven't used it much. Even MS Word isn't terrible these days.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  What was it good at 20 years ago? What is it missing now?
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    It made it easy to create latex documents without having to type latex code. It was especially handy for creating equations and tables. I don't know that it's missing anything today, it just doesn't provide a lot of value over something like LyX (that is open source and doesn't cost anything) or even a good markdown editor.

bachmeier 5y ago

I used Scientific Word to write my dissertation and my first academic papers. It was a great piece of software in the late 1990s, at least relative to the alternatives, which were writing .tex files yourself or typing in a word processor. I have a coauthor that still uses SW. I can't say this is surprising. I moved to LyX long ago, and then after markdown became popular I ditched LyX and went with that. There are lots of strong alternatives today. There probably aren't many people willing to pay for something they can get for free, that they already have, or that doesn't provide features for collaboration.

SloopJon 5y ago
How does Markdown fill the niche of TeX or Scientific Word? Is there a mathematically oriented fork? You mentioned R Markdown in another comment, but I don't see anything in the gallery that looks germane.
- dunham 5y ago
  pandoc will turn markdown with TeX formatted equations into PDF or html (relying on tex and mathjax, respectively). It can also turn it into TeX if you need to tweak stuff. A number of other systems like Obsidian (for note taking) use markdown and integrate MathJaX or KaTeX to render TeX formatted equations.
- bachmeier 5y ago
  Pandoc includes math support out of the box. R Markdown is actually built on top of Pandoc. I know many academics that write their papers in (Pandoc) markdown and then convert to PDF. It creates an intermediate .tex file that is then converted to PDF.

danaos 5y ago

Our course instructor on "Estimation and Detection Theory" was a big fan of Scientific WorkPlace. It did such a great job at replacing the chalk-board during lockdown.

londons_explore 5y ago

It's a unique kind of business that commits to doing substantially more development work after announcing they have ceased sales with no plan to restart.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
That’s my plan. I doubt my business will be viable for many more years but I do feel a responsibility towards my existing customers.

clipradiowallet 5y ago

That's a shame... science/math focused software is such a niche, and the people inside that niche(I imagine) _really_ appreciate that type of software. There could be some type of consulting opportunity here though for licensees that are still wanting to pay for that type of software. Depending on their use case, a consultant could try to shift what they currently are dependent on to a semi-customized collection of jupyter notebooks etc.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

marcodiego 5y ago

Another example of abusive license: "If you need to install your software on a new or different computer, you will need to re-activate the software on that computer using that serial number. [..] This contacts the MacKichan Software licensing server, which we will keep running for at least two years." The hope: "We expect to make Scientific Word an open source product eventually. Since both Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Notebook contain the proprietary computer algebra system MuPAD, they cannot be made open source. When the open source project for Scientific Word is established, an announcement will be made here."

deleted 5y ago
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nerdponx 5y ago
Would be nice if they open sourced it now that the company doesn't exist anymore. But it seems to never pan out and people just lose access to the thing they paid for.
gopiandcode 5y ago
> Since both Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Notebook contain the proprietary computer algebra system MuPAD, they cannot be made open source. Don't you just hate the viral nature of infectious *proprietary* code? To co-opt some propaganda used against GPL in the past: Using a proprietary library in your application mandates that significant swaths of your application be released proprietary as well. That's not a problem if you wanted to release proprietary software to start with, but it's a problem for anyone else on either side of the spectrum. For this reason, developers have to be quite careful about how they use proprietary software to make sure that it doesn't impose unwanted licensing restrictions.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  > Don't you just hate the viral nature of infectious proprietary code? Sure, I agree with you. I'm currently looking for a term to replace "infectious" and "viral" since I want to talk about the GPL without bad health connotations. Any suggestion?

LanternLight83 5y ago

The sibling thread I was going to reply in has been deleted, but I wanted to share what I learned this morning, as a young-blood who was hardly alive at the time: a. Laptops of the time sport specs that assure me they'd be perfectly capable of proforming the majority of tasks I engage in on my computer, and education especially sets a low bar; I'm sure they could run a terminal, CLI text editor, calculator, interpreters, and Wikipedia like any modern PC (thanks to Wikipedia for staying accessible!). Selfies simply aren't the most important thing. b. According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcam > The released in 1993 SGI Indy [sic] is the first commercial computer to have a standard video camera > The first widespread commercial webcam, the black-and-white QuickCam, entered the marketplace in 1994 [ . . . ] $100 > The first widely known laptop with integrated webcam option, at a pricepoint starting at US$ 12,000, was an IBM RS/6000 860 laptop and his ThinkPad 850 sibling, released in 1996. > Around the turn of the 21st century, computer hardware manufacturers began building webcams directly into laptop and desktop screens, thus eliminating the need to use an external USB or FireWire camera. So, yes! Idk exactly what OP had, but if laptops of the time were starting to include built in webcams, and could run a 20fps webcast, then they could certainly "take and share selfies and video". Interestingly, 2000 was also the year of the first Presidential Webcast in the US, though I'm pretty sure Clinton didn't stream it from his iBook.

keid 5y ago

Way back when, just after the IBM PC came out in the early 1980s, a company named Triad Computing was formed by J. Mack Adams, Roger Hunter, and Barry MacKichan, with the goal of creating a WYSIWYG technical text editing system. I was their first employee. Roger, Barry, and I did all the programming. Venture capital for this sort of thing wasn't common then; we raised operating capital by contract work (e.g. I wrote a floating-point arithmetic library for the PDP-11). After about a year our product debuted, named T^3. Shortly after there was a company name dispute and we changed ours to TCI Software Research. I could go on at some length, but that's where MacKichan Software started.

analog31 5y ago
I wrote my physics dissertation using t3. For what it did at the time, it was fantastic.
- keid 5y ago
  When I went to Oxford University in 1985 I learned that, at the time, theses in the mathematics department were required to be written with T^3. I did not advertise my background--I did not want to be tech support. I actually went back to TCI for a while after finishing my degrees there.
low_common 5y ago
What did J. Mack Adams do?
- keid 5y ago
  As a founder/part-owner, like the other two he kicked in some money to get it started. Despite being a computer science professor he wasn't an effective real-world programmer so he in effect became a silent partner. He eventually got cold feet and his initial investment was bought out by the other two. (The other two ultimately went all-in and effectively gave up their professorships; J. Mack stayed in academia.)

cosban 5y ago

This is sad, but I'm glad that they plan on making Scientific Word open source.

coldacid 5y ago
Too bad it'll be an older version instead of the latest.

emmanueloga_ 5y ago

Hmmm I've never heard about this software but I found some screenshots in google search, the UI looks a lot like another old CAS that I used in high school, "Derive" [1]. Derive was great :-) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_(computer_algebra_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_(computer_algebra_syste...

submeta 5y ago
„Derive“ was an excellent piece of software. Loved it. Until I came across Mathematica years later.

robbmorganf 5y ago

I never used this software, sadly. What made it different from Mathematica or from Maple?

MelvinButtsESQ 5y ago

My best friend's dad's boss is named Barry MacGoughener. I wonder if they are from the same place in Scotland?

rietta 5y ago

Is the market for this software gone or is it that Mr. MacKichan is ready to retire and there wasn't a buyer for the company? I could imagine being tired and ready to close up shop after 40 years as well.

qurashee 5y ago

Upon reading this article I thought I should check the fate of one of my favourite astronomy software (SkyMap). Looks like it had the same fate last year, Chris Marriott (the sole developer) decided to retire. I don't really get though why shut up shop and not open source such one man projects :(

deleted 5y ago
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cyanydeez 5y ago

i suppose its too dreamy to think you could open source parts of the other software and some how modularize the properitary code.

mnowicki 5y ago

Which word did they make? Was it "Mitochondria"? I bet it was mitochondria