ChiWriter

» see horstmann.com/ChiWriter as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

ChiWriter was a word processor for people who had to put mathematics on a page. It went on sale in 1986 for MS-DOS, and it did something close to impossible on cheap hardware at the time: it showed you the formula on screen the way the formula would print. Text could sit half a line above or below the baseline and still count as part of the line, which is how you build a fraction out of characters. It carried twenty fonts simultaneously, among them Greek and mathematical symbol sets, and it shipped a font editor so a researcher could draw a glyph nobody had made yet.

The competition for that job was TeX, and in 1986 TeX meant a Unix machine in a department somewhere with a queue in front of it. ChiWriter cost a few hundred dollars and ran on an IBM PC XT, which is why it ended up on the desks of scientists rather than typesetters. It was a DOS program that drew its own graphical interface in graphics mode, with its own fixed width bitmap fonts in separate sets for screens and for printers, because that was the only way to be sure the output matched.

Horstmann Software Design Corporation advertised version 4 in Byte as completely what you see is what you get, with paid add-ons for laser printers and 24 pin dot matrix machines. Version 4.20B in 1993 was the last release. The company stopped selling and supporting the product on 1 July 1996, a date Cay Horstmann still has on his own FAQ page, ten years after the first release.

~ the case file ~

~ why there was never a windows version ~

Horstmann answered this himself, and the answer is one of the plainest post mortems a software author has written down. Four programmers were working on the Windows build when Windows 3.0 became popular enough that DOS programs stopped selling. Sales dropped and the programmers were laid off one at a time. Meanwhile Microsoft Word kept getting more capable and quietly set the floor for what a word processor had to do, and then came the suite wars, which put a word processor on most machines at no visible cost. His word for the end of it was that they threw in the towel.

Nothing in that sequence is about the equations. ChiWriter was better than Word at the one thing it was built for and that turned out not to be the axis the market was deciding on.

~ the afterlife ~

Horstmann released the ChiWriter executable into the public domain and never published the source, so what survives is a working binary and no way to change it. Both version 3 and version 4 are downloadable from his site today. People with old documents run them under DOSBox or in a virtual machine and print to PostScript to get a PDF out, and a programmer named Dmitry Zaitsev wrote a converter in 2017 that reads the dot matrix output ChiWriter emits and turns it into a bitmap, which is a long way around but it works.

The page where you download it sits on horstmann.com underneath a list of books. Core Java is on that list, and so is Python for Everyone.

~ from a distance of twelve years ~

ChiWriter stopped being sold when I was twelve and two years before I first got online, so there is no version of this where I used it. The name reached me from the other end: by the time I was a computer engineering student, Cay Horstmann was the person whose name was on the Java book, and that is how most of my generation knows him. Finding out that the same person spent the late eighties shipping a DOS program that could draw an integral sign on a monochrome screen was the surprise in writing this one up.

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