Reference Software International

~ the eulogy ~

Reference Software International was founded in 1985 by Don Emery and Bruce Wampler. The sales and marketing side sat in California and the research and development side sat in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is a slightly odd shape for a software company and an entirely normal one for a company whose flagship product came from a developer in that same town.

That product was Grammatik. Aspen Software of Albuquerque had released it no later than 1981, first for the TRS-80 and then for CP/M and the IBM PC, and it was less a grammar checker than a diction and style checker, descended from the Writer's Workbench ideas that had come out of Bell Labs. Reference Software acquired it in 1985 and kept developing it for eight years, until it could find actual writing errors rather than flagging long sentences and leaving you to work out why.

On the last day of 1992, WordPerfect Corporation made an offer. The deal was signed in January 1993 and the stakeholders received about 19 million dollars; a WordPerfect Report from that spring said the acquisition would complete during the season, so the signing and the closing are a few months apart and the sources do not agree on which one is the ending. The staff went to Orem, Utah. That is where the company stops.

~ the dossier ~

~ what grammatik did ~

It is hard now to explain that a grammar checker was once a separate purchase. You went to a shop and paid for a second program whose entire job was reading what your first program had written. Grammatik ran on MS-DOS, Windows, Macintosh and Unix across its life, which is a wider spread than most productivity software of the era managed, and Reference Software sold a companion called Reference Set beside it.

What it did was argue with you. The early versions counted things and reported statistics, and the later ones under Reference Software actually parsed. Either way it produced a list, and the list was frequently wrong in ways that made people defend their own sentences out loud at a screen. That experience later got compressed into a colored underline that appears while you type, and almost nobody today has the memory of a program that waited until you asked and then told you everything at once.

~ the orem years ~

WordPerfect kept selling Grammatik as a standalone product for several years after the acquisition, then folded its functionality into the word processor itself, where it still sits. That is the gentler kind of ending. The company dissolves and the engineers relocate, while the thing they built keeps shipping under a bigger name until nobody remembers it ever had a box of its own.

All of this closed before I had a modem. I was nine, in Turkey, with dial-up still five years off, and an English grammar checker for DOS would have been useless to me twice over: wrong language, wrong decade. What I know of Grammatik is the shape it left behind in the tools that replaced it.

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