Trellix

~ the goodbye ~

Everybody knows what Dan Bricklin did in 1979. Almost nobody can tell you what he did with the nine years after 1995, and the answer is Trellix, a program for building web sites that was better thought out than most of what beat it.

VisiCalc is why the first sentence works. Bricklin and Bob Frankston wrote the first spreadsheet, sold about a million copies of it and never held a patent on the idea, which makes it the most consequential piece of software nobody owned. Trellix was the second act: a company started in Concord, Massachusetts in 1995 and formally incorporated two years later, aimed at people who had something to publish and no idea what a directory was.

The decision worth remembering is that Trellix did not edit files. You drew a map of pages with connections between them and the program generated the site out of that map, navigation included. The structure was the document and HTML was an export format. FrontPage and the rest were doing the opposite, showing you one page at a time and leaving you to work out how the pages joined up.

Distribution was the other half of the plan. Free versions shipped bundled with Dell and HP machines and inside Corel's WordPerfect, and the paid one, 2.7PA, was the version that would publish to a host of your own choosing. In 2001 the company took Lycos's Tripod site-builder technology and turned it into Trellix Web Express, a browser-based version that published as you typed. The Spanish and Portuguese editions were dropped later.

Interland announced it was buying the company in December 2002 and closed the deal early in 2003, for 4.75 million dollars in cash plus three million of its own shares and an option on six million more. Bricklin stayed on as chief technology officer until early 2004. Interland renamed itself Web.com and kept the patented parts for its own hosting products. The Trellix subsidiary was shut in March 2004.

The reason this could never have reached me is the delivery route rather than the software. It arrived free on an American computer or bundled with an American internet account, and a machine bought here came with neither. Getting a page online from this side of the world meant a free host and an upload, using whatever tool you could get hold of. A product whose distribution strategy is the bundle has quietly assumed a market, and I was not in it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what interland kept ~

The acquisition reads oddly until you look at what was retained. Interland was a hosting company with hundreds of thousands of small business customers who needed a site and would not build one, and Trellix had spent seven years on the problem of generating a coherent site from someone who cannot describe one. The technology went straight into Web.com's own products and is arguably still in there under other names.

What got closed was the company and the idea that any of this was a product you buy. Site building stopped being software you install and became a checkbox on a hosting plan, which is where it has stayed. Bricklin left within months of the deal completing.

~ the name now ~

The desktop program had one more life. The rights went to GlobalSCAPE, which sold it as CuteSITE Builder until it was discontinued on 30 June 2006, eleven years after Bricklin started the company and two years after the company stopped existing.

The word Trellix currently belongs to a cybersecurity firm assembled out of McAfee Enterprise and FireEye in 2022, which has no connection to any of this beyond the domain. That is the ordinary fate of a dead software name in a market with a finite supply of pronounceable words. Somebody with more money picks it up, and the search results close over the original within a year.

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