Applixware

Applixware is a suite of modular applications edited by Vistasource, Inc.

Applixware was originally created by Applix, Inc.

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Applix's first office suite, introduced in 1986, was called Alis, and was marketed with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland themed promotional items. One such was a mug depicting the tea party scene from the book, with a Cheshire Cat that disappeared when the mug was filled with a hot beverage.

Alis was available for Unix workstations from Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems and others. Two site licenses were sold for Digital's VMS operating system, one to ExxonMobil and one to a brokerage in New York City.

In addition to providing a graphical office suite environment with a number of modules including graphics editor and word processing functions, very advanced for the time, Alis was distinguished by a very powerful scripting language called "ELF" (Extended Language Facility), which was capable of, for example, reading spreadsheet data, performing calculations on it, and merging results into text documents.

Applixware's next major project was called Aster*x, but was renamed to Applixware to avoid confusion with Asterix the comic book hero. During the mid-1990s, Applixware was one of a small number of WYSIWYG word processors available for Unix systems. Competitors included products from Island Software and proprietary software from the computer hardware companies.

In the late 1990s, Linux began to emerge as a desktop operating system, and Applixware was ported to Linux, becoming the first graphical office suite for the platform. Sales expanded to the point where Applixware was available across the USA as shrink-wrapped software on retail shelves at stores like CompUSA and Micro Center.

In 1999, Sun Microsystems bought a competing product, StarOffice, and turned it into the open source OpenOffice software suite. That destroyed the market for competing software, and Applixware sales declined.

Applix Inc. began to seek other software markets, leveraging the power of their scripting engine and flexible architecture to expand into business intelligence software markets such as OLAP. Applixware is often used in the industrial world as a means of developing large scale Unix and Linux applications, and glueing together other applications.

The Applixware unit of the company was renamed Vistasource, Inc. and sold to Parallax Capital Partners in 2001.

Vistasource now offers a freely available limited version for home users on Linux.

• Vistasource, Inc.
• Parallax Capital Partners
• Office Wars: Applixware and StarOffice | Linux Journal