🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Dec21.185321.5609@julietbnc@csn.org> ref@julietbnc@csn.org (Randy Fay) writes:
>Years ago I used and loved a text formatter called Scribble. I believe
>it had an earlier life associated with EMACS. I also believe it's
>related to a formatter called Scribe.

Scribe was the dissertation project of Brian Reid.  He sold the
commercial rights to some company which charges several kilobucks for
it.

Mince (Mince Is Not Complete Emacs) and Scribble were a text editor and
formatter, based on Emacs and Scribe, from a company called Mark of the
Unicorn.  They were originally offered for CP/M-80, which should date
it.  (PerfectWord, bundled with the Kaypro CP/M systems, was a
Mince/Scribble bundle or integration.)  Mark of the Unicorn developed
MS-DOS versions, and then a more integrated package called Final Word.

The rights to Final Word were bought by a small (:-) software publisher
in California named Borland.  (This was about the same time they bought
the rights to Paradox and Wizard C.)  Several significant improvements
later, Borland announced (and eventually released) their word
processor, Sprint.  The big selling point of Sprint was its ability to
mimic the user interfaces of other word processors, such as WordStar,
WordPerfect, and Microsoft Word.

Sprint can still be found for sale in various places.  Borland never
did very well with it, and offers somewhat limited support for it.

That's what's left of Scribble.  I think Scribe is still for sale.
Back in the early days of GNU Emacs, someone had volunteered to produce
a copylefted version of Scribe, just as Richard Stallman et. al. did
with Emacs.  I heard it was coming Real Soon Now for a long time.  I
never did hear if anything was distributed.  (I'm not a GeNiUs about
what the GNU folks put out.)

Sharon Murrel of Bell Labs research wrote a Scribe-like formatter
called monk.  This may be part of the Documenter's Workbench source
product from UNIX Systems Laboratories (note it's written in C++, not
C).  That doesn't necessarily mean it's included in binary DWB
distributions from various vendors.


Paul S. R. Chisholm, AT&T Bell Laboratories, paul.s.r.chisholm@att.com
att!sewer!psrc, psrc@sewer.att.com, AT&T Mail !psrchisholm
I'm not speaking for the company, I'm just speaking my mind.

Borland, CP/M, Documenter's Workbench, Emacs (?), Final Word, GNU (?),
Kaypro, MS-DOS, Mark of the Unicorn, Microsoft, Mince, Paradox,
PerfectWord, Scribble, Scribe, Sprint, UNIX, Wizard C, WordPerfect, and
WordStar are trademarks or registered trademarks of various
organizations, some of them defunct.