7 ms·
Way back when, just after the IBM PC came out in the early 1980s, a company named Triad Computing was formed by J. Mack Adams, Roger Hunter, and Barry MacKichan
by keid 5y ago
Way back when, just after the IBM PC came out in the early 1980s, a company named Triad Computing was formed by J. Mack Adams, Roger Hunter, and Barry MacKichan, with the goal of creating a WYSIWYG technical text editing system. I was their first employee. Roger, Barry, and I did all the programming. Venture capital for this sort of thing wasn't common then; we raised operating capital by contract work (e.g. I wrote a floating-point arithmetic library for the PDP-11). After about a year our product debuted, named T^3. Shortly after there was a company name dispute and we changed ours to TCI Software Research. I could go on at some length, but that's where MacKichan Software started.
- analog31 5y agoI wrote my physics dissertation using t3. For what it did at the time, it was fantastic.
- keid 5y agoWhen I went to Oxford University in 1985 I learned that, at the time, theses in the mathematics department were required to be written with T^3. I did not advertise my background--I did not want to be tech support. I actually went back to TCI for a while after finishing my degrees there.
- low_common 5y agoWhat did J. Mack Adams do?
- keid 5y agoAs a founder/part-owner, like the other two he kicked in some money to get it started. Despite being a computer science professor he wasn't an effective real-world programmer so he in effect became a silent partner. He eventually got cold feet and his initial investment was bought out by the other two. (The other two ultimately went all-in and effectively gave up their professorships; J. Mack stayed in academia.)