Talk:WordUp (program)

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Companion software produced by Neocept that integrated with WordUp

I am Shelby Moore (III), the founder of Neocept Inc (Camarillo, CA), the original creator and co-author.

You may want to add a section for the companion software Neocept Inc released, FONTZ! and Turbojet.

FONTZ! may have also shipped with some additional fonts for use with GEM/GDOS programs.

https://www.atarimania.com/st/files/fontz_1_11_neocept_inc_flyer.pdf

https://www.atarimagazines.com/st-log/issue30/10_1_ST_NEWS_HP_PRINTER_DRIVERS.php

http://www.digitpress.com/library/magazines/atari_explorer/atari_explorer_julaug88.pdf#page13

I created the first GEM/GDOS printer driver product TurboJet, which employed a very clever (afair somewhat reverse-engineered) run-length encoding (RLE) to drastically speed up laser printing when the entire page was an image as was the case for WordUp. This drastically improved the utility of WordUp for desktop publishing by addressing the complaints about slow printing. Afair, we had to reverse engineer some facets of GDOS and/or the HP Laserjet interface. I believe Turbojet worked with and sped up some other important desktop publishing software such as Timeworks Publisher which was an Atari ST clone of Ventura Publisher (Corel Ventura). Coincidentally I moved on to work for Fractal Design Corp and my first task was to fix their printer drivers for the FDC Painter which later became Corel Painter (not Paint).

http://relativisticobserver.blogspot.com/2012/01/illustrated-evolution-of-painter-ui.html (c.f. my name on the Painter 3 and was also on Painter X2 About screens)

IOW, I envisioned WordUp as participating in the nacent desktop publishing segment for which Ventura Publisher and Aldus Pagemaker were more widely known.

The main reason Wordup did not continue beyond version 3 is that Atari started producing consumer electronics and I (correctly) sensed the future of the ST was doomed. I went into a personal crisis coupled with a sabbatical overseas at age 26 in 1990, after shutting it down. I remember taking my frustration out by encouraging/goading Mike to enjoin me in taking axes to our desks. I believe Mike Fulton tried to interface with the community unpaid for a while after that. Mike I believed worked in developer relations for the Sony Playstation for a while after that. I worked for FDC, then created CoolPage (which had about a million downloads and ~1% Internet websites share at the turn of the century according to Altavista). I did not create anything after CoolPage, except making contributions behinds the scenes to the nascent blockchain industry from 2013. Even if all of this does not get added to the main page, I leave it here for former WordUp users who want to know some of the behind the scenes history.

Note WordUp 3.0 was also distributed in the UK (and Europe) by HB Marketing (who actually flew to Camarillo, CA to meet with me) and if I remember correctly they had paid royalties for several thousand units (8000 units?).

I had been exposed to MacWrite at its initial release as I was working as a research lab assistant intern at Rockwell International Science Center down the street from my father's (Shelby Moore Jr's) house on 908 Camino dos Rios, Thousand Oaks, CA (we no longer live there). My father was West Coast Divison Head Atty for Exxon Corporation in Thousand Oaks. My father had MSWord for the PC for his legal work, which was no WYSIWYG when I was first exposed to it. So this was my inspiration to produce WordUp with the initial work down in assembly language from my bedroom. I graduated to the self-taught (in a couple of days) C language for WordUp 3.0 and was much more productive with it, though the majority of WordUp was coded in 68000 assembler.

Also the current article fails to mention that WordUp 3.0 included a 116,000 (upgradable to 256,000) word spell checker and 477,000 (upgradable to 1.4 million) word thesaurus licensed from Proximity/Merriam-Webster! As well as numerous other improvements including configurable auto-hyphenation, multiple columns, boxes & lines, more fonts. Proof: https://www.atarimania.com/st/boxes/hi_res/word_up_3_neocept_inc_d7_2.jpg

(I thought we addressed automatic index generation, because I am nearly certain we used that for the huge WordUp manual which the article correctly states was produced with WordUp), but I can’t find automatic indexing mentioned on the aforementioned sleeve)

I can recommend some additional resources as follows. Note I wrote all the ad-copy for version 3.0, including term paper and those were my actual eye glasses and Atari ST in the image.

https://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari-st-wordup_27783.html (c.f. scans of the outer physical box sleeve, ad copy and floppy disk set for version 3.0)

https://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari-st-wordup_30262.html (mentions our overseas licensee HB Marketing)

https://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari-st-wordup_23365.html Someone should grab an image off of eBay of the software and packaging for posterity.

Shelbymooreiii (talk) 13:20, 3 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]