Applixware

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

Applixware was originally created by Applix, Inc..

Applix's first office suite, introduced in 1986, was called Alis, and was marketed with Alice 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 Exxon and one to a brokerage in New York City.

In addition to providing a graphical office suite environment with a number of modules including word processing functions, very advanced for the time, Alis was distinguished by a very powerful scripting language called "ELF", 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 Microcenter.

A subset of Applixware modules for Linux was originally developed by Applix upon request from Red Hat, who sold the package for $500. This price was reduced to $200 in October 1996, and, by 2000, during the dotcom bubble, the Applixware Words word processor was available for $50 in GTK toolkit versions (Applixware 5.0 and Anyware 2.2). These offers (and the GTK toolkit) were subsequently abandoned when the dotcom bubble burst, and priority was given back to versions aimed at Vistasource's core customers in financial, defense and government markets.

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