Bristol Technology
| Private | |
| Founded | Ridgefield, Connecticut, USA (January 1991) |
| Headquarters | Danbury, Connecticut, United States |
| Products | Wind/U HyperHelp XPrinter TransactionVision Kenosia DataAlchemy |
Bristol Technology Inc. was a software development company founded in January 1991 by Keith, Ken, and Jean Blackwell. The company's original product idea, Wind/U, was an implementation of the Windows API (application programming interface) on non-Windows operating systems (such as UNIX). In March 2007, Bristol was purchased by the information technology corporation Hewlett-Packard for an undisclosed amount.
Bristol Technology began as a software development tools company with $100,000 of seed investment from company insiders. Throughout the 1990s, Bristol developed a series of successful cross-platform developer tools which were used by over 1,000 corporate customers. From 1992 revenue base of $500,000, Bristol revenue grew by 70% annually over the next five years; reaching the Inc. 500 and being ranked #1 on Connecticut’s Fast 50.
Windows Interface Source Environment (WISE) was a licensing program from Microsoft which allowed developers to recompile and run Windows-based applications on UNIX and Macintosh platforms. WISE Software development kits were not directly provided by Microsoft. Instead, Microsoft established partnerships to software providers such as Bristol Technology which in turn sold WISE software development kits (SDKs) to end-users.
In August 1998, Bristol filed a federal antitrust suit against Microsoft Corporation, accusing Microsoft of entangling Bristol in a charade to stifle competition from other operating systems: UNIX, Compaq's OpenVMS, and IBM's OS/390. Bristol alleged that after initially approaching Bristol in 1991 and creating a dependency for Bristol and its customers on the Windows programming interfaces, Microsoft was then seeking to end access to this technology on all but Windows operating systems.
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