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FinalWord


Sprint is a text-based word processor for MS-DOS, first published by Borland in 1987.

Sprint originally appeared as the "FinalWord" application, developed by Jason Linhart, Craig Finseth, Scott Layson Burson, Brian Hess, and Bill Spitzak at Mark of the Unicorn - a company (headquartered in Cambridge, MA) which is now better known for its music software products. At the time MOTU sold MINCE and SCRIBBLE, a text editor package based on Emacs. As The FinalWord, the package met with some success: for example, the manuals of the Lotus software package were written on it, as was Marvin Minsky's book The Society of Mind.

FinalWord II was renamed Sprint when it was acquired by Borland, which added a new user interface, new manuals, and features to the application. The editor speed was considered blazing at the time, running with no delays on machines as slow as 8 megahertz.

This was the time of European development for Borland: Sidekick and Turbo Pascal had been founded in Denmark; and the management of the European subsidiary comprised former Micropro France managers (Micropro was at the time the world leader in Word processing software with the famous WordStar line-up. They had success with the launch of WordStar 2000 - the first word processor package with a spelling dictionary in French.)

This is why the development and marketing of the product was conducted in France. Sprint is one of the very few major products from an American software publisher that had a French version shipped before the American version.

Sprint v1.0 shipped in France with notable initial success, capturing a 30 percent market share and getting the jump on competing word processors. MicroPro was weakening with old Wordstar products and still-new WordStar 2000; WordPerfect was having problems with the translation and the user interface; and MS-Word was a decent but less polished or powerful product, and was also DOS and text-based.


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