Re: Did Claris buy TimeOut QuickSpell from Beagle Bros?

[Warren Ernst <wernst@gmail.com>]

On Dec 22, 7:35 am, magnusfalkirk <dean.pha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Dec 22, 12:57 am, slickrcbdn...@gmail.com wrote:
>
>
>
> > I was just having a conversation about how Word Processors have
> > changed since the 1980s and spell check being a major part of it. I
> > was talking about AppleWorks. I remember that when I upgraded from AW
> > 2.1 to version 3.0, the new version had a built-in spell checker that
> > looked almost identical to TimeOut Quickspell. It seemed a little more
> > efficient than QuickSpell, but otherwise looked identical.
>
> > Did Claris buy the source code from Beagle Bros? I don't recall ever
> > seeing any articles about it, but in that time frame my only real
> > sources for news in the computing world was InCider/A+ magazine and
> > the BRCC newsletter.
>
> > Just curious, I probably should have posted this question in the mid
> > '90s when I was more active on this group, but for some reason I never
> > thought of it while at a computer that I could use to access Usenet.
>
> > oh, to e-mail me, drop the news from my address.
>
> If you look at the startup screen for Appleworks v3.0 it states
> "enhanced by Alan Bird, Randy Brandt and Rob Renstrom". Also at the
> bottom it says "Portions copyright Claris Corp., Alan Bird and Beagle
> Bros, Inc.". If I remember right Claris went to Beagle Bros and asked
> for help with version 3 of Appleworks and one of the major things they
> did was to make Timeout Quickspell a standard part of Appleworks.
>
> Just my two cents worth,
> Dean

Yup, that's basically what happened.

As I recall, Claris originally wanted a relatively minor bug-fixing
update, and they went to Beagle's programmers because of their
extensive knowledge of the internals of AppleWorks, which they gained
from creating UltraMacros and TimeOut.

It eventually morphed into a huge re-write that dramatically cleaned
up the code, one of the benefits of which was that it would be easier
to make new modules. That was no coincidence.

Anyway, a version of QuickSpell did indeed make it into AppleWorks 3.
I seem to recall that QuickSpell proper had a few more options than
the built-in version, and the 3.5" disk version of QuickSpell's
dictionary had something like 4 times the words as the 5.25" disk
version that came with AppleWorks 3.

It was a glorious time to be working for Beagle Bros, I tell you.

Virtually,
Warren Ernst
(former Beagle Bros tech support)