Albuquerque Journal du lieu suivant : Albuquerque, New Mexico • Page 41

It 111 Ifll III 11 II igilfT BUSINESS OUTLOOK MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1994 in tor '1 r. "We helped people improve their writing. Our company helped establish grammar-checking as an important part of the writing process in computers." Bruce Wampler in computer science room at the University of New Mexico i 7" fc -r a NATASHA LANETHE ASSOCIATED PRESS ioneering Grammar Software Born at Home By Nancy Walz THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 1 5 4', i A However, Grammatik continued to lead the field. "I think, hands down, it's the best in the industry and has been for a number of years," says Sandra Anderson, editor-in-chief of Mac Home Journal published in San Francisco. Reference Software was sold to WordPerfect for $19 million on the last day of 1992.

Reference at the time employed 120 people in offices in the United States, London and Antwerp, Belgium, where foreign-language versions of Grammatik are made. The company's 1992 sales were $14 million. "Grammatik was consistently in the top 10 sellers of any business software," Wampler says. WordPerfect, whose word processors for DOS, Windows and Macintosh include Grammatik, has continued to upgrade the technology and recently released Grammatik 6. The program proofreads documents for errors in grammar, style, usage, punctuation and spelling.

It explains errors, gives advice and grammatical rules, suggests replacements and can automatically rewrite sentences. Twenty-four developers in the Albuquerque office produce Grammatik, the Random House Unabridged Dictionary on CD-ROM, and Random House Webster's college edition and school and office dictionaries. "If it involves language, it comes from here," says developer Marni Elci. Wampler is teaching again at UNM and writing about computer programming. "The industry has really changed," he says.

"There's not much room left for garage development. It's gotten so sophisticated it takes teams to launch any product with any hope of success." Wampler sees his biggest accomplishment as having an impact on the way people use language. "We helped people improve their writing," he says. "Our company helped establish grammar-checking as an important part of the writing process in computers. "It feels good to have done that." An Albuquerque computer scientist tinkering at home created groundbreaking personal computer software that whips writing into shape.

"I was a typical garage software designer," says Bruce Wampler. Wampler, working through two companies over 12 years, developed Grammatik, the first grammar- and style-checking software for PCs. Grammatik is the world's best-selling grammar-checker with 5 million copies sold since its debut in 1981. WordPerfect a leading producer of word-processing and business software, bought Wampler's company in late 1992. An office in Albuquerque acts as the linguistic and writing tools development division of WordPerfect, which recently was acquired by Novell the software giant in Provo, Utah.

Wampler, exposed to computer writing tools in the late 1970s while working on his doctoral dissertation on a main frame computer at the University of Utah. He says his inspiration was Writer's Workbench from "the very first style analysis program intended for writers developed at Bell Labs in 1978 79." However, it worked on a main frame in a collection of programs, and Wampler wanted a writing helper in a single program for his home computer. He left his job as a computer scientist at Sandia National Laboratories and formed Aspen Software in 1979, licensing the right to use versions of the Random House dictionaries. He developed one of the early spell-checkers, the Random House Proofreader, that year. "It was very innovative for the time," Wampler says.

"We set trends now being caught up with, that is, using trademark or brand-name content." He began working on Grammatik in 1980. It hit the market in 1981 as a punctuation-and style-checker. "It accomplished its task, which was writ- x-7- Jtm -f i ii ,.,1., i m.nii I Marnl Elcl explains a computer program In her office in Albuquerque. The program flags words that might be offensive. It's sort of PC for PCs politically correct for personal computers.

ing improvement," Wampler says. Aspen had about a dozen employees and had sold 80,000 units of its Proofreader and Grammatik programs when it was bought by Wang Labs of Lowell, in 1983. Wampler moved on to teach computer science at the University of New Mexico. "Wang bought it and sat on it," Wampler says. "They did nothing with it." Wampler, through a small company in California that had grandfather rights to the software, licensed back the rights to Random House words and Grammatik from Wang in 1985.

By then, computer technology had advanced, and Wampler formed a new company, Reference Software International, which developed a new generajjon grammar-checker. The development office was in Albuquerque, and marketing and sales were handled in San Francisco. Grammatik 3 was released in 1987. "It really was the first that did true 'grammar-checking subject, verb agreement, parts of speech," Wampler says. Other companies were developing similar software at the same time, and several grammar-checkers were on the market by 1989..