a little MORE history

[Frank Demmler]

This is my first post, but I've been lurking for a long time.

Like several people on this list, I went with OO when I was looking for 
a OS X outliner to replace my trusty MORE.

IMHO, being an outliner tool zealot, but not a programmer or scripter, 
I find OO to be an interesting work in process, but having used MORE 
from its ThinkTank days (I bought my first Mac in June 1984; and 
remember how happy I was to pay $1100 for a 10MB hard drive in 1986, I 
think [but that's another story]).

In any event, my recollection is that Symantec went on an acquisition 
spree in the late 1980s, trying to corner the Mac utilities market.  
Along the line it acquired MORE (or whatever the parent company was).  
BTW, Dave Winer was the founder.  He's doing something in the blog 
world these days, I believe.

Symantec tried to position MORE as a presentation tool, competing 
against PowerPoint and an Adobe product (I think) whose name I forget.  
The combination of that misguided strategy and the amazing series of 
terrible decisions by Apple, threatening its viability, Symantec either 
withdrew from the Mac market, or at least went dormant.  If I remember 
correctly, MORE 3.1 was released in 1991, and that was that.

I assume that Symantec still "owns" the product (name, source code, 
etc.).

If someone actually "ported" MORE to work in Jaguar, I'd buy it 
tomorrow.  If someone "ported" it to Jaguar, and took advantage of 
Jaguar features, I'd jump for joy.

Not being a programmer, if Symantec would sell, give, license MORE to 
Omni, I would strongly encourage you to do that.  As has been cited 
multiple times, MORE does some things so elegantly and intuitively, 
that I continue to be amazed that others (such as Omni) hasn't just 
"borrowed" many of those features.  Considering the age of the code and 
the resultant functionality, I've got to believe that someone could 
create a MORE on steroids and would sweep up a large portion of the 
market.

I'm probably showing my age with these comments.  Perhaps my 
familiarity with MORE makes it seem elegant and intuitive to me, and 
others would find it as difficult to adopt as I have found OO.

Whether my representation of history is accurate, or a myth that has 
evolved in my mind, I can't tell you.  I think it's pretty accurate.

Frank Demmler
frank at future-fund.com
(412) 343-5417 phone
(412) 344-2450 fax
www.future-fund.com