Re: About the Admiral/was Re: ndxCards & CRIMP "obligations"

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 3541

Posted by szeoli
2005-07-25 14:35:19

Daly,

James Fallows wrote an article about Zoot for the Atlantic Monthly in August of 1997. The full file is on the Zoot Forum, but I’ve cut and paste the relevant content below, removing references to Zoot features and the shareware industry:

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, August, 1997

HEADLINE: Zoot! A new software program on the Internet shows the usefulness and flexibility of shareware; shareware

BYLINE: Fallows, James

A new software program available on the Internet shows the usefulness and flexibility of shareware.

[cut text about shareware]

Fortunately, there is an alternative to the dominance of big programs from the few major software houses: “shareware.” [cut text] But for the smaller firms that offer programs for the shareware market (and, even more, for software developers working from home offices), just a small fraction of these “disappointing” sales would mean huge success. “A benefit of being a small company is that you can afford to give your products a very long life-span,” one shareware developer recently told me. “You don’t need to maintain a huge sales volume to keep the product going. Give me a hundred thousand users and I’m in business for life.”

The speaker was Tom Davis, a thirty-one-year-old self-taught computer programmer who until four years ago lived in New York and worked in advertising. Then he and his wife moved to Vermont, where he set up a one-man company and began writing a program to do the things he wished other programs would do. His program is called Zoot, and it illustrates both the commercial and the technical possibilities of the shareware approach.

[cut text]

When Davis offered an early version of the program, he called it InfoSnatch. Last year he changed the name to Zoot, in homage to Frank Zappa and his song “Zoot Allures.” (Davis says he likes to listen to Zappa’s music while writing program code.) “Zoot” sounds artier than “InfoSnatch,” but the original name got across the idea of the program. It is an unusually effective tool for snatching information as it arrives - in E-mail messages, from Web sites, from online discussion forums or “newsgroups,” from any other Windows-based research source - and then snatch- ing again just the parts you want, when you want them, wherever they may be on your hard drive.

The way the system works is easier to demonstrate on a screen than to explain - something that is true of most programs that do something new and unusual. Its essential elements are these.

[cut text about Zoot features]

“The past few years have been kind of a blur,” Davis told me last spring, after completing a major revision of Zoot and a huge new set of help files. “If you stop programming even for a couple of weeks, you start to lose your abilities, like a foreign language. At the moment, I know every piece of the program, all the variables. There is so much information to keep track of that if you don’t keep doing it, you just lose track of what is where. That is why I have been so quick to keep developing new versions while I’m at the top of my game.” Zoot takes time to learn, and you have to be at least a little interested in computers to want to try. I love the idea of it, I use it constantly, and I am glad that shareware made it possible.

+ + +

James Fallows (“Zoot!”) is the editor of U.S. News & World Report and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.

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