“I can’t think of many commercial software packages that
have been continuously evolving since the early days of the
personal computer industry. Visual SlickEdit, MicroEdge’s
award-winning programmer’s editor-cum-development environment, was
initially released in 1988 as a DOS and OS/2 character-mode
editor. This was when IBM was marketing text-mode-only OS/2 as
“a better DOS than DOS.”
“Clark Maurer, currently CTO of MicroEdge and still active in
SlickEdit development, was employed at IBM’s Watson research lab.
He was one of the developers of the legendary internal IBM editor
E; this experience enabled him to quit IBM and begin development of
the first SlickEdit releases.”
“Having installed an earlier version of SlickEdit from floppy
disks a couple of years ago, I anticipated no problems installing
version 5.0 from CD-ROM. A GUI installation interface makes the
process even easier than before, but I ended up with an installed
editor which wouldn’t even start up. After an exchange of e-mail
and phone calls with MicroEdge’s responsive and helpful service
personnel, I still couldn’t get it to work. I e-mailed a core-dump
file to MicroEdge; it seems there were some compatibility problems
with the particular version of Debian I’ve been running, which
admittedly is the “unstable” release. The support staff even went
so far as to install Debian 2.0 on one of their test-bed machines,
and reported that SlickEdit started up just fine. Since there
didn’t seem to be any immediate solution to this problem, I
installed SuSE Linux on a spare partition and soon had a functional
editor. I imagine this particular incompatibility hadn’t come to
light before due to the nature of SlickEdit’s normal user base,
which probably uses older and more proven versions of Linux.”