Pluma

Pluma is a shareware word processor.

History
The original programmer speaking: Pluma was the result of three things: my frustration at the time (early 1990s) with the state of word processors in general, my discovery of the Adobe Type Manager in OS/2 1.3, and my tendency to write what I need for myself rather than buying something off the shelf.

At the time, the only WYSIWYG word processor I knew of out there was Samna Ami, which was later acquired by Lotus and rebranded. That, however, worked only on Windows 2.11, and apart from how badly it worked (unless one happened to own a PostScript printer), I was in a state of opposition to Microsoft in those days. I had just got done spending a lot of money on hardware, software and documentation to learn to program with OS/2, and Microsoft dumped it and suggested we should buy everything new... for Windoze. For what was, at the time, a vastly inferior (though nicer looking) operating system. So I was quite ticked with Microsoft, and remained so until IBM pretty much abandoned normal people on OS/2 after Y2K.

Anyway, it took only a few days to cobble something useful together. After that, it was a matter of adding bells and whistles over time. After migrating the program to OS/2 2.0 and 32-bit C++, I released a version as shareware in early 1994, and in the end sold all of two dozen copies at US$30 apiece.

Sometime in early 1995, I got a note from Sams Books, which was putting together the book "OS/2 Unleashed". They wanted permission to include a copy of Pluma on the CD included with the book. Permission granted, no problem.

The original name, "Pluma" was borrowed from Spanish, my second language. In that language, that word means both "plume" and "pen". In late 1995 I received a "cease and desist" letter from a company in Arizona I'd never heard of, Pluma Software, and as a result had to change the name. See also: Escriba

Versions
Renamed to Escriba
 * 1.00 (1994-03-18)
 * 1.01 (1994-03-21)
 * 1.02 (1994-04-01)
 * 1.03 (1994-04-25)
 * 1.04 (1994-05-09)
 * 1.05 (1994-05-11)
 * 1.06 (1994-05-12)
 * 1.07 (1994-05-20)
 * 1.08 (1994-05-27)
 * 1.09 (1994-06-17)
 * 1.10 (1994-07-08)
 * 1.11 (1994-07-20)
 * 1.12 (1994-09-13)

Author

 * Rick Papo