'Way back when, just after the IBM PC came out in the early 1980s, a
company named Triad Computing was formed by J. Mack Adams, Roger
Hunter, and Barry MacKichan, with the goal of creating a WYSIWYG
technical text editing system. I was their first employee. Roger,
Barry, and I did all the programming.
'Venture capital for this sort of thing wasn't common then; we
raised operating capital by contract work (e.g. I wrote a
floating-point arithmetic library for the PDP-11). After about a
year our product debuted, named T^3. Shortly after there was a
company name dispute and we changed ours to TCI Software Research. I
could go on at some length, but that's where MacKichan Software
started. …
'As a founder/part-owner, like the other two he [J. Mack Adams]
kicked in some money to get it started. Despite being a computer
science professor he wasn't an effective real-world programmer so he
in effect became a silent partner. He eventually got cold feet and
his initial investment was bought out by the other two. (The other
two ultimately went all-in and effectively gave up their
professorships; J. Mack stayed in academia.)
'When I went to Oxford University in 1985 I learned that, at the
time, theses in the mathematics department were required to be
written with T^3. I did not advertise my background--I did not want
to be tech support. I actually went back to TCI for a while after
finishing my degrees there.'
I wish this guy would write a memoir or something--judging from his
comments he can communicate by an eloquent & concise prose.