Ami was the name of a word processing program developed and marketed by

Samna Samna was a competitor to WordStar and MultiMate in the DOS market for word processors in the 1980s. Based in large part on the look and feel of the Lanier enterprise word processing system's software, Samna was targeted at businesses who had use ...

in the late 1980s, which was later purchased by

Lotus Software Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2- ...

in 1990.Samna Bundles Ami With Its Unix-Based Samna IV
by Martin Marshall, page 33, 21 Nov 1988, InfoWorld Shortly after its introduction, the name of the program was changed to "Ami Pro". Ami Pro was a significant competitor to

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms includin ...

and WordPerfect Corporation's WordPerfect during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The developers of Ami Pro introduced a number of innovations in Ami Pro that were later adopted by other word processors. At the time that Ami Pro was introduced, the word processing market was dominated by WordPerfect. Both Ami Pro and Microsoft Word made inroads into WordPerfect's market share. Eventually Microsoft Word overtook WordPerfect as the dominant player and Ami Pro was discontinued. IBM, the present owner of the Lotus brand, renamed it

Lotus Word Pro Lotus Word Pro is a word processor produced by IBM's Lotus Software group for use on Microsoft Windows-compatible computers and on IBM OS/2 Warp. Word Pro can be obtained as part of the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Word Pro was based upon Ami ...

Overview

The

16-bit 16-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 16-bit microprocessors. A 16-bit register can store 216 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 16 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two mos ...

Ami Pro had significant limitations, most notably that it was unable to display the bottom of one page and the top of the next at the same time. The limitations were so severe that Lotus completely re-wrote the program from scratch when developing the

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32-bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calculation ...

version for

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...

. The 16-bit Ami Pro had significant benefits, too. It was possible to easily control formatting with paragraph styles that were set with function keys, and were locked in for the whole paragraph. (They were not erased with the deletion of the last character of the paragraph as they are with Microsoft Word.) Ami Pro used .SAM as its file extension, while Lotus Word Pro used .LWP.

References

External links

Official website
(archived)

Word processors {{WordProcessor-stub