SmartKey was the first macro processing program of its type, and the first TSR or ''terminate and stay resident'' program for PCs and

CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...

microcomputer A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (PC ...

s, their eight bit predecessors. Smartkey's "keyboard definitions" were first used with the early word processing program

WordStar WordStar is a word processor application for microcomputers. It was published by MicroPro International and originally written for the CP/M-80 operating system, and later written also for MS-DOS and other 16-bit PC OSes. Rob Barnaby was the sol ...

to change margins of screenplays. Thousands of other uses were made for the program. SmartKey was written by

Nick Hammond Nicholas David Hammond (born 7 September 1967 in Hornchurch, England) is an English former football goalkeeper. Playing career Hammond was an Arsenal apprentice, making his league début whilst on loan at Bristol Rovers in 1986, followed by ...

, an admiral in the

Royal Australian Navy The Royal Australian Navy (RAN) is the principal naval force of the Australian Defence Force (ADF). The professional head of the RAN is Chief of Navy (CN) Vice Admiral Mark Hammond AM, RAN. CN is also jointly responsible to the Minister of ...

, and published by

Software Research Technologies Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

, founded by Stan Brin and Reid H. Griffin. SmartKey received two Editor's Choice awards from ''

PC Magazine ''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and have continued to the present d ...

'' due to its tight code and powerful features, but was never able to counter the marketing muscle of its largest competitor,

SuperKey In the relational data model a superkey is a set of attributes that uniquely identifies each tuple of a relation. Because superkey values are unique, tuples with the same superkey value must also have the same non-key attribute values. That is, ...

, a product of

Borland International Borland Software Corporation was a computer technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was the development and sale of software development and software deployment products ...

. The company folded in 1987 and the product disappeared from the market soon after.

References

DOS software CP/M software {{DOS-stub