Ami was the name of a word processing program developed and marketed by Samna 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 sold to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2-3 sprea ...

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 processor program, word processing program 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 platf ...

and WordPerfect Corporation's

WordPerfect WordPerfect (WP) is a word processing application, now owned by Alludo, with a long history on multiple personal computer platforms. At the height of its popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the market leader of word processors, disp ...

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 International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

, the present owner of the Lotus brand, renamed it Lotus Word Pro.

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 ...

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 a maximum of 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform la ...

version for

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

. 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