Icon Technology: a bit of history

In 1983 I started a company called Icon Technology in partnership with Mike Glover, an Apple Dealer in Leicester. The aim of the company was to develop software for the Apple Macintosh which had just been launched. Our first product was a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word processor called MacAuthor. As its name implies it was designed for writers and was used by a number of well known authors, such as the late Douglas Adams. I did all the software development, eventually helped by Bob Pollard, an old ICL colleague; Mike handled sales and marketing. It took us two years to bring the product to market and it did quite well, but was eventually swamped by the big bucks at Microsoft who’d ported Word to the Mac. The company eventually went on to develop word processors for Acorn’s RISC computer. I eventually left the company in 1994. Bob stayed but unfortunately passed away at the young age of fifty. I’m not sure what happened after that, but I think Mike sold the company to a third party. This link leads to a website that was alive in 2000 offering all the Acorn products for sale. I  very much doubt it exists any more. It was an interesting ten years.