Borland International Inc, the London-listed, Scotts Valley, California-based microcomputer software company founded by Frenchman Philippe Kahn, has announced Sprint, a word processing engine with automatic incremental back-up, for delivery in the second half of this year. Designed by the team that wrote PerfectWriter and FinalWord for Mark Of The Unicorn, Sprint will come with its own simple set of commands, and the ability to emulate the command sets of popular word processing packages such as Wordstar, Wordperfect, Multimate and Xywrite. Users will also be able to program their own set of instructions. The menu-based package supports up to 24 open files, six horizontal windows, fast scrolling – at the London demonstration on Thursday, the cursor took less than three seconds to jump through a file containing 11,000 lines, approximately 600Kb – and common character fonts of most output devices from dot matrix printers to photo typesetting equipment. Also included is Postscript desktop publishing language support and a dynamic key facility for designing macros. The automatic back-up saves between keystrokes in background mode and provides full recovery facilities in the event of a system failure. The time between back-ups can be specified by the user. Sprint, which is already on test at 100 sites, will cost $195.
