Background (1980–1985) Reference Software International, Inc., was founded by Donald "Don" Emery and Bruce Wampler in 1985 in
San Francisco, California. Both Wampler and Emery were college professors when they founded RSI: Wampler at the
University of New Mexico as a professor of computer science and Emery a professor of marketing at
San Francisco State University. After graduating from the
University of Utah in around 1978, Wampler founded his first software company, Aspen Software, in
Tijeras, New Mexico, in 1979. Dictronics was in turn purchased by
Wang Laboratories; according to Wampler, "Wang bought [Aspen] and sat on it. They did nothing with it".
Success (1985–1992) In August 1985, RSI released their first product: the Random House Reference Set, a new version of Proofreader for the
IBM Personal Computer and
compatibles, revised to be a
terminate-and-stay-resident program that ran atop other word processors such as
WordStar or
WordPerfect. At the time, Reference Set was the only such program on the market that functioned like this. In spring 1987, they released Reference Set II, which allowed users to import their own words into the built-in dictionary and added a thesaurus of 300,000 words. Emery consulted
Paul Brest and Bob Jackson—professors of law at
Stanford Law School and San Francisco State respectively—for the curation of the law dictionary; and Burton Grebin—at the time the executive director of
Mount Saint Mary's Hospital—for the curation of the medical dictionary. Grammatik III received universal acclaim, with Gloria Morris of
InfoWorld calling it the apparent leader in the grammar checking field and Sandra Anderson of
Mac Home Journal calling it "hands down ... the best of the industry" six years after its release. By 1990, RSI achieved annual sales of $9.7 million. In March 1992—by which point RSI had sold 1.5 million copies of Grammatik across all versions—the company released version 5 of the program, another rewrite that updated the lexicon further and added new functions such as word redundancy detection. Around the same time, the company introduced Easy Proof, a pared-down version of Grammatik intended for novice writers, students, and family computers. In 1991, the company was engaged in a trademark dispute with Systems Compatibility Corporation (SCC) of
Chicago, Illinois, over the rights to the Software Toolkit title. Both companies had published software bundles bearing the name in the turn of the 1990s; SCC had published theirs first in 1988 and registered the trademark with the
USPTO. SCC was granted a restraining order against RSI in January 1991. The following month, RSI agreed to rename their product, preventing a protracted legal battle.
Decline and acquisition (1992–1993) By early 1992, RSI achieved annual sales of more than $13 million, employed 120 people, and had opened international offices in
London,
Belgium, and
Antwerp to sell foreign versions of Reference Set and Grammatik. However, RSI's launch of six disparate titles in the year proved problematic for the company when they failed to sell as well as they had projected, and the company laid off employees by the dozens. WordPerfect continued selling Grammatik as a standalone product for several years. ==References==