@pernia @meeper yeah it was, 90 days or something and then you had to buy the software. eventually they opted for a more conventional shrinkwrap model but by that time it was kind of already on the out and out. stallman for his part decided to write texinfo as a sort of scribe++ with hypertext capabilities but it got about as much adoption as you'd expect any stallman thing to get outside of emacs, gcc, and gdb. also scott burson (while he was employed at mark of the unicorn, now famous for making midi gear and digital audio workstations) made a clone of it for micros called scribble alongside a rough emacs clone called mince and both of those sold rather well and had a couple of commercial descendants in the form of perfectwriter and borland sprint.