I was a little sorry to see that Trellix was shut down as of the 15th. Really you could tell for years that it wasn’t going to make it, but longtime readers of this blog might remember that the original publishing system for it was the first version of the Trellix web publisher, and even before it could publish to the web I really liked Trellix. It came out somewhere around 1994-1995 and was initially a novel text editor that combined some notions of nonlinear/hypertext editing with aspects of powerpoint style presentation stuff. I loved the original PC only version. When they made absolutely no dent in MS Word’s dominance of word processing the tool morphed into a desktop web publishing tool geared towards the novice user or someone who wanted ease of use over features. When that didn’t work out the sold that product to Globalscape, where it lives on as CuteSite Builder. Unfortunately they haven’t been updating it for years and it’s basically not worth much now. Meanwhile Trellix the company worked as a middleware vendor selling to web hosting companies, taking some of the ideas from the original Trellix and incorporating them in a browser-based web content editor. They seemed to be doing ok, selling their services to big hosting companies like Tripod and at one point bailing out Blogger, but I guess that business plan didn’t work out either and they were bought out by another hosting company, which let the last of the original Trellix staff go a couple of weeks ago.

It’s really a shame. Trellix had some interesting ideas about how to approach data management and publishing in the original Trellix app, and with Dan Bricklin behind it (he developed the first commercially successful spreadsheet – Visicalc – among other things) it seemed like they had they potential to build an interesting and useful new toolset.

If anyone knows how to acquire a copy of the original Trellix word processor I’d be interested. I watch ebay for it and while the website stuff shows up regularly, I’ve never caught the original Trellix for sale.

If you’re interested in the subject, Dan Bricklin himself keeps a weblog which he updates regularly and which has a lot of background material on the software he’s worked on and the companies he’s been involved with.