The most famous software company to come out of Russia so far is Paragraph International of Moscow, the creator of the handwriting recognition alogorithms that Apple Computer Inc is using in its Newton family of handheld devices, and the Chigaco Tribune has been looking into the company. Russian companies have the technical skills, but they don’t have the management skills, Ted Lewis, Soviet business liaison for the University of San Francisco told the Tribune. As a result, An ideal marriage for an international company like Paragraph is to have an Apple or a Sun, which has the marketing expertise, marry up with a company that has the technical expertise, he says. Paragraph founder Stepan Pachikov, who formed the company only four years ago, was booted out of college twice by the KGB, and stumbled across his first computer while working as a concierge at a hotel for foreigners in Moscow, the Trib says. He had a PhD in mathematics, but needed to supplement his vestigial income as a scientist by working at the hotel. The story goes that a guest brought in a personal computer and asked if Pachikov could assemble it. After reading the manuals, he set it up – and in return, asked for a subscription to Byte magazine. Four years later, while working at the National Academy of Science, he attended an artificial intelligence seminar that came up with a list of some 20 potential projects.
Object-oriented technology
Pachikov opted for handwriting recognition, largely because the technology did not need a lot of expensive equipment. But the real break with the prevailing ethos was to form a commercial company capable of bringing the technology to the market: he wanted the company to be independent of the government, to be self-financing and to be organised on a research and development model akin to AT&T Co’s Bell Laboratories. Two years later he was able to visit the US and did the rounds of the host of companies in Silicon Valley, soon signing his first licensing agreement with Apple (CI No 1,832). The essence of our relationship with Apple is they demonstrated two years ago that they trusted us and our technology, says Pachikov. Adding Paragraph’s recognition technology will give us the most functional, most usable product in the emerging category of personal digital assistants, an Apple executive has said, and word out of Cambridge, where Advanced RISC Machines Ltd designs the processors used in the Newton, is that the handwriting recognition software in Newton is very impressive indeed. Observers say that because engineers in the former Soviet Union did not have access to computers, they were forced to dwell on blackboard sciences, the mathematics and theory behind computer programming, giving them an intimacy with algorithms found in few other countries except perhaps India – and suggests that they will have a very important contribution to make in the advance of object-oriented technology: because of the inherent overhead imposed by an object-oriented framework, core object software is going to have to be much more efficiently and ingeniously written to be successful.
