Tigera Group Inc, the Belmont, California cash shell that also included the software interests of Fortune Systems Corp – it sold the the hardware side, and also the rights to its Fortuneword word processor, to SCI Systems Corp in 1987 – has now, as reported briefly (CI No 1,083) sold substantially all of its remaining assets to Wang Laboratories Inc, giving the Lowell company an entree into the Unix software world. The main software offering of Tigera was its Wordera word processing package, developed out of Fortuneword, and this was clearly of considerable interest to Wang, because the firm paid $1.4m cash for it and assumed some liabilities. Fortuneword, Wordera, and Quadratron’s Q-Office all have a common ancestry: the original Fortuneword was written by Stephan Zimberoff, now with Quadratron. Wang has need of an equivalent word processing package to its proprietary systems, now that Unix is becoming an established operating environment on its VS line of small mainframes. According to Bob Potter of Inta Electronics, a UK Fortune dealer based in Wokingham, Surrey, Wang will now either kill off Wordera or develop the word processor as part of its office automation package. The chances are that Wang will continue with Wordera to try and attack Fortune’s considerable user base.
