Yet another promising Xerox Corp venture has bitten the dust with the demise of Envos Corp last week. The Mountain View, California-based company was spun off from the ill-fated Xerox Artificial Intelligence Systems Business Unit in August last year, (CI No 1,001). Envos was majority-owned by the employees, with Xerox and its affiliate Rank Xerox Ltd holding minority stakes. Xerox has assumed responsibility for all Envos products, but hasn’t decided whether to sell them off to other companies or take them back on board itself. Ironically, Envos had just announced new hypertext technology extending into the arena of analysis, with integrated tools that support information capture, organisation and communication. The Envos Notecards include text and graphics editors, and overlapping windows for viewing multiple Notecards. Development versions of the cards use Medley – a Lisp offshoot, for customising specific applications. Both versions of the card are supported on Sun-3 and Sun-4 workstations.
