Samna

Samna was an Atlanta, Georgia, USA based computer software company that was bought by Lotus Development Corporation in November 1990 for $65 million USD.

Samna Word was a competitor in the DOS market for word processors in the late 80s. Based in large part on the look and feel of the Lanier enterprise word processing system's software, it was targeted at businesses who had used the Lanier system but were interested in moving to lower-cost PC-based word processing in the 1980s.

It had many strengths, but was regularly criticized in reviews over speed issues. Even before GUI environments like Windows, it pioneered treating the empty editing screen as a 'scratchpad', that is, a space that you could cursor into, placing a character or other entry anywhere at will on a printable page. In WordPerfect and Word, and virtually all other editors of that period, territory beyond the last character entered did not exist. When the Hercules graphics card began becoming popular, Samna Word supported a Print Preview view that was not editable, but showed font and format treatments in a kind of anticipation of full WYSIWYG. When Windows was released, Samna beat Microsoft in introducing Ami, a graphics-based word processor, in 1988, which was the first major Windows-based word processor on the market (Word for Windows 1.0 did not debut until early 1989). Windows 3.0 versions were being shipped when Lotus acquired the company, and Ami Pro was folded into Lotus's product line, first becoming Lotus Ami Pro, and then later evolving into Lotus Word Pro. The signature extension of Ami Pro files, .sam, is all that remains of Samna Corp.s' originality in developing WYSIWYG editing.