| Sound Ideas Of America, Inc. was founded in 1987 to develop and market UNIX utilities for the Tandy 6000 Xenix computer, one of the very first "personal" multiuser computers.
As technology quickly marched forward (and the bills piled up), Sound Ideas expanded its business to include assembling and shipping "state-of-the-art" 386 (and later 486) systems completely configured to each Tandy 6000 customer's requirements - including new versions of all software packages, conversion programs, cables and more - down to the last adapter. The customer only needed to place the new system next to the 6000, connect the two, run a few conversion programs and they were up and running on a completely new system running SCO Xenix. This unique service was very successful for Sound Ideas for a few years.
One small feature offered by these custom systems was a menu that enabled access to the standard UNIX system e-mail program. After trying this option, a number of customers complained about the clumsiness of the standard UNIX e-mail interface and asked about the availability of a more user-friendly e-mail program for UNIX.
A light bulb went on at Sound Ideas.
In 1990, Sound Ideas developed its first commercial application: the FineLine Message Manager (originally called "Mister Mailman"). This UNIX-based e-mail program enabled terminal users to send and receive e-mail and telephone messages between one another and later, to schedule personal and shared appointments. Note that this was years before Internet e-mail was available to the masses.
In early 1996, Sound Ideas released version 5 of the FineLine Message Manager package, just as Internet e-mail became widely available and extremely popular. The explosion of Internet e-mail in the workplace combined with the timely release of an Internet-friendly UNIX-based e-mail program proved a winning combination for Sound Ideas. Last we checked, there were over 60,000 users who read their e-mail each day with our FineLine Message Manager. Our current release is version 6 which was completely re-written in 2000 to become a centralized UNIX e-mail package with both character-based and Windows PC interfaces.
Sound Ideas forged into new directions in 2003 by releasing of a new slate of products that focus on adding graphical capabilities to UNIX applications using the UNIX/PC communication technology built in-house over the years (starting with v6 of the Message Manager).
Our growing number of UNIX products now include digital signature capture; PDF file creation on UNIX; electronic document creation, storage and retrieval on UNIX; web form data exchange with UNIX; UNIX/PC file transfer and execution; PDA data exchange with UNIX, and more.
Our most exciting new release is FineLine Reface, which enables creating a true Windows interface to standard character-based UNIX/Linux software.
And more new products are on the way!
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