In 1989, I started work in the Compound Document Architecture team porting their library and tools to MS-DOS. There was a port to OS/2 that was nearly complete. In those days, Windows 3.0 hadn't come out yet and Windows 2.0 didn't really have that much traction as a platform. It was used for some graphical tools like PageMaker but very few people were "living there".

It quickly became apparent that the library was large enough (360k) that there wouldn't be much room in 640K to write a substantial application over it. So I started looking at DOS Extenders. We settled on PharLap and built a version that worked there that could be used by the document converter library and third-party document converters. Meanwhile I tried to figure out what to use for our document viewer and other tools. Windows 2.0 was the obvious choice, but it would require a substantial reworking of our memory management to deal with double-dereference.

As it happened, talking with other groups working on the platform, I discovered that the Digital group in Littleton had a beta version of Windows 3.0. I quickly arranged to be a beta site and developed and delivered a complete version of the library and the tools for the Windows 3.0 platform shortly after it released.

The "Compound Document Architecture for MS-DOS and MS-Windows" had two point releases and was used by other Digital products. We were in the midst of working on image library memory management enhancements that would have made the library a viable imaging solution when the entire development was sold to a German company as a part of Digital's pare-down.