Mansfield Software Group

A company founded in 1986 by Kevin J. Kearney and based in Storrs-Mansfield, in Connecticut, USA. Sold the XEDIT compatible KEDIT text editor but prior to the founding of the company Mr Kearney had been selling KEDIT for DOS as a sole trader since 1983, but an OS/2 version of the editor added not long after MSG was founded. The company also sold the Personal REXX interpreter developed by Charles Daney of Quercus Systems, but the KEXX interpreter used in the KEDIT editor appears to be a simplified version of Personal REXX.

Mansfield staff programmer Nico Mak hit the jackpot a few years later when his part time shareware project WinZip became the must-have utility for Microsoft Windows, but WinZip was simply the Info-Zip archiver packaged in a very simple windows shell. Mr Mak formed the Nick Mak Computing company (later renamed Winzip Computing) around the WinZip business and most of the personnel involved with Mansfield Software Group appear to have become involved with WinZip, even founder Kevin Kearney was consulting for WinZip for a number of years and the two companies shared an address for a time.

Although Mansfield did manage to ship a Windows version of KEDIT, new releases were notably fewer and further apart than they had been before and shortly after the WinZip company was sold in 2006, Mansfield Software Group announced that it would gradually wind down its operations with all sales of KEDIT to cease in 2009, except for companies that already had licences, although they would carry on releasing maintenance releases to make the program functional with newer versions of MS Windows and to quash any found bugs.

In 2014 the proprietors of the company announced that they would finally be winding the company down all sales of KEDIT would be discontinued. In December 2015 the company somewhat out of the blue announced that even though the editor was still in maintenance mode, they would start selling KEDIT licences again to anyone that wanted them and not just prior customers, at the same time the company announced that the maintenance and support would continue until 2017 at the least and a new release 1.6.1 of the product had been made available that fixed some Windows 8 & 10 related bugs.

Products

 * KEDIT - XEDIT compatible text editor for OS/2, DOS and Microsoft Windows
 * Personal REXX - REXX interpreter for OS/2 and DOS.

Links

 * Mansfield Software Group homepage

Known personnel

 * Kevin J. Kearney
 * Nico Mak
 * Sara J. Rogers