Sprint, originally known as The FinalWord application, is developed by Jason Linhart, Craig Finseth, Scott Layson Burson, Brian Hess, and Bill Spitzak at Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU) - a company (headquartered in Cambridge, MA) which is now better known for its music software products.
FinalWord II was renamed to Sprint when it was acquired by Borland, which added a new user interface, new manuals, and features to the application.
This was the time of European development for Borland: Sidekick and Turbo Pascal had been founded in Denmark; and the management of the European subsidiary comprised former Micropro France managers (Micropro was at the time the world leader in Word processing software with the famous WordStar line-up.
Sprint v1.0 shipped in France with notable initial success, capturing a 30 percent market share and getting the jump on competing word processors.
The lack of beta-test mixed with pressure to ship for back-to-school time resulted in a Sprint 1.0 which had a range of minor glitches and bugs that had to be corrected with model 1.01 and a whole new set of diskettes for each registered user.
Traditional Borland fans who bought Sprint were happy with the editor, but wondered why the package included a sophisticated formatter, while business users who wanted a word processor just to write their memos and letters wondered what to do with the heavy manual and powerful features of the formatter language.
Version 1.5 was a reasonable success in France for some years, but Microsoft Word and Windows gained momentum and obscured all the other products.
It built up a small, but loyal and often enthusiastic, following among professional writers, researchers, academics, and programmers who appreciated its power, speed, and ability to handle large documents.
Crash-recovery: Sprint had incremental back-up, with its swap file updated every 3 seconds, enabling full recovery from crashes.
At trade shows, demos were made with one person pulling out the power cord, and the typist resuming work as soon as the machine restarted.
Separate formatter and programmable editor: These have been useful features for corporate environments aiming at standardizing documents or building "boilerplate" contracts.