BRINGING NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING TO THE MICROCOMPUTER MARKET 
THE STORY OF Q&A 
Gary G. Hendrix 
Symantec Corporation 
10201 Torre Avenue 
Cupertino, CA 95014 
OVERVIEW 
This is the story of how one of the new 
natural language processing products 
reached the marketplace. On the surface, 
it is the story of one NL researcher- 
turned-entrepreneur (yours truly) and of 
one product, Q&A. But this is not just my 
story: It is in microcosm the story of NL 
emerging from the confines of the academic 
world, which in turn is an instance of the 
old theme "science goes commercial." 
BACKGROUND 
In September of 1985, Symantec introduced 
its first commercial product, Q&A. Q&A is 
a $299 integrated business-productivity 
tool for the IBM PC/XT/AT and compatibles. 
It includes 
a file management system, 
a report generator, 
a word processor, 
a spelling checker and 
an "intelligent assistant" or "IA." 
The IA lets users manipulate databases and 
produce reports by issuing commands or 
asking questions in English. 
WHY Q&A IS IMPORTANT 
Q&A is important to everyone with an 
interest in natural language processing 
because it is bringing NL technology to 
the attention of the world at large. 
Already Q&A is the most widely used NL 
system ever developed, with hundreds of 
people now using it on a daily basis and 
thousands using it occasionally. Here is 
a small sampling of the reaction: 
* SoftSel, the largest US distributor of 
microcomputer software, publishes a 
biweekly "hot list" ranking its 
best-selling products. At the time of 
this writing, Q&A is number 3 on the 
list, below only dBASE III and Lotus 
123, with monthly sales in the 
thousands. Some weeks Q&A has actually 
been above Lotus on the charts. 
* Every major publication addressing the 
IBM PC market in the U.S., Europe and 
Australia has written about Q&A, and 
their reviews have consistently been 
favorable. Infoworld gave Q&A a 5 disk 
rating--its highest. PC Week has 
called Q&A the "quintessential 
management tool." In the New York 
Times, Q&A received an unprecedented 
2-part review, and it took honors as 
the "software product of the year" in 
Australia. 
In a comprehensive survey of file 
management systems for IBM PCs, 
Software Digest, which is widely 
considered to provide the microcomputer 
industry's most objective testing, gave 
Q&A the highest overall evaluation ever 
given to any product in any category. 
WHAT'S THE STORY BEHIND Q&A 
Compressing all detail, Q&A is a direct 
outgrowth of NL research conducted at SRI 
International in the 1970's. 
About the time SRI's LADDER project was 
winding down, the Apple Computer appeared 
on the scene and I got the crazy idea that 
it would be neat to build a LADDER for the 
Apple. The known problems were that there 
wasn't an INTERLISP for the Apple, 
LADDER's code was over i00 times larger 
than the Apple's 48K memory, the Apple was 
too slow, and LADDER couldn't be ported to 
new databases relevant to personal use. 
These turned out to be the easy problems. 
Getting Q&A off the ground eventually 
entailed starting two companies, coming 
close to going broke on multiple 
occasions, putting a number of personal 
friends through months or years of stress, 
building a new culture for AI/micro/ 
marketing cross fertilization, and 
learning about lawyers, finance, product 
marketing, PC DOS, C, advertising, PR, 
promotions, sales, and end users. But in 
the end, the product happened. 
CONCLUSION 
Thousands of people now own or use NL 
systems, and hundreds of thousands have 
read about them. The world of NL has 
changed, and new opportunities for 
research and commercialization abound. 
Acknowledgment: Major contributors to the 
design/implementation of Q&A's IA were Dan 
Gordon, Brett Walter and Denis Coleman. 
