> Ecco Pro was originally developed by Pete Polash, who had sold an early Macintosh based presentation program to Aldus and Bob Perez, a Harvard-trained lawyer hired by Apple as a programmer and Evangelist in the 1980s. It was first released in 1993 by Arabesque Software, Inc., based in Bellevue, Washington. PC Magazine awarded ECCO Pro their Editor's Choice award in 1996 and 1997.
> Development by NetManage ceased in 1997 after the July 1997 release of version 4.01. Andrew Brown wrote in The Guardian: "So what happened to the paragon of a program? The market killed it. First it was sold to a much larger company, Netmanage; presumably doing this made the original programmers a lot of money. Then Netmanage panicked when Microsoft Outlook came along as a "free" part of the Office suite, and killed development on the program." NetManage chief executive officer Zvi Alon noted that 'As soon as Microsoft decided to give away Outlook with Office, we started getting phone calls questioning the value of Ecco Pro'.
Ecco was so beloved that it was binary patched to enable Lua scripting, a decade after being killed. It was virtually bug free and continues to work today on Windows, Linux+Wine and macOS+Crossover. It was so well designed that even though it predated the internet, it could be trivially extended to support hyperlinks. The main limitations after 20 years of zero maintenance are max db size and lack of scalable fonts.
In 2023, an open-source PIM inspired by Ecco Pro reached v1.0 status after 14 years, built on Qt with binaries available for Win/Linux/Mac, https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine
CrossLine is an outliner with sophisticated cross-link capabilities in the tradition of the well-respected Ecco Pro. It implements the concept of "Transclusion" proposed by Ted Nelson and - among others - implemented in the legendary Objectory SE tool by Ivar Jacobson. It is also a full text database with built-in search engine.