History Lesson: Ami Pro and the .sam File

Atlanta, Samna, and Word II

Samna Corporation was founded in 1982 in Atlanta. Its early flagship on the IBM PC was Word II, shipped in September 1982 at a list price of about $450. By 1984, Data Decisions counted roughly 3,000 Word II installations — a real office product, not a hobby editor.

Said Mohammadioun was chairman and president, and roughly a 10 percent owner when the company later sold. He was not the founder. The firm’s name and the later Ami product line are where the .sam extension comes from.

Ami for Windows, then Ami Professional

Ami shipped in 1988 for Microsoft Windows 2. Ami Professional followed in 1989. Lotus Development acquired Samna and sold the product as Ami Pro — the name most people still use when they find a folder of .sam files.

Samna did not abandon its older line overnight. Compute! magazine in June 1991 still covered Word IV upgrades after Ami already existed. Two product generations overlapped while Windows word processing was still new.

First Windows word processor?

Lotus’s 1991 marketing called Ami Pro the first Windows word processor — meaning a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor built for Microsoft’s graphical shell rather than a DOS screen with a Windows skin.

That claim needs a hedge. Palantir had a Windows word processor in 1987. NBI was in the market. Microsoft Word for Windows shipped in November 1989. Ami was early and serious; “first” was Lotus’s line, not settled historiography.

Style sheets and frames

Ami Pro’s discipline was presentation separated from content. The Washington Post in 1989 described about 25 style sheets and treated a frame as a mini document you could place on the page. By 1991, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post were citing roughly 50 sheets and calling out scientific or financial reports as the workload the product handled well.

That model is why archives still hold .STY files next to the documents. The .sam file says which style a paragraph uses; the style sheet says what the style looks like.

What it cost next to Word

On 8 November 1990 the Los Angeles Times put Microsoft Word at $450 and Ami Professional at $495. Ami Pro was not the bargain basement suite. It was priced as a professional Windows word processor competing for the same desks.

Drawing, charts, equations, DDE, and OLE

Lotus’s 1991 Ami Pro pitch stressed drawing tools, 168 chart styles, an equation editor, Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). Those were the interoperability buzzwords of Windows office suites: live links to other applications, embeddable objects, charts and figures inside the report.

Ami Pro stored equations in its own editor model. It did not store LaTeX as a native Ami Pro document format. Later converters may emit readable math as pictures or as LaTeX for reuse; that is a modern recovery path, not how Ami Pro wrote history on disk.

Lotus announces the tender

On 1 November 1990 Lotus announced a tender offer for Samna: about $65 million, or $18.84 a share, with roughly 113 employees to stay in Atlanta. That figure is from the announced deal, not a later 10-K reconstruction.

After the sale, Lotus shipped Ami Pro through the early 1990s and folded it into SmartSuite. The Atlanta product became a Lotus brand with an Atlanta engineering footprint that the announcement said would remain.

What a .SAM file actually is

A .SAM file is tagged ANSI text. Open one in a plain editor and it typically starts with a [ver] header, then square-bracket markup for styles, layout, and inline formatting. Companion .STY files hold the style sheet — sample names from the era include memo.sty and other office templates shipped with the product.

It is not a .SM file. It is not the Windows Security Account Manager (SAM) hive. And it is not Lotus Word Pro’s later .LWP compound format. Word Pro descended from Ami Pro in the SmartSuite line, but .LWP is a different container. If the extension is .sam, you are looking at the Ami / Ami Pro generation.

IBM, SmartSuite, and the end of the line

IBM bought Lotus in 1995 for about $3.5 billion, or $64 a share — a deal driven by Notes as much as by desktop apps. Ami Pro / Word Pro lived on inside SmartSuite.

IBM turned SmartSuite marketing off on 11 June 2013. Support ended on 30 September 2014. There was no replacement product from IBM. Corel is not an owner of Ami Pro or Word Pro; WordPerfect Office is a different lineage.

The legacy files

The Bodleian Libraries hold several thousand Ami Pro files in collected digital material. One 2011 office anecdote still repeated in migration circles counted about 10,000 .sam documents on a single shared drive. Those numbers are not a market share claim; they are evidence that the format did real work and then sat still.

LibreOffice’s bug tracker treats Ami Pro .sam import as WONTFIX. Microsoft Word never shipped a built-in Ami Pro converter. A Windows 11 PC will not open the file by double-click. The bytes are still a Samna / Lotus document: correspondence, reports, and drafts written when Ami Pro was the desk application.

If you need those pages in Word or as a PDF, convert them on this PC. Do not upload a privileged archive to a random website.