History Lesson: Ami Pro and the .sam File

Atlanta, 1982: Samna Word II

Samna Corp was an Atlanta company. Data Decisions in 1984 listed the address as 2700 NE Expressway, Suite C-1200, called that the first year of business, and named Samna Word II as the first product: first delivery September 1982, list price $450, roughly 3,000 installs at the time of the review, on IBM PC / XT, DEC Rainbow, and TI Professional.

Dataquest in 1990 put the founding year at 1982, later headquarters at 5600 Glenridge Drive, 1989 revenue of $11.1 million, a first net loss since 1985 of $2.26 million, and 123 employees. Said Mohammadioun appears in Dataquest and UPI coverage as chairman/president and about a 10% owner at the sale. Dataquest said founders' information is not available — so do not invent a founding story. The character-based line is Samna Word; the Windows line is Ami.

Two eras: DOS Word IV and Windows Ami

Samna kept two product lines. The older one was character-based Samna Word II / III / IV on DOS and UNIX. Compute! in June 1991 covered Word IV 3.0 as the first upgrade to that character line after Ami and Ami Professional had already shipped; Lotus said the release showed loyalty to the character-based constituency, and the registered upgrade was $49.95.

The graphical line was different. Ami shipped for Windows 2 in 1988 (covered in InfoWorld on 13 Feb 1989 and the Washington Post on 27 Mar 1989). Ami Professional followed in 1989 (InfoWorld, 4 Dec 1989). Lotus sold the professional line as Ami Pro. That is not a simple rename of Ami — Ami and Ami Professional were separate products; Ami Pro was the professional brand Lotus kept.

"First Windows word processor" was a boast

A Lotus 1991 brochure claimed Ami Pro was the first WYSIWYG — what you see is what you get — word processor developed specifically for Windows, not a DOS port. That is Lotus's claim. Microsoft Word for Windows shipped in November 1989. Palantir WinText was announced in summer 1987; NBI Legend arrived around late 1987 / early 1988. Usable wording: Ami was among the first commercial, fully featured WYSIWYG Windows word processors, on the market about a year before Word for Windows. Lotus claimed first; others advertised the same.

Page on screen, frames, and style sheets

The Washington Post in 1989 described layout mode that matched print, 25 predefined style sheets, and the frame as a “mini document” (the manual's phrase) that text could flow around. By 1991, LA Times and Washington Post coverage put the style-sheet count near 50, noted scientific or financial reports as a use case, and called out drawing via the yellow pencil icon.

Lotus's own 1991 materials pushed drawing, 168 chart styles, point-and-click scientific and equations processing, DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange — live links between applications), and OLE (Object Linking and Embedding — embed or link objects inside a document). Equations in Ami Pro were native objects and/or OLE (MathType appears with Ami Pro 3.0). Ami Pro did not store LaTeX.

$495 beside Word at $450

The LA Times on 8 Nov 1990 put Word for Windows at $450 and Ami Professional at $495, framing Word as document automation and Ami as text, graphics, and charts. The Ami Pro list stayed $495 into version 3.0 (Computerworld, 22 Jun 1992; Compute!, Jan 1993), with cheaper upgrades. Street prices were often lower — treat $495 as list, not what people paid.

Lotus, November 1990 — Atlanta stays

UPI reported Lotus's tender announced 1 Nov 1990: $18.84 a share, about $65 million — Lotus's “biggest acquisition yet.” About 113 staff would stay in Atlanta as a Lotus word-processing division, with Mohammadioun remaining head. The New York Times on 2 Nov 1990 repeated the same $65 million figure. Write that as an announced tender, not a confirmed cash total from a 10-K. UPI also noted Samna's 1989 loss on roughly $11 million in sales.

.SAM and .STY — the filename is the company

.SAM is the Ami / Ami Pro document extension — the letters come from Samna. Later Word Pro used .LWP and could still open .SAM. It is not Samna Word's DOS .SM, not the Windows SAM registry hive, and not bioinformatics SAM.

An unencrypted .SAM is tagged 8-bit Windows (“ANSI”) text that starts with [ver] (hex 5B 76 65 72). It reads more like proprietary markup than a classic Word .doc, which is an OLE compound file — a mini file system inside one file — starting D0 CF 11 E0. A typical sample opens with [ver] 4, [sty], [charset] ANSI, [edoc], then body. Styles live in [tag] blocks and can reference a sheet such as defalt.sty.

.STY files are style sheets. Lotus 1991 samples include names like ~memo.sty. Documents often sit beside MEMO.STY or ~MEMO.STY. There is no mandatory “tilde-name” law in the format — missing .STY just degrades formatting. Linked graphics can appear as paths at the bottom of the file; embedded images are binary stuffed into the text. There is no public vendor specification.

IBM paid for Notes; SmartSuite ended in 2014

IBM bought Lotus in June 1995 for $3.5 billion / $64 a share. The prize was Notes, not Ami Pro. Word Pro rode along in the suite. WinWorld notes that Word Pro 96 was the first release to drop the Ami Pro name; whether it was rewritten from scratch is a hedge, not a settled engineering claim. Corel later shipped importers — Corel was never an owner of the line.

IBM withdrew SmartSuite marketing on 11 June 2013. Support ended 30 Sep 2014, with no replacement programs (IBM via ZDNet). After that date there was no remaining vendor reader for the suite that once opened these files.

The files did not leave

Around 2011, Bodleian Libraries described several thousand Ami Professional and Samna Word files in their holdings. Their tools treated them as plain text; a naive PDF export showed markup instead of a laid-out page. On Ask Ubuntu in 2011, one office reported about 10,000 .sam files; LibreOffice had .lwp support, not .sam. That is one user's report, not a census.

LibreOffice bug 36543 was marked WONTFIX. LibreOffice's format lists still name Word Pro .lwp, not Ami Pro .sam. Microsoft Word never shipped a built-in Ami Pro converter (KB Q208863). A later Converter Pack dropped it (Office forums 2005 / Pack 11). The documents stayed; the readers left.

Why this still matters in 2026

Three owners — Samna, Lotus, IBM — and no remaining supported reader. A .sam on a share from 1994 is not nostalgia. It is a memo, a scientific report, a framed newsletter draft that still expects its .sty. The application that wrote it is gone. Word will not open it. LibreOffice will not pretend it is .lwp. The bytes are still an Ami Pro document.

Legacy File Converter reads .sam locally on Windows and writes modern formats such as DOCX, PDF, RTF, or TXT. Nothing is uploaded.