Short answers, pulled from the story.
Peter Maschke created the RagTime software in 1986. He was a German software developer who released the program when personal computing was still finding its footing. The software treated every element on a page as a movable, resizable frame.
The company filed for bankruptcy in July 2007 after years of declining sales and internal disagreements among shareholders. The rights to the software were taken over by a newly established company called RagTime.de Development GmbH. This event marked a dark chapter for the software's history.
RagTime failed in the North American market because the American market was already dominated by the emerging Microsoft Office ecosystem. In 1990, the software was priced at $395, which was a steep cost for a single application when competitors were beginning to bundle similar features into cheaper suites. By 1991, the North American sales office had closed.
The early versions of RagTime were written in Pascal and later versions were completely coded in C++. This choice of programming language allowed the software to be highly efficient and flexible. The use of C++ in later versions allowed the software to take advantage of the latest hardware and operating system features.
The company announced the discontinuation of RagTime Solo in July 2006. The private version would no longer exist after nearly two decades of offering the free version. The decision was met with criticism from the user community and coincided with a period of financial instability for the company.