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After Symantec released the American edition of Q&A 5.0 for DOS in 1995, it publicly announced that there would be no further development (upgrades) of the Q&A product line.

During the summer of 1998, representing a joint venture between Professional Computer Technology Associates (PCTA) and Marble Publications (publisher of The Quick Answer monthly Q&A newsletter), Bill Halpern and Tom Marcellus entered into negotiations with Symantec Corporation to purchase its Q&A product line outright, including source code, trademarks - the works.

We came very close to signing a final agreement, but in the end Symantec's legal department uncovered some insurmountable (to them) legal issues that it felt couldn't be resolved, and negotiations broke down.

In September 1998, Symantec dropped all in-house sales and support for Q&A, officially referring all pre-sales and sales-related inquiries to PCTA and all technical support inquiries to PCTA and Marble Publications.

Symantec clearly communicated its wish that we take care of its Q&A customers. Symantec has since been referring people inquiring about Q&A to our group as the future providers of a 32-bit solution for Q&A.

With no further Q&A product development, everyone who uses Q&A is being forced away from it. Future Windows versions will not support DOS programs or even Windows 3.1 programs.

Current and future hardware does not/will not support DOS programs such as Q&A either. Today, large computer manufacturers are selling units that do not physically support the Expanded Memory that is recommended for Q&A 4.0 and essential to Q&A 5.0. There is also the problem of DOS programs (and Windows 3.1 programs such as Q&A for Windows) running unreliably in hard drive partitions greater than 2G.

We could see a looming dead-end for Q&A and, of greater concern, a dead-end for Q&A users whose businesses and organizations lived and breathed on their vital Q&A databases and applications.

As a result of efforts spearheaded by Bill Halpern of PCTA, a group of leading Q&A consultants, developers and "power" users came together and formed a company to design and market a Q&A follow-on product. Not a product that would be called Q&A, but a totally new product built from the ground up that would be Q&A-compatible. Our group began meeting in 1999 after development on the new product had already begun. Lantica Software, LLC was formally registered in the State of Pennsylvania in June 2000 as a limited liability stock corporation.