A Brief History

Shoebox was written as a DOS program in 1987 by an SIL field linguist named John Wimbish. He enhanced it through 1991, producing versions 1.0, and 1.2.

From 1991-1993, SIL International enhanced DOS Shoebox, producing version 2.0 (Programmers: Brian Wussow, Mark Pedrotti, et al.).

From 1994-2000, SIL International produced Shoebox for Windows versions 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0 (Project manager: Karen Buseman; Programmers: Alan Buseman, Mark Pedrotti, Rod Early, Bryan Yoder, Tom Bogle, et al.).

In 2002, Shoebox work was moved to an SIL field entity, and the name was changed to Field Linguist’s Toolbox. This field entity continues to enhance Toolbox, producing versions as in the Version History (Programmer: Alan Buseman; Support: Karen Buseman).

About SIL

SIL International is a faith-based nonprofit organization committed to serving language communities worldwide as they build capacity for sustainable language development. SIL does this primarily through research, translation, training and materials development. SIL works alongside ethnolinguistic communities and their partners as they discover how language development addresses the challenging areas of their daily lives — social, cultural, political, economic and spiritual.