Company Announcement

NEW SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE POLICY

October 1, 1997

Since Hypercube, Inc. is growing and since our products are becoming increasingly richer in scientific content, it now seems appropriate to institute a formal maintenance procedure for the major releases of our products. It is not that we expect more maintenance but that we believe a more formal and timely approach to maintenance is now needed - to satisfy both our internal organizational needs and the needs our customers. A sophisticated and complex product such as HyperChem will always need routine maintenance. Thus, we have instituted an official Maintenance Group within the company, responsible for issuing periodic Maintenance Updates of our core products, particularly HyperChem. Apart from shipping and handling charges, Maintenance Updates are free. They can be downloaded from our WWW site or physically mailed to you for the appropriate shipping and handling cost. At this particular time we are announcing a Maintenance Update from HyperChem 5.01 to HyperChem 5.02 for Windows and NT.

Until now, Hypercube, Inc. has had an unofficial maintenance policy. As products like HyperChem grew and their functionality was extended, we released new versions regularly and these new releases fixed any problems with the software at the same time the new releases added capability. With the new policy we hope to be more responsive to customers needs and be able to make desired changes in a more timely fashion.

Understanding Release 5 HyperChem

Our product numbering, such as "Release 5.xy", labels Major Releases with the first decimal place (x) and Maintenance Updates with the second decimal place(y). Thus, the first (and only) Major Release of current HyperChem is Release 5.0 sometimes shortened to Release 5. If we were to come out with Release 5.1, Release 5.5 or Release 6.0, these would be new Major Releases and there would be an upgrade fee for each. At this time, of course, we are not announcing any new Major Releases of HyperChem. The history of Release 5 is that Release 5.0 operated only with Windows 95. What should now be termed a Maintenance Update, i.e. Release 5.01, was later made available to run on both Windows 95 and Windows NT. All registered users who purchased Release 5.0 were later updated to Release 5.01.

We are now ready to distribute Release 5.02 which offers no specific new functionality but addresses several reported problems since Release 5 first appeared. With Release 5.02, we begin the use of a patching procedure, similar to that used by Microsoft (their "Service Packs"), that involves running a program to "patch" the binary code to go from Release A to Release B. In this instance, we are offering a patch or Maintenance Update (as we refer to them) for 5.01 to 5.02. To use this Maintenance Update you must have a proper installation of 5.01 or reinstall 5.01 if you have made any changes to any of its binaries. The Maintenance Update 5.01 to 5.02 is now available for downloading from this site. Alternatively, you can request us to physically mail you the 5.01 to 5.02 Update on floppies.