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SilkQuit was born in late 1996 out of the Usenet newsgroup alt.support.stop-smoking (as3). At the time the members of as3 were using an Excel spreadsheet to calculate the days, weeks and years they had been quit. SilkQuit's author, a fellow quitter at as3, decided it was time for a dedicated quit meter tool and set to writing SilkQuit v1.
SilkQuit v1 was released in early 1997 as a small (about 100kb) tool which calculated the time quit in weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds and provided the ability to copy some summary text to the clipboard. This text was then pasted into posts on as3 and around the net.
Feedback from users on as3 resulted in the development of SilkQuit v1.5. This new version included the ability to calculate time quit in calendar months as well as a hot-paste feature which allowed the user to paste their quit summary using a simple hot key. Version 1.5 also introduced TaurusScript, a tool for formulating the sentences which make up the quit summary.
SilkQuit was developed in Europe and has always supported local languages, currencies and timezones.
SilkQuit is the original stand alone quit meter for Windows and its basic features have been copied by many other meters since. We are flattered to have inspired people to build upon our original ideas.
SilkQuit remains by far the most popular quit meter in use around the world.
SilkQuit is free of charge and supported by voluntary donations and website advertising revenue.
SilkQuit has been downloaded over 1 million times and is in use on desktops around the world. We often receive wonderful emails from our users telling us of their success and the role SilkQuit has played. We are thankful to everybody who has sent us thanks and best wishes. It is that feedback of success which keeps us going for 13 years later.
Our binding philosophy is that success when quitting smoking comes from individual focus, the support of a community, and the celebration of success. It is for this reason that we have, and continue to, resist the temptation to pack SilkQuit with lots and lots of new features; most of which add little or no value to the quit smoking journey. SilkQuit is intended to be a tool for tracking your success rather than a distraction from the task at hand.
We plan to further support the quit smoking community from which SilkQuit was born as well as the expand our coverage across new and emerging technologies in 2011.
If you have any specific requests for future features please contact us. Or, if you'd like to help support SilkQuit you can make a donation to help cover its running costs.