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Karel Jansens's Avatar
Posts: 3,220 | Thanked: 326 times | Joined on Oct 2005 @ "Almost there!" (Monte Christo, Count of)
#228
Originally Posted by fpp View Post
Naaah, all that new-fangled GUI stuff is still a trifle advanced for me. This weekend I managed to retrieve (after much shuffling and searching of old backups) an archive of the first professional "productivity suite" I used at work in the 80s : the little-known, but quite effective for its time, "Smartware 3.10" by the Canadian Innovative Software (later bought by Informix, who came out with Smartware II, just in time to be wiped by the Windows 3.0 wave...).

Smart 3.10 is a character-based, MS-DOS app in the same league and timeframe as the better known Framework III from Ashton-Tate and SPI's OpenAccess II : a word processor, spreadsheet and database with a common interface and programming language (those were the blessed days when presentation software hadn't even been invented yet :-).

Apart from some keyboard issues, it runs like a champ in Dosbox on my 810, and much faster than the orginal did on my first IMB PC-XT... a real beauty :-)
I started with Symphony (the original one, not the GUI copycat) myself. Ahh -- the joy of typing in a wordprocessor that is actually a spreadsheet, wearing a cunning disguise.

Now if only somebody managed to reproduce Canon's Cat, or even Archy. I never got to play with it, and come to think of it, the keyboardless Itablets (I don't consider the N810's chicklet bar a keyboard) are probably not the best platforms for these beasties.

Hmm -- while musing: This might be a nice target for that Ueberlady of emulators, the Dame Pandora...
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