Sunday, July 30, 2017

Wampum

One of the great shareware databases produced by Ward Mundy (who I recently exhanged e-mails with...I must ask for unlock keys for Wampum so I can play with it a little more).






Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Surefire

Before MS Word had classy things like fields, an obscure shareware package had them. It may have been inspired by Q&A, an 80s data management-word processor.

Some screens from Surefire:










Sunday, July 23, 2017

ZoomRacks

My first piece of non-linear PIM software. ZoomRacks. It came from Atari, I think, and was designed with a card file metaphor in a text-based system. So nothing looked like a card. It has some hypertext functionality. So here we are, from the mid 1980s.






Wednesday, July 19, 2017

My Assistant

I was IT manager for a large consulting firm in the late 1980s and after implementing a production IT system, was looking around for a local user organising tool. This was before the days of MS Outlook, or other more sophisticated PIMs that brought notes, diary and do-lists together.

My Assistant was reviewed in a newspaper article; the developer was in North Sydney, near my office, so I dropped in to visit. He demonstrated the software, which he had developed for a politician friend of his.

It looked great, but the board of my company was less impressed, being keen pen and paper users.

Here's a screen from it.


Sunday, July 16, 2017

Lotus Agenda

Just for the memories (or for 'reference' to make it seem more serious), screen shots from Lotus Agenda running President's  Planner.

Agenda fired up quite happily in a DOS box on my old XP machine. It runs smoothly, and apart from cut and paste between applications not being available, is quite useable. I love it for the sheer genius of the software design in the small footprint that DOS had.