vbthedog

I remember very vividly the early days of MSDOS and the final cohesion of a bunch of disparate operating systems (except for Apple) into a unified “standard”. The programs that had caused the explosion of the PC industry either died or survived based on their switch from whatever they were developed on, to this new OS.

Some made it and many, many did not. One of my favourites was filePro16 that started on the Tandy TRSDOS and Xenix platforms; it was ported to MSDOS and did quite well and the UNIX version still exists. For some reason, The Small Computer Computer never felt the need to go Windows or Mac, much to I consider their loss. I loved this program as I could use it’s 4GL language ‘behind the scenes’ to develop almost any standalone application I wanted. I once even did a Lotto predict system based on past number occurrences, and it printed graphs on an NEC Pinwriter dot matrix printer using CHR$ codes for graphics blocks!

dBase II -> III – IV survived too – for a while – until others usurped including KnowledgeMan (which I also liked), Borland Paradox, Lotus Approach and ultimately Microsft Access while the  original Visicalc spreadsheet was overtaken first by Lotus 1-2-3 and then Multiplan. Microsoft Word wiped out Multimate, WordPerfect, Lotus AMI Pro and of course Wordstar. The excellent and easy to use PFS series was never to be seen again and the same fate applied many other brilliant tools that simply couldn’t match the Microsoft marketing dollar, and the stroke of genius employed by Australia’s own Daniel Petre that was Microsoft Office.

What did fascinate me at the time was the birth of the ‘integrated package’ in the guise of Lotus Symphony, Open Access, Framework and Visi-On (for starters). They promised a single application that allowed all the major functionality of at least word processor, spreadsheet and database, but added the mouth-watering ability of sharing data without the need to export and import information between applications.

While the idea was sheer genius, and I had huge fun playing with and reviewing these applications for PCUser mag back in the 80s – I became a bit of a specialist – the concept never really took off. Some interactions needed knowledge of macro processing (also huge fun) and despite the eye candy of the graphing and charting capabilities (anyone remember Boeing Graph? That was a CRACKER that integrated with filePro and Scripsit WP), eventually the introduction of Windows sent these applications to the scrap heap.

I don’t know if Ashton-Tate (dbase and Framework) even exists anymore. Lotus is an IBM company that seems to be sulking behind a door somewhere despite still having the very best personal info manager in ‘Organiser’ – yes it still exists – and Borland? Who knows? I must check one day.

Where am I going with this?

The internet has spawned a similar situation in an odd sort of way, except that integrated applications are now developed by independent vendors that share an API – a programming interface allowing data to be exchanged and shared between them. Think Facebook and Twitter talking to each other, or Outlook and Evernote for starters.

Social media seems to be the catalyst for this; in many ways I think it is a top idea, but I do have reservations about a) security of this shared data and b) the frustration many may get as it is not always as easy as it seems to make all these apps work together.

More importantly though, when the original integrated applications came out such as Lotus Symphony, they had price tags of over A$1000 – a lot of money in the 80s. Today many are free (there is a warning about security there alone so check the User Agreements) or around the $30 – $50 mark.

So the question arises. Do you really need it? I wonder how many tens of thousands of applications in this price range have been installed and discarded over the last 18 months.

And let’s not ask the same question of phones!