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Crimping in the 80s and 90s
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Posted by Hugh
Feb 1, 2012 at 10:02 AM
Mention of Lotus Organizer reminds me that I bought it soon after it was launched by a company called, I think, Threadz. It seemed a better product then before Lotus bought it, or at least it stood out from the crowd. It had a graphical diary interface and internal links (represented, as far as I remember, by an anchor icon); these were not common features at the time.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Feb 1, 2012 at 10:52 AM
Strangely, I’ve missed much of the tools discussed here; I don’t think I had even heard of them at the time. In the 80’s, as a student, I had mostly used word processors and Framework, apart for dedicated engineering software. Then, up to the mid-90’s I worked mostly with flat-file and relational databases: I recall File Express, Alpha 4, Wampum (!) and Paradox; I never learnt dBase. I also used Word Perfect 5.1 and Quattro Pro.
Then Windows 95 came, we moved on to MS Word, Excel and Access, and it took me half a decade to recover and get my stuff under control again—assuming I ever did.
Posted by Geoffrey Miller
Feb 1, 2012 at 11:06 AM
I also fondly remember the original Threadz Organizer, which, for my part, was ruined by the Lotus takeover. The original had a useful feature whereby a single day could have one entry, making it ideal for keeping a diary. Lotus chopped the day into hourly segments with no way of avoiding this business-oriented model. It took days to export my data from the program and I’ve never touched a Lotus product again.
Although not strictly a PIM I first purchased Blackwell’s “Idealist” in the early 1990s, stayed with version 3 which was released in 1995 (I found the subsequent version 5 - there was no v.4 - produced by Bekon after Blackwell sold the program to be quite ‘buggy’) and continue to use Idealist 3 to this day. It has operated on every Windows platform, has never crashed and I have never lost data. There can’t be too many programs with that record.
From the same era, I continue to use askSam, having had every version since the first Windows, and am now beta-testing version 8, but development seems to have slowed to a crawl in recent years. Such a shame as I always thought this program could have been a world-beater if properly developed and marketed.
Geoffrey
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 1, 2012 at 01:48 PM
One other ‘80s app that I’ve just recalled was Sidekick. It was my first real PIM with a calendar and other utilities. The big deal was that with Sidekick you could copy text from one application and paste it into another… This was the first time I encountered this feature and it was breaktaking to be able to do this!
How things have changed.
Steve Z.
Posted by Hugh
Feb 1, 2012 at 03:11 PM
Ah Sidekick! According to Wikipedia: “Long time users of Sidekick 98 report no difficulties continuing to use the program through subsequent iterations of Windows, up to and including Windows 7.” However I suspect that Sidekick 98 doesn’t really represent the real, original Sidekick usage experience. (“Terminate and Stay Resident” was the jargon name for the type of DOS programme that the original Sidekick represented - a great title for a horror movie I’ve always thought.)
I abandoned Sidekick for Threadz Organizer, which I bought as a floppy direct from the developer in person at some trade show or another. As you say, Steve, how times have changed!