Software Graveyard -- MultiMate

One of the early PC word processors, MultiMate was a pretty solid success.

They did something very smart in their design of the software:  they made it look like the Wang word processing software that was popular on minicomputers of the time.  If you knew how to use Wang word processing, you could learn MultiMate in a few minutes. A template that explained the function keys was all you needed.

This allowed businesses to switch to PCs without having to spend a lot of time retraining their users.

Another feature of MultiMate was that it loaded one page in memory at a time.  This seems like an inconvenience (and it was -- if you accidentally pressed PgDown, you'd have to wait until the page displayed, then press PgUp and wait again), but it made sense.  In a time when few computers had hard drives and memory was limited to 256K (that K, not Meg), it allowed long documents to be created and edited.  You didn't have to worry if the 200-page document could fit into RAM -- it would.

Still, what made MultiMate popular also contributed to its demise. People who came to computers without experience with the Wang didn't care that they were similar; they wanted just to be able to use a word processor.  In addition, MultiMate was slow to add features and printer support that other word processors had as standard.

When Windows came along, MultiMate's parent company, Ashton-Tate, decided not to bother with it.  It seems to be gone completely (the only software I could found with that name is used to manage the mating of cows by ranchers).

Software Graveyard -- Remember these?

Silicon Valley Insider has listed some of Tech's forgotten brands --25 software and services that were very popular at the time, but which have been forgotten.

The list (with my comments):

1. 1. AltaVista -- THE search engine before Google came along. First online translator with Babelfish.
2. 2. Amiga -- Very popular home computer.
3. 3. Atari -- The top gaming system for a number of years.
4. 4. Broderbund -- Their software was everywhere. Where in the world are they now? Probably in the Print Shop.
5. 5. CDNow -- The amazon.com of CDs; now just amazon.
6. 6. Commodore -- VIC 20. 20 K memory! What power!
7. 7. Compuserve -- Information service; killed by AOL & the Internet.
8. 8. CueCat -- One of the stupidest ideas ever.
9. 9. Cyberian Outpost
10. 10. Divx
11. 11. Egghead Software -- Your mall computer store.
12. 12. eToys -- Amazon.com of toys. Or tried to be.
13. 13. Geocities -- Everyone's first web page.
14. 14. Inktomi -- Search engine software. Googled.
15. 15. Iomega -- Drive maker. Their Zip drive external drive was going to be the next big thing. Stock was big until hard drives became bigger and the bubble burst.
16. 16. Lotus -- The most popular business software of the 80s. Best selling title for years. Botched the changeover to Windows and let Excel take over.
17. 17. Lycos -- Nice search engine, but no match for others.
18. 18. Netscape -- First serious web browser. MSIE overwhelmed it; became irrelevant once Firefox was introduced.
19. 19. Packard Bell -- Cheap (and lousy) computers were sold everywhere but computer stores.
20. 20. Prodigy -- Online service from Sears with crude graphics; competed with Compuserve, but AOL killed it.
21. 21. Silicon Graphics
22. 22. Tandy -- TRS-80 was one of the first home computers
23. 23. Tomagatchi -- Virtual pets. An idea whose time had not come.
24. 24. U.S. Robotics -- Top modem maker. Remember dial-up? Built-in modems were the beginning of the end.
25. 25. WordPerfect -- The top word processor, replaced by Word (and still beloved). Bad marketing hurt them, as did the move to Windows.

I can add some others -- GEnie, WordStar (and Wordstar 2000), Multi-Mate, Lotus Symphony -- but these are names that will soon be forgotten.

Software Graveyard: Harvard Graphics & Zenographics Mirage

As is obvious, PowerPoint is the undisputed king of presentation software (OpenOffice's Impress is trying, and Google is getting into the act with Google Presentations, but they are currently still only minor pretenders to the throne). But before PowerPoint, there was Harvard Presenatation Graphics.

Actually, there still is. But you don't hear about how someone is going to do a Harvard Graphics presentation. Still Harvard was the first. Before Windows came out, it was the software you used to create a presentation. Similar in design to PowerPoint (though I don't recall if it had the outline feature), it let you create presentations even before there was a good way to present them. But it remained the leader until Microsoft bundled PowerPoint with Office. Few people were willing to buy a stand-alone program for the one or two presentations they made a year, but if it was part of the Office Suite, anyway, you had it and learned to use it. Harvard Graphics just faded and was forgotten.

I doubt anyone remembers Zenographics Mirage; I only know about it because I used it for several years to create slides (the type you projected in a Kodak Carousel). I worked at a graphic design firm, and created what would now be PowerPoint slides for presentations (GE was our biggest customer). Mirage (and its graphic entry software, Ego) used a digitizer to trace images. I would put them onto the digitizer board and touch it with a pen to indicate the image. Mirage/Ego was not good with curves at all (It took me weeks to get a decent version of the GE logo* when they changed it**)

But Mirage was difficult for the average user to use, and you had to create each slide individually. Even such things as aligning text was a chore. It probably was never going to be popular software, but it did the job in the days before more advanced software was developed.

*Known in Schenectady and "the meatball." There was also the "flying meatball" with the words General Electric and the logo in the middle.

**The logo was changed in the late 70s. No one outside of GE ever noticed the changes.

My Third Computer

My third computer was probably a GE-235 Information Processing System. I say "probably," because by the time I used it (at Union College in Schenenctady), GE had sold its computing business to Honeywell. But the picture looks something like what I remembered.

This was the computer you saw in 60s movies about computers; the closest thing to it in a more modern movie was WOPR in WarGames. The big difference was that there were no flashing lights, the one feature Hollywood set designers thought were on all computers.

Most of the memory was from tape drives (the other element of Hollywood computers). There was also something I hadn't known of before: a disk drive. The disks were about three feet across and made of some brown plastic-looking material. I have no idea of their capacity (there was an array of about five of them), but if the held a Meg, I'd be surprised.

Input was by punch cards. We were told never to call them "IBM Cards," since IBM looked askance at that sort of trademark infringement (they probably don't care now). The cards were the size of an old dollar (not the ones in your wallet right now -- an inch or so bigger on each side). You ran them through a card punch -- a typewriter keyboard that took a blank card and punched holes in patterns according to the letter you chose.

I learned some programming on these: BASIC and later FORTRAN. Every card was one line of the program and if you made a typo, you might have to discard the card (though there were tricks to change the mistyped character into something that the card reader would ignore).

After you typed your pile of cards, you put it into a bin. One of the advanced Computer Science students would run it and put the printed out resulted (18" tractor feed paper with pale green strips). If your program ran, you could hand it in. If it didn't (which was likely the case), you'd retype the cards that contained errors and tried again.

Of course, a setup like this was primarily for programming; Word Processing, Spreadsheets, and any function of a modern computer just didn't work. I would also guess that the computer you are using right now has more memory and more storage space that the roomful of equipment back in the early 70s.

But if you wanted to be on the cutting edge back then, this was it.

Software Graveyard: Lotus 1-2-3

For month after month, year after year, Lotus 1-2-3 was the best selling software program. If you ran a business, or if you had to keep track of finanaces, it was the first thing you put on your computer after DOS.

Lotus wasn't the first spreadsheet -- VisiCalc came first -- but it quickly became the most popular. It was relatively easy to use and by far the industry standard.

One interesting feature of Lotus was the slash key. Instead of pressing a function key* to activate what are now menu fuctions, you pressed slash to bring up the menu, and could use the arrow keys to move around.

The most annoying feature of Lotus -- at least, until it was fixed -- was that you could quit without saving your work. Slash and Q would get you right out of the program. And if you hadn't saved things first, they were gone. This probably caused as much cursing as any software invented. By version 3, you would get a warning, but before that, make sure you saved.

Also, Lotus didn't like to be on a hard drive. There was a strict copy protection scheme. First, you couldn't do it at all without cracking it. Then, they set up a system where you transferred Lotus from the disk, erasing it, as you copied it to the hard drive (this was common back in that era). But you still had to keep the original disk: Lotus would look for it on startup. If it wasn't in the A: drive, Lotus wouldn't run.

What happened to Lotus? Windows 3.1. They never got how it worked; the first versions of Lotus for Windows were still using keyboard controls instead of using the mouse. Microsoft also pushed Excel, and designed it so that Lotus users could easily adapt, including an automatic translator that would turn Lotus commands into Excel ones so you wouldn't lose effieciency while learning. Lotus took at long time to get their version 4 up and running on Windows.

They also wasted time with their integrated "Symphony" program, which was supposedly a word processor, spreadsheet, and database all in one. I think that integrated programs got the short shrift -- they probably would have worked just fine for most people's uses instead of a suite of features you don't use -- but Symphony was just a Lotus spreadsheet where you could type in text and have rudimentary word processing functions. It was even in the same file format (if you changed the extension)!

Lotus was eventually bought out by IBM, not for 1-2-3, which by then was dying, but for Lotus Notes, a nice bit of hypeware that was going to change the way we did business. Notes was both an e-mail client and a "database" -- a confusing use of the term, since it was nothing like a database. The Notes database was more like a message board. The idea was the people would collaborate on projects via computer. The idea is still "hot" in computing, but still hasn't caught on.

In any case, 1-2-3 is now part of Lotus Smartsuite, so it's really not dead, but Smartsuite isn't really all that popular. And compared to the way Lotus was all over back in the mid-80s, it's certainly taken a big fall.

*F1-F10 were used in the DOS days to activate what are now menu functions. F11 and F12 were added about the time Windows was replacing DOS and the function keys became obsolete. When was the last time you touched one?

Software Graveyard: The Death of a Pioneer

Last Friday, AOL announced it was ending its support for (i.e., putting an end to) the Netscape web browser. I doubt many people will be affected by the news; no one is using Netscape any more.

But not so long ago, Netscape was the web browser. It was the first in general use that displayed graphics. Old timers like me might remember Lynx, which did let you look at web pages, but not graphics. That didn't matter much, since you were connecting with a 2400 baud modem and graphics took ages to load.

But Netscape made web browsing attractive. It turned it from the abode of geeks to an experience that everyone can enjoy. Its interface was what all web browsers emulate, with the Home, Back, Forward, and Reload buttons still an integral part of any web browser. It used the term "Bookmarks" to mark web pages.

Doesn't look so different, does it?

It's hard to imagine that Netscape once had 90% of the web browser market. However, they fell victim to Microsoft deciding to give away Internet Explorer (odd as it seems now, but Netscape used to ask people to pay to use their software). Suddenly, there was competition, and if MSIE wasn't quite as good, it was good enough, especially at the price. Netscape had to give away their product, and without the resources of Microsoft, was not the same technically.

Several different business models were tried, but eventually Netscape was purchased by AOL in 1999. And AOL quite rightly decided to get out of the browser business. Netscape was down to less than 1% the browser market in 2004, and just could not compete with Firefox, Opera, or Safari.

The road is littered with software that went from being ubiquitous to forgotten: Lotus 1-2-3, Harvard Graphics, Wordstar, MultiMate, and many others. I'll be talking about them from time to time. But Netscape was a major player and important milestone in the creation of the World Wide Web, and its passing deserves note.