RES: IBM investment in i - can open source software help sales?

Symphony was one of the first "all in one" packages, very close to todays MS
Works.

It was a Lotus product with about the same spreadshet on Lotus 123, you
could even run macros between them with minor or no modifications.

Symphony wasn't a competitor, but an "upgraded" Lotus 123, it never come as
a replacement because its costs were higher (1 Symphony > 2 Lotus 123).

It had a database, word processor and a graphics module (far superior than
that on 123), and ahead of its time, a communications module.

On the early 80's I've started building my first "statiscal data bases" on
Lotus 123, switched to Symphony for "numbers and words databases" plus
"merge and print docs and graphs with data", then to DBase III for "pure
data bases".

That was far before Windows and MS office, there were only big and expensive
mainframes used mainly by Banks or small basic mono user Apples and later
PCs, used by companies wich could afford to buy 1 or 2, as they also were
expensive.

It's interesting to note that most of those ancient packages did better and
easier (but sometimes slower) jobs than some of today tools.

In fact I still use a DBase variant for heavy PC processing and it's
tremendous light and fast compared with newer packages such as MS Access.

Regards,

Rubens


-----Mensagem original-----
De: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Em nome de Richard Schoen
Enviada em: sexta-feira, 9 de maio de 2008 13:01
Para: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Assunto: RE: IBM investment in i - can open source software help sales?

Symphony was a spreadsheet competitor to Lotus 123 back in the DOS days
:-)

Regards,
Richard Schoen
RJS Software Systems Inc.
"Get the information you need. Now!"
Email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Web Site: http://www.rjssoftware.com
Tel: (952) 898-3038
Fax: (952) 898-1781
Toll Free: (888) RJSSOFT


------------------------------

message: 8
date: Thu, 8 May 2008 09:32:44 -0500
from: Doug Palme <DPalme@xxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: IBM investment in i - can open source software help
sales?

Wasn't Symphony a word processor back in the middle to late 80's /
90's......I recall using a WP called symphony back then on DOS....

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