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Rising Star Industries Valdocs on CP/M in 1983 & Forefront/Ashton Tate Framework on MS-DOS in 1984: the first "office suits".

Framework still exists.

Revisionism. It gives a bad taste.

Microsoft also unified the computer market with Windows back in the 1990s. Before that, it was sheer chaos and incompatibility. Windows and FAT32 gave the world a standard.

Microsoft unified the computer market with MS-DOS back in the eighties. This stiffled inovation for over ten years. In the nineties there was with Linux a serious Free contender. Microsoft never (or perhaps rarely) gave the world a standard, they thrived on idiots like you who think that every fart of microsoft by virtue of being blessed by the mighty Bill or Steve sets a standard.

While many people dislike it, Microsoft Office was the first complete and integrated office suite to include all the functions needed in an average office.

Never heard of Forefront/Aston Tate's Framework from 1984? It still exists.

It took it some years to get good, but now it's the standard.

Microsoft pushes and bribes it's own practices into "standards", you're gullible if you believe that "standards"=standards.

Windows 95 gave us real multitasking at a time when you could freeze a Macintosh by holding down the mouse button. Come to think of it, the 'softies have done a lot of good things.

I don't know where to start with this one. Let's just say that you have a verry narrow world view if you think MS Windows and Mac OS were the only operating systems around.

And then there's Microsoft Research

Hahahaha, MS Research is a playground for great names so that they are cheerful and harmless and out of the way of the program managers.

and Microsoft Press.

OK, your first serious argument, MS Press did produce some awesome things. I hope MS pays you for mentioning their Press division.

Office was very innovative as well. Back in the original days you had wordperfect, and you had lotus. Both of these apps could not share any data. Microsoft created a unified vision of desktop app integration.

Had been done before: Framework

Hey, it even still exists.

Ultimately, it's Microsoft's fault. They invented (and defined) this whole category in the first place, and any imitation of Microsoft Office will end up suffering the same massive feature bloat and quickly become a slug.

You really believe that Microsoft invented "office software" as a bundle of wordprocessor, spreadsheet & database?

MS Office was introduced in 1990. Forefront's (later bought by Ashton-Tate) Framework was in 1984.

(And to my surprize, it still exists.)

And, FRED isn't dead. Sadly, it isn't open source either which, IMHO, would allow it to replace OO.

http://www.framework.com/

I'm not really sure what you're trying to do. Perhaps you want an outlining tool? MSWord does have a mode to do that, but it's famously buggy and unstable. I suspect that some coding environments might have a lot of the structure, but not the typographic features. There were some tools back in the DOS era that I sometimes came across that did this. That's one of the costs of the MS Office monoculture: since about 1995 it's become weird and geeky to use anything except MS Word; and any other surviving word processing apps seem to have their main focus as mimicking every feature of Word.

One of my authors long ago used to use an outliner called Framework, it's still around but I haven't used the current version. I'm concerned with editing and layout rather than creating new text. DTP apps tend to be either linear (code based) or visual (pasteboard metaphor). You generally have to transition to just thinking about layout towards the end of the process. I still use Ventura, a code-based layout app that allows fairly easy revision even at late stages of layout, though it's now moribund under its owners Corel.

Hey they had that for IBM PC-XTs ;-)

http://www.framework.com/fw/aboutfw.htm

Well, not really, but it sure looks like they gave it a good shot. Another item in the past is the Cambridge Z88 laptop. Its 'Pipedream' application is a combination of spreadsheet and word processor in the same program.

I tend to agree that object linking/embedding isn't really the holy grail of desktop application convergence. I really don't get why this is so hard to do... every word processor has a table editor... why not drop in a full spreadsheet there? And presentations are mostly word processor docs with some large fonts and pretty animations. Not much going on there but some macros.

-- John.

There is no reliable or economical way to manage any database for small (very small) business.

I've got to disagree with this. The problem isn't that it isn't possible, but that small businesses tend to over-buy for what they really need. Most of them could get by with a flat filer, or maybe even a rolodex type program. Instead they tend to buy large, fairly complex relational databases like Access* because thats what "everybody" uses, or thats what the consultants know and recommend. There used to be a lot of products in this categorey: Filemaker (PC & Mac), Panorama(PC & Mac - wicked fast since its ram based), PC-File, Symantec Q&A, PFS: File, Microsoft File, Ashton-Tate Rapidfile, etc. (Some integrated software packages had / have databases too, like: Framework(Doesn't need Windows!), Microsoft Works, and others.) Unfortunately most of them have been marginalized, discontinued or driven from the market. People either tended to either buy a relational database, or make due with the database functionality in spreadsheets. I think that Filemaker is the only one with a market share of any real size. Kind of a shame.

*Although Access is Microsoft's low-end database, it is still relational, fully programable, and relatively complex compared to filers.

somehow I thing that not as many people would get into programming by tinkering with the macro language of your typical generic office suite, for example.
I did. One of my first languages was FRED from Framework III. Incredibly Framework still exists, it's now Framework VII. It was owned in the III days by Ashton-Tate (remember them?) Ahh, for the days of DOS office suites...

add an "optional" expiration date on a copyright

Considering that copyright holders can release their work into the public domain anytime they want, what would be the point of that?

Ease, standardization and legitimacy.

Currently a copyright application is for (I believe) 24 years, subject to extension. To limit the copyright, a separate contract is required. This is an extra burden on every copyright filer (and consumer) which can be alleviated with an extra field "expires: ..." on the form. If it's on the form, it's legit. Both consumers and producers can grok it. It's a small change. It's optional. It is backwards compatible. And it certainly can't hurt.

How else would you accomplish this? Leave it up to the legal department of each software publisher to spin their own version? Like that would end up with anything that could be compared on a chart... it needs to be simple. After N years, the copyright *expires* ... the material becomes public domain.

This could all be done now within the constraints of current copyright law (for example, companies could sign an agreement with a third party such as the FSF or invent some Source Code Vault Foundation.)

Yes indeed. But these organizations lack the legitimacy and level of standardization of the Copyright Office. Also, you now get to enforcement. In short, I think these "contractual" solutions are far more problematic...

Besides, what responsible-to-the-stock-holders business would voluntarily restrict their intellectual property rights?

Yes. If there are 10 products in a market, a company may bet that if they set their price to $500 and put an expiration date of 5 years that may "big" clients would buy their software over a competitor who is offering their software for $200 without an expiration date.

In short, it won't force anyone to limit their copyright; but it will allow reasonable programmers an option that they don't practically have at this time (since it is not standard) This just opens up another "dimention" in the competition spectrum. Right now, with the software I'm writing I'd do it -- in fact, I will most likely do it anyway.

Even if they somehow knew that they were going to go out of business and all their sourcecode would be lost, they probably still couldn't do it.

You're getting to the reasoning why contractual agreements won't work well.

HOWEVER, it would be nice if there was copyright law dealing specifically with legacy software, aka "abandonware". This is a big problem for both business and home customers -- I'm sure that sources exist for all sorts of old programs on disks and tapes in one of the programmer's basement, but they can't be released due to copyright considerations.

Good luck. Copyrighted software is an asset. Upon liquidation it will be treated as an asset. For example, Ashton Tate's Framework source code was sold to the highest bidder -- Selections and Functions.

They sold it off to a bunch of dBASE consultants bent on building the "next big database company".

These are the three places where old software goes:

* it is junked

* it becomes open source

* or is relegated to the backbenches of the Internet (see Superbase, dBASE or, gasp, Framework