8 May
2009
8 May
'09
8:24 p.m.
2009/5/9 Teo Zenios <teoz at neo.rr.com>:
Lotus was in a steep decline before IBM purchased them
having lost the
office desktop wars at the time. A shame realy since I liked Lotus Ami Pro
for Windows 3.1 quite a bit (which I think they purchased from somebody
else?). I have a boxed Copy of Lotus Suite 3.0 for Win 3.x and someday I
might find the OS/2 native version.
Lotus bought in both Approach and Ami (properly, Am?). Am? came from
Samna Development Corporation, creators of Samna Executive, the DOS WP
aimed at senior managerial and directorial staff. I only ever met one
person who used it - and I supported virtually every DOS WP going in
the 1980s.
Samna Executive was very odd and /profoundly/ unlike other DOS apps,
but it did have a sort of WYSIWYG and a print preview before just
about anybody else. Horrible app, though. :?)
Am? was the first Windows WP app, long before Word for Windows. Aldus'
Flintstone might have been first, but Bill Gates met Paul Brainerd at
a trade show and when told of the not-yet-alpha testing WYSIWYG GUI
WP, he lied through his teeth and told Brainerd not to bother since MS
Word was nearly ready and would beat Aldus onto the market.
Brainerd went home and cancelled the product. Gates went home and told
his dev team to start writing a Windows WP, PDQ, because someone else
was going to beat them to it.
Well, Word for Windows 1.0 was rubbish. 2.0 wasn't great but was
better. Then it leapt to v6.0 which was actually pretty good and is
basically the same app as Word 11, more generally known as Word 2003.
But Samna beat them to market, and considering the weird horror that
was Samna's DOS apps, Am? was a beauty. Fast, elegant, easy.
The only remnant of Samna corp and its name is the .SAM extension of
Lotus Word Pro docs, and the chief influence it had on MS Word was
that Microsoft copied Am?'s "Full Screen View" - still my preferred
way of working in MS Word to this day. Often in white-on-blue mode,
for me.
And I think I have a copy of the OS/2 version somewhere, but I don't
think it was the last version... I'll look.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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