A lament for my favourite software products

Well it's probably not strictly a lament,

If I were stuck on a desert island with my laptop and a choice of software, I would choose 3 things. PC Outline for sorting out my ideas, WordPerfect 5.1 for word processing them into a readable document, and Lotus Magellan for managing all the files.

The observant will have noticed that they are all DOS products, and the truly wide awake will realise that they have all been out of circulation for years.

PC Outline

It didn't do anything else. It was a lousy word processor, its printing ability was not great (just a simple text printout in a fixed pitch font), and the space formatting played havoc if you tried to import an outline into a word processor. But I found it adequate. I tend to print out an outline and write the document in the word processor by referring to the printed copy. The ideas in the document never seem to come together in the same way and the same order as in the outline anyway. I d id go through a brief period of making the outline elements into paragraphs in PC Outline, then removing the outline numbering and saving as a text file, and importing it into WordPerfect. I learnt recently that there is a rudimentary utility, PCOWP, for converting Outline files into WordPerfect documents.

I still use PC Outline now, for organising my ideas for writing research papers or tricky reports. And for analysing focus groups I have conducted.

So what has happened to it? Well, it seems to have gone through several owners, and by searching for it you can still find several sites from which to download it. Go for v3.34 rather than v3.37, because you can bypass the nag screen (v3.37 has a really ugly nag screen, which appears both at the start and end of the application, and which randomises the function key it requires you to push to get rid of the nag screen). I had been using v1.06, dated 1986, for years. V3.34 is dated 1987, and seems to have some bug fixes, while v3.37 is dated 1994, and seems to contain very little new apart from the upgraded nag screen.

If you search for it on the web, you will find out about Symantec GrandView, which seems to have inherited its mantle (and its designer!). But of course it is no longer available. Then there is something called MORE, a mac product, which did similar neat stuff (and which is also no longer available?. You can read someone else's lament about these products here. The guts of it is, there seems to be nothing like PC Outline around, so I'll keep using it. I hope the y2k bug doesn't blow it up.

WordPerfect 5.1

And guess what? It was fast, flexible, did all the things I wanted of it, and it almost never crashed. Try saying that about a modern word processor. These days, using WordPerfect 8 for Windows OK, the WYSIWYG is nice, but it does slow the thing down. And I do like being able to copy stuff between applications, and have too many applications open at once. But show me any other advantage of Windows over DOS. Bring on Linux!

Lotus Magellan

Lotus Magellan had incredible flexibility. You could tell it to ignore certain characters when it indexed, so I told it to ignore the special characters that separated outline elements in PC Outline. This meant it would even look for words at the start and end of outline elements in its fuzzy searches. Its macro language was very flexible, with keywords for concepts. I still use it to help with backups from my hard drive to the network, and for those times when I know a file is there somewhere, but I can't quite remember where. Don't just take my word about how good it is. Try here and here. Both give suggestions about somewhat similar modern-day applications.

The big problem with Magellan is that it has no new viewers. So, even if you do open it in a DOS box within Windows 95, you can't look at many of the latest files you have created. Where it will remain useful is in helping me to hunt for old files created in WordPerfect 5.1 or dBASE for DOS, or PC Outline, and so on. I just hope the y2k bug doesn't kill it.