[Info-vax] Desktop office environments on VMS, was: Re: Final Orace release on VMS.

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 11/16/20 1:39 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2020-11-16, Marc Van Dyck <marc.gr.vandyck at invalid.skynet.be> wrote:
>> on 15/11/2020, Jan-Erik Söderholm supposed :
>>>
>>> VMS has never been a mainstream office desktop environment, outside of
>>> the technical area, as far as I know.
>>
>> In a previous life, I developped financial trading software, and
>> installed trading rooms where each trader desk was equipped with a
>> VAXstation. VAX Clusters of 3 boot nodes and 50+ satellites. But yes,
>> that was a long time ago, and in this business, costs were not really
>> an issue... Was fun, though.
>>
> 
> ALL-IN-1 was apparently popular during the 1980s, but office applications
> on PCs killed that market stone dead.
> 
> WordPerfect was a viable third-party product on VMS for a while as well,
> but PCs also killed that market stone dead. The unique feature in WordPerfect
> was its Reveal Codes facility which also allowed the codes to be directly
> edited and not just viewed.
> 
> WPS-Plus (a DEC word processor) was available on VMS at one point although
> I know nothing about it and I don't know whether it had anything like
> WordPerfect's Reveal Codes.
> 
> DECdirect also helped here for a while IMHO in being able to supply some
> products directly without having to go through full sales procedures.
> 
> However, like Phillip's desired web browser, the VMS market for all these
> products is long-dead and has long been replaced by PC-based applications.
> 
> Simon.
> 

My 1986 copy of the VAX Software Source Book has 50 pages of
items under the heading Office Systems.  And there are several
other categories that contain systems that would qualify (at
least to me!) as desktop applications.Management, Law, Personnel,
Sales and Marketing, Health Care, Word Processing, Accounting,
Financial Management, Education.  Back in the early days VMS
probably had as much on the desktop as it did in the data-center.

bill