The Office Before Office
In the early 1980s, when IBM had just turned the computing world upside down with the invention of the IBM PC, a company called Ashton-Tate launched revolutionary software: FRAMEWORK. This set of applications – word processor, spreadsheet, graphics, database, macro language, and so on – ran in a text-based window environment on MS-DOS 2.0. Today we tell you what it was like, the Office before Office.
In 1989, Microsoft launched a tool that is now the main office suite: Microsoft Office. This type of “office application package”, composed of tools designed to meet the basic computing needs of any user or company, has become very popular today. With MS Office, for example, you can process text, use spreadsheets, manage databases, create presentations, and – among other things – write “macros” (small programs) in a programming language that is a subset of Visual Basic that can add extra functions to those provided by Microsoft. The main pieces of this puzzle are Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, and for many users this package is the first tool of its kind. However, this is not so.
FRAMEWORK: A Suite Before Its Time
Although the idea and implementation of an “office application suite” is almost as old as computing itself, one of the first to become truly useful and highly appreciated by its users was “FRAMEWORK”. FRAMEWORK is part of the huge group of integrated application packages that invaded the world of personal computers in the 1980s. Version 1.1, available even in Spanish and released in 1983, offered users the possibility of doing their work through a windowed interface.
This, which today is nothing new, worked – and very well – on the star operating system of the time: IBM DOS 2.0. There were still two years to go before Microsoft put “Windows 1,0” on sale, but the programmers at Ashton-Tate, the company that created FRAMEWORK and the database manager D-BASE, used the window metaphor so that their users could more easily access the tools of their suite.
FRAMEWORK included a word processing tool, capable of performing “feats” such as justifying and centering text, highlighting words by underlining or bolding them, etc. It had a “spreadsheet” in which the user used the now so popular grid of cells arranged in rows and columns to “process” numerical data, performing simulations, planning, and any type of numerical modeling.
FRAMEWORK's database manager was very powerful – it used the “relational model” – and allowed management of data stored in tables. A tool for creating charts, something still not very popular in a world dominated by text-based screens, offered the possibility of converting numerical data into bar charts, line charts, overlaid bars, X-Y, “pie” or dot charts.
Inside FRAMEWORK: Tools and FRED
In addition to these tools, very similar in function to those we find in any office suite today, FRAMEWORK had a communications program – the internet was still very distant – that took advantage of a modem (2400 baud or a little more) to link our computer with others and transmit the information contained in any of the tool's windows. An additional component, for “outlining”, facilitated the creation of document indexes. Something similar to the old “notebook” of MS Office, which allowed maintaining “indexes” made up of the chapters and subchapters of users' documents. But what was really useful (even though some users didn't even try to do anything with it) was FRED.
Although this type of “suite” aims to keep the user from having to resort to programming to solve their business, FRED offered the possibility of creating small programs to automate tasks within FRAMEWORK. The main characteristic of this language was that it allowed using any of FRAMEWORK's options along with its own statements – very similar to those of BASIC or PASCAL languages – to improve, replace, or add functions to the package. Using FRED it was possible to develop complete applications, intended for those coworkers who didn't even know how to use FRAMEWORK. This true “grandfather” of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) allowed creating new “menu trees” in the suite's windows, from which the new functions created by the programmer were “called”. Almost 30 years ago, and in DOS..
Performance and Hardware
The publications of the time highlighted as advantages of this package its great flexibility, the existence of FRED, the window-based interface and option lists, the possibility of “run DOS commands” from within the environment, and the communication system. All this – except for “run DOS commands”, of course – is taken for granted today and is available in any application.
But not all was roses for FRAMEWORK. Many complained about the “huge hardware requirements” needed for it to run smoothly: sometimes, even with the 384KB of RAM (yes, a third of a “mega”, about 20,000 times less than the 8GB of RAM that your average computer has today) required by the package, “Insufficient Memory” messages often appeared when trying to print multiple copies of a document.
A Legacy That Lasted
Although it seems incredible, this program had support until almost a decade ago. It was possible to find versions for machines as small as a handheld HP-200LX or Psion, for Windows, or even a multinational version installable from the internet. Did you know it?.
