Whole Earth Software Review Spring

OFFIX: Simple, Useful and Cheap New personal computer owners share certain frustrations. Their promising “productivity tool’ is complex. Software looks simple when the dealer demonstrates it; then turns out to be a bear to learn and comes with a book full of instructions, hints, dire warnings and Catch-22’s. If you want to read a book, you would have bought one, right? OFFIX attracts us with a seductive simplicity based on a graphic replication of the physical steps you go through to gather, organize and structure the information you use. It’s simple enough to be shipped without documentation. All necessary instructions are available on the screen and the codes used to make OFFIX perform are blessedly consistent and logical. They pop up on the screen at your command; disappear when they aren’t needed. All this good news is wrapped up in a most welcome trend. Software has cost too much since personal computers appeared. You can get a complete microcomputer for around $1,500 these days, but a single software package can still cost $500-1,000. That's wrong. OFFIX is part of a new direction in software pricing: downward. It’s a basic set of office tools for only $99. More about OFFIX starting on page 47. —Richard Dalton The book is the Whole Earth Software Catalog, first edition to appear late in 1984, published by Doubleday. Its subject is everything having to do with personal computers. Its function1is to” evaluate the best of what’s available for personal computers. The on-going magazine has the same subject. Its function is to find the best of what’s available for personal computers. A clear impossibility. Consequently, a clear necessity. Rather than quote the usual astounding statistics of the runaway growth and product proliferation, I can report on my own continuing dismay, delight and intensely educational confusion facing this marketplace as a shopper as well as would-be cataloger. A privileged participant in one of the inner circles of computer mania — COMDEX, the microcomputer and software manufacturer/vendor mating dance at Las Vegas last November — I faced eleven miles of aisles of _ exhibitors. Nicely dressed fast-track professionals gobbled their hot dogs crouched on the sticky concrete floor because there was no space or time for niceties like chairs. If that’s the view from inside, what does this bizarre bazaar look like to customers? Something has to provide an overview. Too bad, it’s too smoky and fast-moving a battlefield for an overview. And yet . . . if we can take it piece by piece . . . and assemble the pieces . . . and use the very technology being reviewed to maintain constant updates... . If readers are willing to do through a publication what they do in person — share advice. . . . If there’s a place with the products and equipment and expertise to compare and check the advice. . . . The impossible might become merely difficult.…