[Coco] Deskmate 3 article link

[Rogelio Perea]

Besides the fact on both providing a GUI to run day-to-day applications
there is little else they could be compared with.

Tandy/RS's offering for the CoCo world was quite a closed up environment
(unlike MultiVue). A long time ago (this was the time of the CoCo & OS9
Fidonet echoes) I asked around if anyone had ever seen documentation on how
to write applications for Deskmate and the results were negative. The
applications provided are bare bones; without knowing much about how they
were built I still believe that through the use of some clever programming,
more usefulness could have been incorporated into them. For example: the
TEXT application offers a basic text editor but lacks any printing
formatting codes (fonts, attributes, pagination, etc).

Once the CoCo 3 version came out, both the text editor and the spreadsheet
received a revamp that allowed them to use the 80 column screen, the drawing
app was actually very good on the CoCo 3 considering the constraints of the
suite. I never got to use the terminal application on either Deskmate
releases.

Deskmate since the 64k CoCo days provided for an easy entry to the
integrated apps world, and to really enjoy the system (as with all OS9
things), having a two disk drive system made everything better. I ported the
two CoCo 1/2 Deskmate disks into a single 40dsdd one modified OS9L1 boot
(D.P. Johnson's SDISK), the suite got quite better to use, disk 0 as the
system disk and disk 1 keeping all the data files.

Now, comparing Deskmate 1 to other suites offered for other 64k computers at
the time, I really think Deskmate came up ahead from all :-)



-- RP




On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 8:52 PM, Todd Wallace <dragonbytes at cox.net> wrote:

> Interesting article.  I wonder if anyone has ever done a comparison between
> Deskmate3 for OS9 and Multiview for OS9.  I never played with Deskmate3 but
> I did have multiview years ago.  They seem very similar.
>
> - Todd Wallace
>