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The Valdocs Integrated Software
System, by Tim Babcock:
One of the few computers that could
be used for both CP/M and MS-DOS.
I worked for Creative Computers in Seattle back in 1985 (a local Epson
dealer at the time). Our store sold several systems of both the
QX-10 and QX-16 models. We also has classes on the Valdocs
Integrated Software System. The integrated software system that was
ahead of its time.
I taught some of our customes Valdocs as well. There were some bugs
in Valdocs but you could teach people ways to get around them. It
took several disks to load up the software but it was a nice system to
work with and probably would have beat Lotus Symphony (the popular
integrated office system back then) hands down. The lack of a hard
drive was a problem.
I did work on one system just before Rising Star Software pulled the plug
on which was the final version of Valdocs. It contained an optical
serial mouse (optical mice in those days were fast but required a grid
mirror as a mouse pad to reflect the beam of light to the other sensor on
the mouse) and a ram disk system (elminating the need to load up the disks
since the memory had a seperate power supply). With these two
systems in use, it was a very fast and very professional integrated
software system. Very expensive at the time as well. I think
it was $1500.00 for a full Valdocs system with mouse and ramdisk.
Nelson Shannon reports:
The system that I had access to, primarily ran TP/M, which was an
extension to CP/M-80. This specialized OS handled the RAM bank-switching
and the bitmapped screen graphics. There was also a normal CP/M-80 for it
which did not make direct use of the graphics or extra memory.
The original software was probably the first fully integrated business
software package with WYSIWYG formatting. It was written by Rising Star
Software, and I believe it was all in Forth. It was not particularly fast,
but it was doing an amazing amount of work on a simple 4 MHz Z80.
Samuel Furem says:
The QX-10 and the QX-16 were sold with a bundled integrated software
package that included everythig that you were going to need; ever.
It is my belief that all of the integrated software packages in use today,
and in use for the past several years, such as Lotus Suite, Microsoft
Office and the WordPerfect Suite as well as any others were copied from
the Epson.
Gary Thomson adds:
During my time at P & M Data Services (an Epson dealer in the UK) and
not too long after the launch of the QX-10/QX-16 machines, we witnessed a
demo of a 'new & revolutionary' operating system developed by Epson
called "Taxi".
Epson "Taxi" was the first ever GUI operating system I had ever
saw (Didn't see an Apple machine until 1986) and the system was shown off
by our regional Epson sales rep. Funnily enough the Microsoft Windows (tm)
turned out to be very, very similar to the Epson system. Makes you think,
doesn't it?
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