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Dinosaur Sightings: Lotus Symphony 3.0

By // November 11, 2007, 11:35 PM PST

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  • By Greg Shultz

    As you know, IBM/Lotus recently released an office suite by the name of Symphony based on OpenOffice. However, this isn’t the first office suite to go by the name Symphony.

    Back in 1985, when DOS-based computers ruled the world, a company called Lotus Development Corporation decided to capitalize on the success of its groundbreaking Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application with a new integrated application suite called Symphony.

    When it was released, Symphony cost $695 and came on twelve 360K floppies.

    Promotional material from the time described Lotus Symphony 3.0:

    Lotus Symphony 3.0 is the one software package for all your business needs. Conduct business in perfect harmony. Symphony Release 3 combines powerful spreadsheet, word processing, graphics, communications, and database in an exciting graphical windows environment. Each Symphony module has great dimension because it works in concert with others.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    Back in the early DOS application days, learning how to use software was hard work. Computers were persnickety, manuals were pretty sparse, and the third-party how-to book market was still getting off the ground. Fortunately, just about every piece of software came with a tutorial that you had to use in order to learn how to use the application. Being a package of five integrated applications, Lotus Symphony 3.0 had a pretty elaborate tutorial.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    At the beginning of this tutorial, you were introduced to each one of the five work environments in Symphony. SHEET was the spreadsheet, DOC was the word processor, GRAPH was the graphing application, FORM was the database application, and COMM was the modem communication program.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    In addition to explaining how the features in Symphony’s environments worked, each tutorial included a hands-on interactive section that used an imaginary company that was planning a major worldwide sporting event as the basis for the lesson. The simple ASCII graphics are laughable by today’s standards.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    This hands-on part of the tutorial would present a particular environment simulation and walk you step-by-step through several of the main features presented in the tutorial in order to help re-enforce the main points of the tutorial.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    Since Symphony was essentially an evolutionary step in Lotus’ product development and was based mainly on Lotus 1-2-3, SHEET was the star component of Symphony 3.0. As such, SHEET was the environment that you entered into by default when you launched Symphony. In fact, the spreadsheet was actually the heart and soul of Symphony.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    The very top of the Symphony interface was called the Control Panel and it was essentially a combination of a menu bar and tool bar. Here, you can see that pressing [F9] displayed the Services menu, which was a universal menu that contained a set of submenus and commands that applied to all of the environments.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    Pressing [F10] displayed the Environment menu, which contained a set of submenus and commands that applied to currently active environment. Here you see the SHEET Environment menu.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    Pressing [Alt] [F10] displayed a menu that allowed you to change environments.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    The Control Panel also served as a dialog box, displaying prompts and other information that might find in a dialog box these days. Here you can see how you open or retrieve a file.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    While clunky by today’s standards, Symphony did have what was called a windowing system, which you accessed from the Window menu. Since Symphony’s SHEET spreadsheet environment could contain up to 8192 rows and 256 columns, more than could possibly be displayed on the screen at one time, the main function of the windowing system was to allow you to simultaneously view different parts of a big spreadsheet.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    Symphony’s windowing system could also allow you to concurrently work with other types of documents from within your spreadsheet and switch between them giving the illusion of a multitasking system. For example, you could create a letter in a DOC environment while working on a spreadsheet in SHEET.

    However, this simulated multitasking system involved a bit of smoke and mirrors in that rather than being separate entities, the other documents were actually embedded in unused cells in the currently active spreadsheet.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    While it was perfectly acceptable to use straight mathematical operations in SHEET (i.e. 5000 5000 6000), Symphony did provide you with an impressive number of functions, over 80 in all, that you could use to work with your numbers.

    Here I’ve used the commands on the Format menu to display the number as currency and to increase the width of the columns from their default value of 9 to 12 in order to accommodate the $ sign and the decimal places. As you can see, each cell contains codes that indicate the formatting options—C2 specifies Currency with two decimal places and W12 specifies that the column width is set to 12 characters.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    Of course, being able to translate numbers into visual displays has always been a big part of working with spreadsheets. In order to provide that functionality, Symphony provided the GRAPH environment that allowed you to choose from eight graph types. While GRAPH was actually a separate environment, you would generally work with graphs right from within SHEET since it contained the data that you wanted to visually display.

    To do so you would select the Graph command on the Sheet Environment menu. You then would have to select the options to create your graph.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    You could then preview your graph.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    In order to get to Symphony’s word processing environment, you selected DOC from the change environment menu. You could then begin typing your text in the DOC environment. Of course the text editing features in DOC were pretty basic. However, DOC did provide Search and Replace as well as Copy and paste.

    You can see here that the spreadsheet interface is indeed the heart and soul of Symphony. Notice in the Control Panel that the Copy operation uses spreadsheet terminology (the word Range) and references line and character numbers similar to the way that you would reference cells in a spreadsheet.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    Since Symphony was a DOS application, it was limited to working with in the first 640KB of RAM. Therefore, programmers back in those DOS days had to be very mindful of the size of the applications. And of course, that trickled over into the way that had to handle extra features, that today we take for granted. And this was especially true in a complex integrated suite such as Symphony.

    For example, Symphony’s DOC environment did indeed come with a spell checker, but it wasn’t loaded into memory be default. In fact, if you wanted to spell check your document you first had to load up the spell checking application as an add-in.

    To do so, you had to press F9 to access the Services menu and select the Applications Command. You then had to locate and select the Speller.app application.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    Once you loaded the spell checking application, you had to select all the text in the document and then select the verify command. Here you can see that the spell checker uses the Control Panel to display its findings.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    The DOC word processor also came with an outline environment called OUTLN which allowed you to create complex, organizational outlines complete with collapsible heading levels. Like the spell checker, the outliner wasn’t a default component, so you had to load it into memory on an as needed basis. However, depending on the memory usage situation, you might have had to unload another application, such as the spell checker, before you could load the outliner.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    When creating a database in Symphony, you started by entering the field names and formats in the SHEET environment. You then entered the FORM environment and reference the cells you created.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    Once you created your data entry form, you could begin entering data to create your database.

  • Lotus Symphony 3.0 for DOS

    At the time that Symphony was being developed, the Internet was still in its infancy and not widely accessible. However, lots of online services existed—you just had to have a modem and a communications application in order to get connected directly to the service’s server. Since Symphony was positioned as a business tool, being able to access online banking services or online stock information was a necessary feature. Symphony’s COMM was the modem communication program that allowed you to connect to pre-Internet online services.

    COMM also allowed you to use a Null Modem cable to create a two-computer peer-to-peer network.

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Cloud Enterprise Software

By Greg Shultz

As you know, IBM/Lotus recently released an office suite by the name of Symphony based on OpenOffice. However, this isn’t the first office suite to go by the name Symphony.

Back in 1985, when DOS-based computers ruled the world, a company called Lotus Development Corporation decided to capitalize on the success of its groundbreaking Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application with a new integrated application suite called Symphony.

When it was released, Symphony cost $695 and came on twelve 360K floppies.

Promotional material from the time described Lotus Symphony 3.0:

Lotus Symphony 3.0 is the one software package for all your business needs. Conduct business in perfect harmony. Symphony Release 3 combines powerful spreadsheet, word processing, graphics, communications, and database in an exciting graphical windows environment. Each Symphony module has great dimension because it works in concert with others.

About Greg Shultz

Greg Shultz is a freelance Technical Writer. Previously, he has worked as Documentation Specialist in the software industry, a Technical Support Specialist in educational industry, and a Technical Journalist in the computer publishing industry.

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