Re: common place apps in forth available, for example irc, or multi

On Feb 11, 2:01=A0am, John Doty <j...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
=2E
=2E
=2E
> It was litigated out of the market. So we can't know if it would have
> been a success.

That's a bait and switch. I carefully qualified my original
description 'it
was "better" as a product' with '...as a product'. It was in use as
the spreadsheet issued by Monash University for MBA units, when I did
mine (1990-1993). They had obtained a grandfather arrangement to stay
with it for a while even after commercial sales had been halted, since
they had already bought it with a licence to issue it for course work
like that. Sounds like success as a product to me - all the lack of
op****tunity for COMMERCIAL success shows is that we don't know if the
whole deal would have worked, paperback software cheap pricing
business model and all. Oh, and I kept it around on my home PC for use
for a while after that, since I was given it for general personal non-
commercial use.

>
> And again, I said 'never had *much* success at "me too" products'. A
> single counterexample is insufficient here, even if not flawed.

That's why I wasn't asserting anything like that much, just
contributing one minor data point against your position and being
careful to preface it with "That's not entirely correct". My own
feeling is, Forth can achieve and has achieved worthwhile clones in
earlier days, but that these days there is a lot more proprietary
stuff like data formats, and more libraries etc. to reverse engineer,
so that the cost of doing it doesn't make sense any more.

Oh, yes - it was called VP-Planner, but by the time I met it there was
an upgraded version around that was called VP-Plus. The main
functional improvement on Lotus 123 that I could see was background
processing for calculation and printing - my guess is, from the
Forth's own multi-tasking. I still have it around somewhere, on
mislaid diskettes and on an old PC that has trouble booting these
days. One day I might spend some time getting it up to see if there
are any old files worth salvaging; maybe I'll get hold of VP-Plus too.
P.M.Lawrence.