[Coco] CoCo Office suite

[farna at amc-mag.com]

Nobody has mentioned Tandy's "Deskmate"!!??? I know it wasn't the best,
used too much memory, but it was an OS-9 based office suite. I think VIP
was the best, but I never really used it. My two main productivity
programs were Telewriter for word processing (TW64 and the later CC3
version... tw128) and Ultimaterm for my terminal program. I used a
checkbook program from The Rainbow at first, later one that I wrote for
the CC3. Never did anything with graphics on the CoCo, and never needed a
spreadsheet. I did use a mailing lable program, but can't remember what it
was. Even after I got a PC for producing "the world of 68' micros" and my
CoCo books, I did most of my initial writing on the CoCo, and used it for
the Internet and e-mail until graphical pages took over the Internet to
the point a text based browser wasn't practical. "Tandy's Little Wonder",
the text for "Mastering OS-9", and even my first Rambler (car) book were
all initially written on the CoCo. I'd transfer the text to the PC to
layout pages in PageMaker and just do the final editing there. PM had a
built-in spell checker, so that was easier to do on the PC. Graphics on
the CoCo just wasn't good enough to print anything remotely professional
looking, though I'm sure some will disagree. Even a 300 dpi laser printer
was better than anything I ever got out of the CoCo. There were a couple
DTP programs suitable for club or family newsletters, but I needed
something better.