IBM Office/36

Office/36 was a suite of applications marketed by IBM from 1983 to 2000 for the IBM System/36 family of midrange computers. IBM announced its System/36 Office Automation (OA) strategy in 1985.[1]

Office/36 could be purchased in its entirety, or piecemeal. Components of Office/36 include:[2][3][4]

  • IDDU/36, the Interactive Data Definition Utility.
  • Query/36, the Query utility.
  • DisplayWrite/36,[5] a word processing program.
  • Personal Services/36,[5] a calendaring system and an office messaging utility.

Query/36 was not quite the same as SQL, but it had some similarities, especially the ability to very rapidly create a displayed recordset from a disk file. Note that SQL, also an IBM development, had not been standardized prior to 1986.

DisplayWrite/36, in the same category as Microsoft Word, had online dictionaries and definition capabilities, and spell-check, and unlike the standard S/36 products, it would straighten spillover text and scroll in real time.

Considerable changes were required to S/36 design to support Office/36 functionality, not the least of which was the capability to manage new container objects called "folders" and produce multiple extents to them on demand. Q/36 and DW/36 typically exceeded the 64K program limit of the S/36, both in editing and printing, so using Office products could heavily impact other applications. DW/36 allowed use of bold, underline, and other display formatting characteristics in real time.

References
  1. Wohl, Amy (17 June 1985). "IBM whets OA mart appetites, but when will it deliver?". Computerworld. Vol. 19 no. 24. IDG. p. 41. ISSN 0010-4841.
  2. "System/36 Integrated office applications" (PDF). IBM Corporation. G580-0454-5.
  3. "BellSouth Advanced Systems announces marketing agreement with IBM". The Southern Herald. 120 (6). Liberty, Mississippi. May 23, 1985. p. 3. Business applications for IBM's System/36 integrated office applications include: word processing, electronic mail, messaging and information distribution; merging of text and data; communications and distributed data processing; and business graphics
  4. Durr, Michael; Walker, Dwayne (1985). Micro to mainframe: creating an integrated environment. Addison-Wesley Longman. p. 166. ISBN 0201111551. PS/36 is part of a total System 36 integrated office support plan. In conjunction with PS/36, DisplayWrite/36 is offered for word processing and Query/36 is provided for datafile manipulation. Much as PS/370 does, PS/36 offers advanced office solutions such as electronic document distribution, calendar management, directory support, and group processing.
  5. "IBM's ad hoc strategy". Network World. Vol. 3 no. 12. IDG. 26 May 1986. p. 34. ISSN 0887-7661.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.