Stone Tools: a 8/16-bit productivity software blog

[Rhetorica]

Stone Tools: Exploring retro productivity software from the 8/16-bit era. No games, just work.

Spotted this on today's This Week in Retro podcast, which is generally very games-focused. The first article is up now, cataloguing a comprehensive history of Deluxe Paint, which, of course, was the raster art program prior to Photoshop achieving sentience; Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D all owe their art to Deluxe Paint (albeit on the PC rather than the Amiga as showcased here. From what I know the PC version of DPaint was basically an exclave of the Amiga user experience, including the hold-right-mouse-button-to-access-menu-bar shenanigans. Even on SunOS, there was a clone, Caldera Graffiti, which is blatantly still using Workbench-style borders and fonts from its Amiga ancestor TVPaint.)

Here's hoping the blog covers some Mac software that got NeXT ports in future posts—there's no shortage of such programs.

[Ndru]

FYI He posted a long article on Improv today; not sure when I'll get a chance to read it, but it looks like quite an exploration:

    https://stonetools.ghost.io/lotusimprov-next/

Found via Mastodon:

    https://mastodon.social/@stonetoolsblog/117425482281015764

"Here at the convergence of International Spreadsheet Day, the 15th anniversary of Steve Jobs's death, and the 1st anniversary of Stone Tools, it's time to break out one of the big guns.

Lotus Improv holds a semi-mythical status amongst the computing faithful. Heck, the first time I experienced it, it literally gave me the idea to start this blog, "I need to talk about this."

How well does the origin of the pivot table hold up in a world of pivot tables? It's... well..."

[ChristopherDrum]

Hey there, I'm the author of the blog. Just a quick note, for those wondering, "Is this worth my time to read?" Pito Salas took the time to drop a comment on the Improv post and he really liked it. So if it's good enough for the guy who invented Improv, maybe you'll like it, too?

[jade_nekotenshi]

It got me interested in playing around with Quantrix to see what it can do. I have it for all four architectures, but I've never really monkeyed with it!

[ZombiePhysicist]

Both Quantrix and improv are great. I didn't like improv 2.0 on windows nor Quantrix the current Java edition.

The next version are very nice. I like improv more form2 reasons, it has the toilet paper dispenser, and it's chives for charts, I love those aesthetics.  Qantrix is more powerful.

All that said, if you're ever forced to solve multi dimensional problems, I've encountered no better too than those to make thinking in greater than 3 dimensions relatively easy.