Found in the junk room, but not junk

I found three old package today. All great ol' packages for their time and in their own  way.

1. DataPerfect.
A DB package that started life as a legal office package, then moved to a more general application.

2. R:Base for Dos
A fabulous RDMS for Dos, I believe it could handle up to 80 tables. This book came with a 5.5 inch floppy disk. I have R:Base on 3.25 floppies, but probably unrunnable now. Also a couple of R:Base report writing and database management utilities. Same problem. But a pity as this Microrim product was fabulously powerful for its day.

3. t/b/m The Business Manager
This was a system by ABC Systems, Ltd. I think an Australian product that sought to be the be all and end all tool for the low power systems of the day (1987). The forerunner of SAP, I daresay!

Again, on 5.5 inch floppies and unrunnable today, but looks like a great concept.

Another wonderful package from 1988 was 'MyAssistant' a type of notebook, diary, calendar, contact list, todo list.

Plenty of flexibility for an all-in-one tool that ran as a TSR (terminate stay resident) package in a DOS system. Forerunner of...maybe Agenda, but less powerful, maybe Outlook and OneNote combined and to run in a mini memory footprint by today's standards.

Key Project Manager

It took me a little while to get the idea of this straight. Having been familiar with Primavera scheduling packages, this was a new approach.
These days we'd call it a task manager, and at that it seems to touch a point that is omitted by the very popular task manager category today: tasks have durations. We estimate these, then can give 'actuals'. Tracking both against a type category system would allow one to calibrate one's performance at estimating and get better at it.
It also fails to link tasks in a dependency relationship. I wouldn't want anything like P6 here, but to keep track of the mountain of tasks in a live work system (with serious volume) it is essential. Linking to document would also be important.
Those crits made, I like the interface and concept, although, naturally it is nowhere near as elegant or cross-platform/cloud useful like my current tool Pagico.

AskSam

This seems to have a single window interface, and relies on its search capability to find entries. It has a type of card file metaphor, but far less useful than Zoot, for example.

RFF

RF Flow: a flow charting package that just dipped its toe into the Windows world. I used it quite a lot for work process maps.

Zephyr

Another of Ward Mundy's great database packages. This was menu driven and could build applications from the menu.

I've only got a demo version...must write to Ward for an unlock so I can further experiment.

InfoSelect

This had to be my favourite package in the late 80s early 90s. It ran as a 'TSR', terminate and stay resident application, so it could be 'popped up' over a foreground program for intermittent use. I've mentioned it before, but here are some screen shots. Note the quirky menu item names.