FPTech Mailing

[Mike Schwartz]

> On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 02:01:41PM -0400, Walter D Vaughan Jr thus spoke:
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > end of the big, honkin' orange manual in a binder - arguably the
> > > last comprehensive and well-organised documentation I ever saw for
> > > the product.
> > [Walter D Vaughan Jr]
> > Dang, ORANGE?
> > All I have are brown plastic Profile16 and blue cloth filePro16 binders.
> > Though I do have a clear glass filePro candy jar nearby...

     I just looked and I have my filePro 1.0.0 manual dated December 1,1985.
I was looking for my "0.95" manual dated sometime in 1984, which was the
typewritten and then photocopied manual for the first Tandy model 16 Xenix
release of filepro.  Marve Wyman and I at American Can were heavily into
"Profile" and "mathpack", so we were given the opportunity to be one of the
beta testers for the new Xenix version. 

     Unfortunately, I may have thrown that out a year or two ago when I went
through some heavy-duty housecleaning...

      I still have all the other manuals (orange, blue, black) although I've
loaned some of them out to people who wanted some sort of paper manual.

      In 2005 I contracted out to a company who had about a half-dozen
filepro programmers working there already.  They were unaware that there was
a filePro manual.  They were also unaware that Stuart Werner at STN had
written any filePro text books, or that this email list existed.  

     The company parted ways with its former development team on unfriendly
terms, and I asked this new group of programmers how they had managed to
learn filePro.  They showed me a version 4.5 "new commands" supplement that
they passed around amongst themselves, and had found the "help" keys, so
they taught themselves all they knew about filePro from those 2 items.
They were shocked that when I showed them that there was a real filePro
manual!    

Mike Schwartz