Valdocs
VALuable DOCumentS by Rising Star Industries is an obsolete Pseudo-GUI WYSIWYG framework/OS for document creation and management, written as a set of interactive application and system modules which ran only on Epson's QX-10 and QX-16 computers. A version designed to run on the IBM PC was in development when Rising Star closed in 1986.
Valdocs shipped to beta testers c. late 1982. Beta and initial production releases of Valdocs' application modules were written in the Forth programming language while its system-oriented modules (such as E-Mail and disk utilities) were written in Z-80 Assembly Language. Later releases of Valdocs' applications were written in the C programming language with some modules written in compiled RSI Basic.
The initial release of Valdocs included WYSIWYG word processor and spreadsheet applications (with onscreen fonts, an UNDO key, keyboard macros and multiple screen formats), a cardfile database, an E-Mail/communications module, and a desktop manager with an address book, mailing list manager, notepad, spell checker, ValDraw & ValPaint, calculator and more. Chris Rutkowski and Roger Amidon worked on the preliminary QX-10 design; Amidon continued designing software for the QX system after Epson and Rising Star Inc. stopped production. Graphic and other software for the QX-10 and QX-16 were developed by program designers such as Dan Oja and Nelson Donley.
Switching between programs was done by pressing an associated hotkey on the QX-10's keyboard (which was specifically designed to support Valdocs, including an UNDO key) or by selecting a program from a menu the hotkey invoked. The keyboard was referred to as HASCI (Human Application Standard Computer Interface) after the user interface with the same name pioneered by Rising Star Industries.
Valdocs was ahead of its time, but there were three major problems with the QX-10 and QX-16. The computer ran at only 4 MHz and was very slow. Using the TPM system was too complicated for most users, similar to that of raw MS-DOS. Worst of all, Valdocs was written in a forth dialect instead of in assembly language and the system was loaded with bugs that resulted in numerous fatal errors. Users would often spend hours writing a document only to see all of that hard work lost in a system crash. Roger Amidon created a program called QX Cure-all that was designed to recover a lost document, but it worked only about half the time. Amidon created other utility software as well as a bootrom. Even with all of the added improvements, the system was just too slow and flawed to compete with companies such as Apple and Microsoft.
Read more about this topic: Epson QX-10