I ran across this article and it made me think of all of the people that would come up to me at trade shows and tell me that they started using OverVUE in 1982 (the Mac didn’t come out until 1984).
I thought this part was especially hilarious.
Nobody seems to know very much about Nashoba Systems, but it is a favorite for namedropping too:
“I used FileMaker back in the Nashoba days.”
“Oh yeah? Well I looked at the old Pascal code. Fixed it up for them, too.”
Used OverVUE back in '87 (?) before the first edition of Panorama (not sure of the timing–it was a looooooong time ago), and was amazed by the programmability…how little did I know. Then came Panorama, and I’ve been running our company on it since 1991, with practically every version of Mac (and clone!) that’s come since. Frankly, I have no clue what I’d do without it. Panorama (and a lot of very fun programming) has made every common data task we have pretty much automated, and made my staff think I’m a wizard (just don’t peek behind the curtain…).
A couple of people have mentioned various dates. OverVUE first came out in August 1984. Panorama 1.0 was released in November 1988. Since Panorama is really an offshoot of OverVUE, that’s almost 39 years of continuous development, longer than anything else on the Macintosh (and maybe on the PC also?).
I bought OverVUE when in first came out. I started wit and Apple Lisa in 1984 and then traded it in for a Mac Plus when it came out. Don’t remember if OverVUE worked on the Lisa or whether it didn’t come out until the Mac Plus. Incidentally I still have the old Mac Plus and it still works (kinda). Wish I had kept the Lisa.
I got my first Mac in June 1984 and have been using OverVUE as soon as it was released and upgraded to Panorama and all its versions as soon as they were released. That means that the only app I have been using longer than OverVUE/Panorama must have been the Finder (if you can call this an app). I’ve been happily using OverVUE/Panorama for nearly 39 years!
I also started with OverVue. I had started using Microsoft File, and it was grinding to a slow and painful death on the one database I was using (taking up a full quarter of the 400K floppy I had it on). A very quirky friend of mine introduced me to OverVue, and I quickly abandoned File. That must have been around 1985. With only a brief detour into using Reflex, I’ve been using OverVue and Panorama ever since. I’ve always liked how much of the Apple toolkit was available to users. Thanks to Jim for keeping this alive!
OverVUE didn’t work on the Lisa OS, but Apple did sell a version of the Lisa that ran MacOS, so OverVUE did run on that.
OverVUE ran right from the beginning, on the original Mac 128k in 1984. In September of 1984 the Mac 512 came out, and of course OverVUE worked on that also. The Mac Plus didn’t come out until January 1986.
I hadn’t thought of this before, but I believe some version of OverVUE or Panorama has been able to run on every Macintosh ever shipped.
I still have the Lisa that I used for development in 1984. However, I only ever installed Apple’s developer tools on that machine, I never installed the Lisa OS or MacOS. In fact, I really only used the Lisa for a few weeks, just long enough to build the tools needed so that I could use a minicomputer to do Mac development. Up until the 1990s, all of the development of OverVUE and Panorama was done on an Alpha Micro minicomputer.
I used OverVUE and Hypercard when I was working at Enigma/Restless records in the mid/late mid 80’s. Then I quit that job and by the time i got my next gig up and running (in Detroit, of all places) Panorama had come out, so I bought that and have been using it ever since!
I was always pretty good at it but I really got into the coding aspect or Panorama when i was working on Waterworld. There are still comments in some of my code dating back to the early/mid 90s.
I just ran across a post on Mastodon with some pictures from ComputerWare in the mid 80s.
Why am I mentioning this here? When I saw this post, I thought I remembered that ComputerWare was a dealer for OverVUE. So I blew up the first picture, and sure enough, there’s a copy of OverVUE on the wall!
I believe that is the OverVUE 2.0 box, so this is probably 1986 or 1987. There is a MORE box in the lower right corner, that software was released in 1986.
I started with OverVUE around 1987 so I was a bit late to the party. That said, I started using SuperVUE (one of Jim Rea’s other creations) around 1980 on the AlphaMicro minicomputer system.
Ok, you definitely go way back! And SuperVUE did in fact come out in 1980. For those of you that weren’t AMOS users, SuperVUE was a word processor. Yep, I have written software other than databases.
ComputerWare was the store to buy Mac products in Palo Alto. I purchased MORE in August 1986 which was the best and maybe only presentation software for Mac at that time.
I used OverVUE, but can’t remember when I started. A local magazine that let me hang around and use their equipment (because I was the only one who would read the application manuals) adopted OverVUE. They eventually switched to Panorama, which I kept using after the non-profit I still work for got its own Macs.
Still feel like a newbie, but have been using it ever since. My favorite application.
Thanks Jim
I first came across OverVUE when I wrote a review for Infoworld on Macintosh databases. As I recall, I included all the databases at the time and concluded that OverVUE was my choice, as Panorama is my choice now.
I did run SuperVUE on an Alpha Micro for the family business for a while as well.
