Lotus Symphony

Now they’ve really done it.  I’m so old that Lotus has reused as a product name for an entirely different product.

Back in 1984, before Lotus was part of IBM, and after the wildly successful release of Lotus 1-2-3, the first really popular spreadsheet program, the company released a follow-on product called “Symphony” that was a Ginsu knife of software.  Yes, it did spreadsheets, and it had a view of that spreadsheet that looked like a database, and a view that looked like a word processor, and it did graphics, and I’m sure it did something else too, but I can’t remember what it was.  It wasn’t as popular as 1-2-3, and I don’t know that there are many people around that even remember it.

But now, in the Open document format wars, Lotus has released an entirely different product called “Symphony.”  So I guess it wouldn’t be lying if I had it on my resume, because I really did use a product called “Symphony” at one time, just not it’s current incarnation…