MacProject in the Wild?

[Scott Baret]

As I looked through the Claris catalog, I couldn't help but wonder....

...did many people use MacProject?

I see the premise of it, but it seems it just had a really, really, really small niche market.

I've known of its existence for a long time, but only now have I wondered how many actually used it...

 

[IPalindromeI]

Gantt charts are the other cocaine for middle managers. The other cocaine is cocaine.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

LOL Had I remembered MacProject existed I would have used it long time ago. I ended up using Powerpoint and let me tell you, Powerpoint sucks for that sort of thing.

Next time I'll have to do that kind of stuff again, I'll fire up mini vMac and MacProject. I can already see my tutor looking at me with eyes agog.

 

[beachycove]

Claris Impact will do much the same thing as MacProject, but which of the two products was more fully featured? I'm assuming MacProject, despite its being earlier.

 

[IPalindromeI]

Claris Impact is more presentation software, I thought? MacProject does planning and ＧＡＮＴＴ　ＣＨＡＲＴＳ.

 

[beachycove]

Impact had timechart/ project management capabilities. It also had a word processor, etc.

 

[CC_333]

Impact eventually got rolled into ClarisWorks as its presentation component, didn't it?

c

 

[Cory5412]

I have Impact on the 840av. I'll need to install CW6 on something and look again at CW4 and CW5/AW5, because I don't remember 4 and 5 having presentations, and Impact and AW6 are far enough apart that it seems unlikely the presentation bits came from Impact.

Impact is very interesting. It's most of what ClarisWorks has, but a little bit higher grade. Like, Business ClarisWorks. It had a spreadsheet module and a word processor with a dedicated outlining mode and some other neat things.

 

[stepleton]

MacProject is the direct successor of LisaProject. Both were written by Debra Willrett:

http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/04/04/founder-story-debra-willrett-on-inventing-macproject/

LisaProject is supposed to have been used by NASA extensively, or at least that's something you find in the Wikipedia article about the Lisa (citing Walter Isaacson's book). LisaProject (and later MacProject) also captured the heart of a planning expert named Jim Halcomb, who would take his Lisa to his clients (some associated with famous engineering projects) and display project plans on large screens (or he wanted to do this, anyway):

https://books.google.com/books?id=jC4EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA36&ots=jRZ5v1R7aS&dq=apple%20lisa%20halcomb&pg=PA36#v=onepage&q=apple%20lisa%20halcomb&f=false

He even seems to have written his own modified LisaProject:

https://archive.org/stream/Infoworld-1983-11-28#page/n33/mode/2up/search/halcomb

But that's not even the impressive thing. Back on Wikipedia, if you believe the article for MacProject, Halcomb wasn't always carrying around an ordinary Lisa but eventually "a Lisa computer housed in a case designed to fit under an aircraft seat." Naturally, there is no citation. I would love to know anything more about that! Honestly, I'm not certain how this could be accomplished at all.

 

[james_w]

But that's not even the impressive thing. Back on Wikipedia, if you believe the article for MacProject, Halcomb wasn't always carrying around an ordinary Lisa but eventually "a Lisa computer housed in a case designed to fit under an aircraft seat." Naturally, there is no citation. I would love to know anything more about that! Honestly, I'm not certain how this could be accomplished at all.

Yeah that is pretty hard to imagine! The I/O backplane and cards alone are a tad on the bulky side...