Bear in the mind the product came along in the 1-2-3 and Agenda heyday, so a small utility wasn't really something they knew how to market. Unfortunately for Bill and Larry, Lotus really didn't know what to make of Magellan. Using the Gather feature (F5) you can copy portions of files and paste them into a single file. When the leave the application, Magellan automatically reappears. It you then chose to edit the file, simply hit the Launch key (F7) to open the parent application of that file type. You could choose to search the entire index, or just a subset such as all *.DOC files or every file under C:\DocsĪ column of matching files appears on the left-hand side of the screen ranked by closeness of match, from which you can then see its content on the right-hand side. Simply hit the Explore key (F9), type in a set of words on what you're looking for, and within a matter of seconds Magellan finds all files matching the phrase. Incredibly, the every-word index created by Magellan took up only about 1 MB for every 20 MB indexed. One of its key strengths was its fuzzy search capability which connected files by relative frequency of keywords, allowing the user to organise related data no matter where or in what format if existed on the user's computer. Both stayed on as employees of Lotus for 7 more years, creating products under the Lotus brand such as HAL (the natural language interface for Lotus 1-2-3) and Magellan. Magellan was the brainchild of Bill and Larry Gross, whose former company, GNP Development, had been bought by Lotus Development in 1986. Main Screen showing list of matching files on left and content on right Magellan is a $139 information manager that lets you locate any and every related piece of information on your disk in under 3 seconds, display the information in context, and launch into that program that was the source of the information." Lotus Magellan could well be the finest utility ever written for the PC.
In 1989, PC Magazine had this to say about Magellan: " Move over, Peter Norton. Such viewers included Lotus 1-2-3, dBASE III, WordPerfect, Word, DisplayWrite, WordStar, and MultiMate. With its ability to open 16 different file formats for viewing without the need to load the application (or even have it installed), it was a very useful tool for anyone with a lot of disparate data across many media. Initial indexing was offered at the time of install, which could sometimes take 1 hour to several hours depending on how many files were stored. This product was an interesting concept - essentially it scanned the contents or your hard disk and floppy disks and built a "master index" of its content.
It's retail price was $179 to $199, but was often discounted to below $100.
tab-separated time and corresponding amplitude values for each data point.Lotus Magellan was a DOS-based search indexing tool announced by Lotus Software in January 1989 and shipped that April.
Notes: Used to designate files with comma-separated time and corresponding amplitude values for each data point. Depending on which method you used to save the data (see above):
prn file extension when naming your file.Ĥ. Use the 'File - Save As' command and choose the. Place the waveform into the window by manually creating the waveform or by opening an existing file.Ģ.