Happy Anniversary - 20 Years of Minder

October 2020 marks the 20th Anniversary of the Windows version of Minder.

Prior to 2020, like most other software in the dark ages, Minder was DOS based. Actually, that’s not quite true as it actually ran on another operating system as well.

Bonus points if you remember the name of that multi-user OS.

For the younger generation, this meant we did without colourful graphic screens, they were green text on a black background, nor did we have a silly little thing called a ‘mouse’. There was no internet, no email and a ‘mobile’ phone was the size of a house brick.

Instead we used the Function key’s up the top of the keyboard, as well as keyboard short cuts, like ALT-C, for cancel and ALT-O for OK.

And Minder remains one of the few Business Management Solutions that can still be driven almost entirely without using the mouse, those ALT key’s still work!

In those 20 years we have seen many many changes to Minder, back in 2000 we were at major version C5, with many many minor releases, then C6, C7, C8 and C9. Again with many minor releases in-between (a minor release would happen almost monthly!).

Now we are at C10, with C11 just around the corner. Single Touch Payroll is a reality (phase 2 will be 2021) and interfaces to 3rd party products like ‘Detrack’ are in daily use. Almost all invoices are now sent via email, with a few companies using EDI. We are getting ready for ‘e-invoice’, which will totally change the way you process Orders and Invoices.

So lot’s more to come over the next 20 years.

And the name of that OS, there were a few, C/CPM (Concurrent CPM), MPM, which ran on the ICL machines, and Multi-User DOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiuser_DOS. We also had sites using Digital Research’s DR-Dos, which was also available as multi-user. And somebody remembers using DataPac, which later became Citrix.