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Comment by Grumbledour | Hacker News Reader

I did this a few days ago and was really surprised by the copying and untaring not having progress bars. I know this thing is old, but as it is heralded so often as a really great system, this little detail struck me as really user unfriendly and I would have not expected to find something like this there.

I have to admit, setting this up was kind of a pain in general and I am not sure if it is worth the trouble. Maybe someone can give some examples while it might be? I personally wanted to take a look at Lotus Improv, but could after setting it all up not find a version for intel. I guess there never was one?

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There never was a lotus improv for non NeXT hardware. Lotus killed NeXT improv basically lay immediately after it came out.

What happened was lighthouse design came in and built an exact clone of improv called quantrix. The manuals were interchangeable - I’m actually learning them now.

I bought a boxed copy of improv and quantrix manuals. It is /excellent/ we really have a lot of excellent ideas in our computing past.

If you want a copy of the lighthouse apps (they gave away licenses when sun bought them in 1996 or so. ) check out next computers.org They have a file section.

Do you mean a NeXTSTEP version for non NeXT hardware because there was a Windows version?

He means for next os.

So this gets complicated so Improv 1.0 is available on m68k next hw.

Improv 2.0 was only available for windows x86.

Lighthouse design quantrix for nextstep is available on m68k, x86, hp-parisc and sun hardware.

Then there’s an offshoot of lighthouse design quantrix which is quantrix modeller written in Java and available for windows and Mac. It costs $2500/year.

I’m learning improv on m68k and quantrix(the manuals interchange freely) on m68k/x86.

Thanks! It's great to hear quantrix is this similar to improv. I will take a look at it!

Lotus Improv was available for Windows (3.x) as well if that’s your main interest. Might be easier to get running, if you can find it.

I have it along with manuals and the update. I used it for years for various personal finance tracking (runs in a Windows XP VM on macOS). This is Lotus Improv, nothing to do with Quantix.

I got curious and tried it on wine last night. Seems like it’s not compatible sadly.

Yeah I know. I've filed two requests with details, but I haven't tried to solve it myself.

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