[stevenjgarner]

Involved in the industry since 1980, I am intrigued looking back how we just reinvent the same things but with different distractions - I'm thinking of things like the "natural language" program Savvy from Excalibur Technologies running on an Apple II with a CPM card back in 1982 (which I cannot even find referenced online), then the whole computer world got thoroughly distracted with the graphical user interface for a few decades (macOS, Windows) but with applications that hardly even matched the capability of Savvy. Savvy and programs with that level of functionality simply disappeared. Then the world got distracted with smart phones (iOS, Android), with apps really nothing more than portals through to large datacenter applications still with capabilities that hardly matched the capability of Savvy. I guess in a few decades we'll be distracted with Ray Kurzweil-esque red blood cell sized computers swimming in our blood (still with capabilities that will hardly match the capabilities of Savvy). It's as if humans really do not want functionality and capability as much as we want accessibility?

[eesmith]

> which I cannot even find referenced online

For these sorts of searches, I use archive.org: https://archive.org/search.php?query=Savvy++%22Excalibur+Tec...

Perhaps https://archive.org/details/InterfaceAge198207/page/n111/mod... ?

Pipes (the tobacco kind, not the Unix kind) used to be a lot more popular back then.

Edit: Dr. Dobb's review at https://archive.org/details/1985-03-dr-dobbs-journal/page/11... . Says SAVVY PC was written in MMS Forth "this despite John Dvorak's statment in his InfoWorld column, "Inside Track," that no decent program was ever written in Forth". :)

[bradneuberg]

So great to hear Savvy mentioned! What an amazing piece of software.

[TedDoesntTalk]

Can you explain what was Savvy please? I had an Apple 2e and do not remember Savvy at all.

[stevenjgarner]

I was co-owner of an Apple dealership in Wellington, New Zealand. We used and sold Savvy, which was touted as a "natural language processor" - seemed to be a database with a natural language query system that was dumb as could be to begin with but rapidly gained in intelligence the more it was used. After the Mac was released the spotlight went off Savvy and a lot of my old customers told me their product was purchased back (recalled?) by Excaliber. There are references here that it may have ended up at Sandia Labs. Did it become a national security item? Does that happen?