Information Manager

Cartridge

Box

Manual

 

Originally thought to be vaporware, this rare cartridge has recently turned up in the hands of a VideoBrain collector.  However this cartridge proved to be full of surprises, when the collector noticed that the label had peeled up and revealed that it was a prototype!

 

The back of the cartridge also provided some interesting information.

 

Unfortunately without a manual, using Information Manager was almost impossible.  All we knew was that it required Expander 1 (which makes sense) and will throw an I/O Error if you try and run the cartridge without it.  However thanks to the efforts of AtariAge user Meauxdal who managed to disassemble the code, we now have a rough idea of how the cartridge works. 

If Expander 1 is plugged in Information Manager presents a menu asking you to either ENTER a program, REVIEW a program, or EDIT a program.  Enter lets the user create a new database, review shows the information in the selected database, and edit allows the user to enter data into the database.  Upon choosing Enter to create a database, Information Manager will ask for the name of the new database, the name of the field being input into the database, the length of the field you're putting in (the program is rather primitive in this regard), and the type of data the field will have: A=Text, I=Integer, M=Money/Monetary (to two decimal places).  After you've entered all the fields you want to use you can actually start enter your items.

Once you've entered all the items into your database you can then exit back to the main screen.  Here you can either Review the records in a saved database or Edit the records in a database.  For reviewing the records in the database the PRINT command will selected records while the PRINT ALL command will display all the records.  Other commands that can be run on a database include Total, Add, Replace, Delete, Merge, and Exit.  Each command has a short single letter abbreviation that can be used (P for Print, T for Total, E for Exit, etc.).  

Information Manager was listed in the VideoBrain newsletter as one of four titles that made it to the prototype stage but were never released (Computer Life, Historical Simulation, Musicianship I were the others).  Interestingly the title screen identifies itself as Info Manager instead of Information Manager, although this might have been changed for the final release.  While this prototype seems completely usable there are some bugs the still need to be worked out such as the Print command causing the program to crash.  Had it been finished and released Information Manager would have been another powerful yet incredibly difficult to use productivity carts for the VideoBrain.