File & Folder 98: a 1998 Word Document Manager

In the 1990s I wrote a document manager for a small business in Geneva with about 20 workstations. Most of its staff were new to computers, and folders were a challenging idea to grasp. They saved Word documents wherever Word happened to put them, and the network supervisor spent his days looking for lost files by panicked coworkers. File & Folder solved that problem. My 1999 product page said it was for “a small business which is sick and tired of seeing it’s workers putting documents a bit everywhere in the system.” The first version, File & Folder 1.0, was a Visual Basic app for Windows 3.11. It sold as shareware for US$75. A 32-bit version for Windows 95 and NT, File & Folder 1.2, followed in 1996. It worked in one root folder with numbered subfolders, supposedly one per client or case number. You typed a number, and it listed the Word documents in that folder, or offered to create one. It drove Word over OLE automation to open and create documents. The source, the Word stand-in…