Framework, launched in the 1980s, was probably the first office applications suite - an integrated word processor, outliner, mini-database and spreadsheet program developed by Ashton-Tate for personal computers running DOS.

In 1983 Robert Carr and Marty Mazner founded Forefront Corporation to develop Framework. In July of that year, they approached Ashton-Tate to provide the venture capital and to later market the product. Together with a team of six other individuals, Carr and company released the original Framework. The product proved so successful that in 1985, Ashton-Tate bought Forefront, a year sooner than expected.

Ashton-Tate continued to enhance the product by producing Framework II, Framework III, and finally Framework IV in 1989. Beginning with Framework III, the company also produced Framework III Runtime and Framework III Developer's Toolkit. These products allowed application developers to create business applications using the internal FRED programming language, and to hide the user interface from the end-users.

In 1991 Borland bought Ashton-Tate and later sold Framework to Selections & Functions , Inc, who is still actively maintaining it. Present versions include HTML generation and an object oriented interactive rapid application development environment. It also includes a speech recognition capability for visually impaired and blind users.

While it remains a DOS program, Framework also works on most versions of Windows.

Programmers at Work (ISBN 0914845713) credits Robert Carr as the designer and principal developer of Framework.

External links

• Framework home page

For guidelines on primary and secondary education in Massachusetts, see Massachusetts Frameworks .