For today’s #ThursdayThrowback, I thought I would mention something that came up in some research into older genealogy software – namely “what a difference a decade makes” in terms of storage and capabilities. I’m going to mention two genealogy programs, one from 1984 (possibly earlier, but it was being advertised in magazines in late 1984), and one from 1994.
The one from 1984 (a Commodore 64 program named “Family Tree”) could hold 664 names per data disk. The one from 1994 (Family Tree Maker for Windows (3.x)) could theoretically hold 2 million names in its database. Of course, the Commodore 64 did not have an internal hard drive early on, and used single-sided 5¼‑inch 170 KB floppies, so we are talking over 3,100 single-sided floppies to get to 2 million names. That’s an insane amount of floppies and cost.
Below and on the left, is an ad for the Commodore 64/VIC-20 “Family Tree” program by the “Genealogy Software” company (that’s the name of the software and the name of the company – I am serious). The ad was in the August, 1984 issue (link) of Compute’s Gazette computer magazine.
On the right is an image from a sales brochure for Family Tree Maker for Windows Deluxe from 1994, thoughtfully scanned in by Kenneth L Hess on his website (he created Family Tree Maker and founded Banner Blue Software which sold/distributed it).
On a side note, whether you are a Family Tree Maker user or not, you really should check out his website, where he’s preserved brochures, manuals, and pamphlets relating to early versions of Family Tree Maker and Banner Blue history going back to the 1980s:
https://klhess.com/family-tree-maker-index/
Now this is not about comparing the Commodore 64 running its programs off of a floppy drive, versus an IBM-compatible PC running Windows 3.0 or 3.1 from a hard drive, it’s just a nice little visual cue about how far things had come within a decade. In fact, just a year or two after the release of the Family Tree Maker for Windows 3.x that I am using as an example (1995-96), it was common for Family Tree Maker for Windows to be sold with CD-ROMs literally full of millions of names.
And if we had looked at Family Tree Maker 1.0 for DOS in 1989, it was limited to hundreds of individuals as well, based on memory (not sure if that was computer RAM or floppy size). Family Tree Maker 2.0 for DOS in 199 could hold up to 1,200 individuals in a family tree, and my guess is that was based on the 3½-inch 1,440 KB/1.44 MB floppy which was becoming popular and obviously held substantially more data than the Commodore 64.
Later versions of Commodores and its peripherals did support 3½-inch floppies, and had genealogy programmers continued supporting the Commodore platform (rather than going to the Apple, Amiga (Commodore’s successor of sorts) or Atari or IBM-PC compatible), limitations on individual records would have been a thing of the past. The history of the Commodore 64 and Amiga (and related computers) is…the subject of numerous YouTube videos if you are curious about that.
Now in 1984, was the 664-name limitation an issue? Possibly, if you had access to genealogy societies, or records or genealogy books that others had compiled, but there was no publicly-available internet, and FamilySearch centers were not easy to find for some people (and I’m not sure what the access was like for non-LDS members).
You could, in theory, call up Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) and download genealogy information, but at that point in time in 1984, even though GEDCOM 1.0 was being worked on, most genealogy programs did not support GEDCOM (and this one did not, otherwise they would have advertised it). Without that GEDCOM support, if you wanted to bring in data files from other genealogists, you had to be using the exact same software as them, and you had to copy floppies. Merging family trees was not that easy, and because you couldn’t see a lot of data at once, you were taking some big chances of contaminating your genealogy data.
While I was using a Commodore 64 in that era, I was not using it for genealogy, but from what I recall, a lot of people I knew who were using genealogy software were using it to create printed trees and charts to either store in a filing cabinet or hand out to family members. Many/most of them didn’t have massive family trees (remember – no internet), so keeping printed copies made just as much sense (and you could take those printouts with you to the library or family reunions).
Icon source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Commodore-64-Computer-FL.jpg