Ortho's Computerized Gardening (1985)

In the early days of personal computing, I don't think people quite new what to do with computers. Playing games was obvious. Spreadsheets and word processing were the early killer apps. Beyond that, it seemed that people were always searching for new use cases.

Likewise, software makers weren't sure what kind of software to make. There was quite the variety of applications being released at an incredible rate by the early 1980s. Not all of it was terribly useful or quite worth the money. This ad is for one example of software I consider of questionable value.

Basically, this software provided information on what kind of plants to plant in your garden based on your location, time of year and conditions. For someone who likes gardening and was into computers, no doubt this would have been tempting. But essentially, this is just a database of information. Something that could be handled just as easily with a book.

It's interesting to note that this software, Orthos's Computerized Gardening, was produced by Ortho Information Services. Even pesticide companies were getting in on the personal computer boom. From their perspective, this would have been software that was pretty easy to produce. Basically, it was taking information already available in books that they published, putting it on a disk for various personal computers and adding search capabilities.

I don't think computerized gardening ever became a very big market. Of course, all of this information would be trivial to search on the Internet these days anyway. In any case, at $49.95 a copy, I'm sure this software was able to cover the cost of development even if it only sold a few hundred copies.

I looked for some screen shots for the Commodore 64 version and couldn't find any. I also couldn't find an emulator image in any of the usual places. This leads me to believe that it might not have been released on that platform despite the ad. Of course, this was probably mail order only software so it might just be that it was very rare.

This ad is from the March/April 1985 issue of Commodore Microcomputers.

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