Context MBA was the first

integrated software Integrated software is a software for personal computers that combines the most commonly used functions of many productivity software programs into one application. The integrated software genre has been largely overshadowed by fully functional o ...

application for personal computers, providing five functions in one program:

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in c ...

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...

, charting,

word processing A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no conse ...

, and

communication software Communication software is used to provide remote access to systems and exchange files and messages in text, audio and/or video formats between different computers or users. This includes terminal emulators, file transfer programs, chat and instant ...

. It was first released in 1981 by Context Management Systems for the

Apple III The Apple III (styled as apple ///) is a business-oriented personal computer produced by Apple Computer and released in 1980. Running the Apple SOS operating system, it was intended as the successor to the Apple II series, but was largely consi ...

computer, but was later ported to the Hewlett Packard 9000 / 200 series computers running Rocky Mountain BASIC and IBM PC platform as well. Since the program was written in

UCSD Pascal UCSD Pascal is a Pascal programming language system that runs on the UCSD p-System, a portable, highly machine-independent operating system. UCSD Pascal was first released in 1977. It was developed at the University of California, San Diego (U ...

, it was easy to port to different platforms, but did so at the expense of performance, which was critical at the time of its release, given the limited amount of memory, processing power, and disk I/O available on a desktop computer. It was soon overtaken by

Lotus 1-2-3 Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM). It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles i ...

, a more limited integrated software package, but one written in assembly language, yielding much better performance.

Reception

'' PC Magazine'' stated in June 1983 that Context MBA "still runs too slowly for a person accustomed to the speed of a microcomputer". It found the

the best application of the suite, describing the

as "amazingly slow" and the text editor as "clumsy and confusing". The review concluded that Context MBA "fails in two areas ... UCSD p-System simply does not produce good code", and a confusing, heavily modal user interface.

References

DOS software Spreadsheet software History of software {{business-software-stub