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 office suites, most notably Microsoft Office, but at one time was considered the "killer application" type responsible for the rise and dominance of the IBM PC in the desktop business computing world.

In the early days of the PC before GUIs became common, user interfaces were text-only and were operated mostly by function key and modifier key sequences. Every program used a different set of keystrokes, making it difficult for a user to master more than one or two programs. Programs were loaded from floppy disk, making it very slow and inconvenient to switch between programs and difficult or impossible to exchange data between them (to transfer the results from a spreadsheet to a word processor document for example). In response to these limitations, vendors created multifunction "integrated" packages, eliminating the need to switch between programs and presenting the user with a more consistent interface.

The convenience of an all-in-one purchase as well as the potential for greater ease-of-use made integrated software attractive to home markets as well as business, and packages such as the original AppleWorks for the Apple II, Vizastar for the Commodore 64 and Jane for the Commodore 128 were developed in the 1980s to run on most popular home computers of the day. Commodore even produced the Plus/4 computer with a simple integrated suite built into ROM.

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