Personal Deskmate

Note:
This particular review is going to be identical to the one for Personal Deskmate 2 as the screenshots are taken on a 1-for-1 basis. I am only showing these merely to point out the differences.
The only difference between this version and PDM is that this version requires the mouse driver to draw the mouse. Unfortunately, the driver Deskmate has and DOSBox didn't agree so the mouse just made a trail of garbage as it was used.

Tandy Personal Deskmate is the first graphical version of Deskmate, and featured their “office suite” as previously bundled with Deskmate 2.
It was clearly influenced by the Macintosh, adding drop-down menus, accessories, and dialog boxes.

Personal Deskmate was designed for the Tandy 1000EX. Personal Deskmate 2 was designed for the 1000HX and 1000TX, and added a music program. Both versions required 640*200*4 graphics only offered by a few Tandy systems (and conveniently also by DOSBox).

The Personal Deskmate desktop consists of a bunch of “menus” which act as lists of either programs or files for a specific program. There are also accessories here too. Each menu is movable, editable, and deletable.

There is mouse support in Personal Deskmate, but because the driver is required to draw the mouse and the driver in use here doesn't do it quite "right", I can't use it.

Each menu displays a list of items with the applicable file type. For example, Paint will only display .PNT files, and Programs will only display .PDM files.

You can use the list to open a previously saved document or to create a new one. This gives Personal Deskmate a crude file desktop metaphor.
All file management is done within the desktop and not externally. You select the file, and click “Copy”, and are then prompted for the name of the new file.

The system menu contains a number of Macintosh-like accessories, in addition to the setup options.

Accessories are the only programs that open in windows. Everything else opens fill screen.
The accessories on the desktop are not the real thing, more like essentially a “preview”. To use them, you must double click or press enter while they are selected, which opens that particular accessory.

As mentioned before PDM includes some basic office programs.
The text editor does have some ability to do more than ASCII text, but the only options are bold and underline.