25 years of NAV(ision)

Navision

I had missed this, but in December 2012, “Henning” posted this on the blog of “Partner Power international”: http://www.partnerpowerinternational.com/blog/nav-turned-25-years-congratulations

This is something to give lots of attention .. .  Henning wrote down a nicely written history of the software we love so much.  Thanks for this, Henning!  To not steal too much, I won’t copy his post, but here are some excerpts.  Please read his post to get the complete story.

 

“In 1984 Jesper Balser, Peter Bang and Torben Wind were still students at Technical University of Denmark (known as DTU today) when they released PC Plus. PC Plus earned great success because of its simplicity and ease of use. Rumors say that they also were considering developing an ironing machine for shirts, but they decided for the IT-way, which was a clever choice.”

 

“In 1987, the three young IT engineers are ready to conquer the world. Together with IBM, they launch the first version of NAV (IBM-NAVIGATOR)”

 

“Think of it. Nowadays NAV is actually older than many of the people using it.”

 

“As the first ERP software in the world to utilize the client-server technology it was already from the beginning a state-of-the-art piece of software and the application was built on top of a genius native database. Us old-timers remember having explained “Optimistic Concurrency” about a million times.”

Coming back to the design of the manuals, the brown leather was now replaced with artwork by the famous Danish designer Arnoldi: two blue colors representing the horizon between water and the sky.”

 

“There were many jokes and circulating questioning on why bookkeeping with a graphical user interface and a mouse should be more effective than using the keyboard and short-keys.”

 

“The User Interface Designer and Project Manager Jakob Nielsen was responsible for making NAV compliant with the Windows 95 GUI standards. Jakob was very thorough and at the launch of the Windows based NAV version he handed over a monster thick report to Microsoft detailing where Microsoft did not meet their own standards. And what is Jakob Nielsen doing today¬? He is Principle User Experience Manager at Microsoft Cooperation and by the way he is always volunteering at Microsoft Convergence and WPC for community work, but thats another story.”


“Partners and users have however been reluctant to take advantage of the Role Tailored client holding on to the classic client. But those days are over with the NAV 2013 release where only the RTC user interface is available in the full client version.”

 

“But NAV has provided 25 years of dedicated service from the good old DOS days to a fully integrated web application soon to move into the cloud on Azure we all believe.”

 

“I am half way through my working life with NAV and I hope that I can retire in 23 years from now and rest assured that NAV is not getting older, only better. “Like” this article to say “Congratulations NAV”.”

 

I can only agree .. and sorry to be a bit late .. :

 

Congrats, NAV!

5.00 avg. rating (98% score) - 3 votes

Permanent link to this article: https://www.waldo.be/2013/02/25/25-years-of-navision/

2 comments

3 pings

  1. Hi Waldo,

    Thank you for sharing this article.

    If you’re going to Convergence, you may be interested in this ‘Zombie Land’ blog post I made:

    http://www.partnerpowerinternational.com/blog/is-microsoft-convergence-like-walking-in-zombieland/

  2. And thank you for writing the article! I really enjoyed it! 🙂
    I’m afraid I’m not attending Convergence .. it’s a little bit too expensive for a poor NAV enthusiast like me ;-).

  1. […] I had missed this, but in December 2012, “Henning” posted this on the blog of “Partner Power international”: http://www.partnerpowerinternational.com/blog/nav-turned-25-years-congratulations This is something to give lots of attention .. . Henning wrote down a nicely written history of the software we love so much. Thanks for this, Henning! To not steal too much, I won’t copy … Continue reading »…(read more)….. […]

  2. […] I had missed this, but in December 2012, “Henning” posted this on the blog of “Partner Power international”: http://www.partnerpowerinternational.com/blog/nav-turned-25-years-congratulations This is something to give lots of attention .. . Henning wrote down a nicely written history of the software we love so much. Thanks for this, Henning! To not steal too much, I won’t copy … Continue reading »…(read more) […]

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