By Sam Ormes, Senior Editor, See staff list for e-mail address
There is a verb form in Spanish ..."supo" ...which means literally "he knew". Spelled backwards it is "opus". The creator of DIRECTORY OPUS probably didn't make that obscure connection but he surely KNEW what an amazingly useful tool he was providing for the Amiga.
I installed DirOpus 4.0 on my first Amiga and quickly realized it had changed my Amiga-computing life. You could do everything from that one window... copying files, decompressing, formatting, viewing, playing music files, renaming things, printing, searching, etc. Opus was also highly configurable to one's own needs.....and was rock-steady. I bought DirOpus 5.0 when it came out but found it did too much! I reverted back to my good old "window on the left/window on the right" Opus4 where it remained as a loyal servant on the numerous Amigas in my collection.
For reasons beyond my control, I later found myself using the Mac platform. One of the first things I did on the Mac was to search the Web for a "Directory Opus" program, assuming naively that all computers surely had such a thing. THEY DON'T ! Most recently I am dabbling in the Win95 world (arghh) and there is no DirOpus there either.
There are numerous other Amiga gems that we sometimes take for granted that are not to be found on the dominant operating systems in today's computing world but my vote goes to Directory Opus as the single most useful program ever written for any platform. SUPO !