Registrar

Registrar was software used in the personnel or human resources (HR) area of businesses. It was the first piece of software developed to provide HR with the ability to manage training administration, booking people on courses, sending call-up letters, and recording their attendance. It enabled HR users to build their own data dictionaries without any help from their IT people. The Registrar software was created by Silton-Bookman Systems (SBS). It was launched in the US in 1984 and became one of the leading training administration software programs on the market with over 5000 installations. It was eventually incorporated into an LMS when SBS merged with Pathlore in 2000. Therefore, Registrar itself is no longer available for sale. Pathlore was subsequently acquired by SumTotal Systems in 2005. Silton-Bookman Phil Bookman and Richard Silton formed the company of SBS based in Cupertino in California in 1983. Richard Silton had been the HRD manager for Memorex and was frustrated that his IT department could not provide him with software to manage the training of his company employees. He mentioned this to his friend Phil Bookman who told him that he could write the software to do this so they started the company. The “killer application” part of the product was that users were able to configure the data dictionary themselves without the need for IT assistance which made the product unique to each client's requirements. Releases It took SBS about 6 months to produce a working system and the first release of Registrar was version 1.1 in 1984 which ran under the DOS operating system and used the Btrieve database management system from Softcraft in Austin, Texas. Version 1.1 was chosen as SBS thought that no one would buy version 1.0., just as there was never a dBase I the first release being dBase II