Seeing references to Corel Draw and Paint Shop Pro … I really miss my first desktop graphics programs – Aldus FreeHand and Aldus PageMaker.
I dug out my CD of Spinrite 6.0 from the late 90’s a while back to run on a Lenovo with Win7. It gave some error, and after googling a bit, I had to change something in the BIOS and it fired right up. And Steve Gibson is still around on the Security Now podcast.
I had a lot of dealings with Aldus, and got to visit their offices on Pioneer Square in Seattle. They had rehabbed an old 1800s building with ornate brickwork (the coffee shop on ‘Frasier’ was in the basement of the building next door). Before their software got bought up by Adobe and Macromedia, it was great!
Oh, by the way, the coolest thing about Fractal Design Painter was that it came packaged in a full-size chromed paint can! The only down side is that your manual always had a rounded shape to it as a result.
ps, I miss my Palm Pilot, but that’s hardware.The software was the alphabet (“Grafitti”) you had to learn to ‘draw’ each letter.
I used to run a piece of software that could decode audio DTMF tones that telephone makes when the buttons are pushed. When coupled with my radio scanner, it could pick up people with cordless phones punching in pager voicemail codes, credit cards, bank account numbers, PINs, all types of secret stuff and it logged it all. If I weren’t evil. I could have used that for all sorts of nefarious things. Sadly, I can’t remember what it was called but it worked a treat.
Fake edit: I found it, it was WinTone by SteakSandwich and it was called ‘dated’ in 2001?!?
decoder - Batboard
Another one let me see what internet traffic was flying out on my dorm room floor in the late 90s, can’t remember what it was called. It was part of a suite of hacker tools. I don’t know the nuts & bolts but it showed the urls of outgoing traffic (like yahoo & altavista search terms) for people on my floor. The catch was I never found a way to know who sent what.
I used to like Lotus Approach for my client database.
Microsoft Digital Image Suite was a great image editor, intuitive and easy to learn. Not nearly as versatile as modern photoshop apps, but more than adequate for my purposes. Discontinued about 12 years ago. I still use it although it’s gotten more difficult to install in Win10.
POV-Ray. A CG rendering engine based on ray tracing. Which as it happens is still in semi-active development, but I was using it back in 1992. One of the things that led to my eventual employment in the computer graphics world. I recall setting it to render one of the fairly simple demo scenes on my 386SX-16 at a whopping 320x200 resolution, then going on a weekend skiing trip–only to find it still running when I came back. Recently, I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 with ray traced reflections/shadows at 3440x1440 resolution… at 60 frames/second.
POV-Ray was awesome.
Another vote for WordPerfect. There are now a number of markdown-oriented editors (IAwriter, ByWord, Bear) which offer a somewhat similar simplified interface to stimulate concentration during writing. While I like these, they all lack good footnote support which is essential for my writing. For my work I need to be able to make footnotes quickly and easily and export them seamlessly into a Word document template It is the last step where these alternatives usually fail.
I really hate to have to work in Word, it is far too bloated for normal wordprocessing. WordPerfect managed to find a much better balance, at least for my needs.
I’m still using Ulead PhotoImpact for nearly all of my image editing - it’s a layer-based image editor with lots of features, effects, utilities, etc. I think the IP changed hands from Ulead to Corel, years ago, then it was discontinued.
I probably should stop using it and learn something else. Actually I should have done that long ago. It’s harder now.
I guess that would be my floppy dial-up modem to the Tallahassee Freenet. I didn’t do much gaming on my 286
GraphicCoverter, a Mac graphics program. Not only was it a fairly advanced Paint-type program, it could open and save as any sort of raster image format that existed at the time. The original business model was that the fully-capable program was itself free, but you had to pay for the documentation… which provided no obstacle at all to just playing with it and exploring it.
I think one of my old computers had Microsoft Bob on it, but it was pretty useless. Basically, it let you do whatever Microsoft wanted, without the flexibility to do any of what you wanted, the same failure that doomed the first generation of PDAs.
I love playing around with CGI, though I never had any particular skill with it. I was using 3DS Max in the 92-ish time range, though in my case I had a powerful 486DX 33.
Rand McNally had a mapping program back in 98 or so. It was great. You couldn’t do down to the address, but you could go between major cities and other major locations like National Parks.
What was really great about it was that you could put in 10 or so different places that you wanted to go to and it would rearrange them into the best way to go. You could also enter start and stop times and it would tell you where you would be.
I don’t know of any programs that will do the rerouting for you now. Sometimes it’s nice if you want to visit 3-4 different places over a couple of days and want to know the best route without doing it myself.
Shortly after getting my first Windows computer back in the 90’s, I found a couple games on sale at Mervyn’s for 99 cents each. One was Hoyle Board Games and the other was a game called Pocket Tanks. The store manager that checked me out gave me an additional discount then the employee discount (my then wife worked at this Mervyn’s). The total cost ended up being 22 cents with tax. Since then I have owned probably 8 or so computers and all have had these games installed. I still play the Hoyle game occasionally, haven’t play Pocket Tanks in a few years.
Back in the 80s I remember using a DOS program called “Quickfiler.” It was just a simple little file management program, but it was way easier to use than DOS commands.
(I’ll grant the exception. 
)
Guys, I found my Story of Civilization CD’s (do we even say CD-ROM anymore?)
I might actually fire this one up again, see what it’s about. I barely remember owning this, much less using it. If I recall, the big issue (for me) was I wasn’t able to make my own bookmarks and notes.
I think this cost $39.99. The books cost, easily, $200. The books are better, imho. At least they look better on my shelf:
I got the first Palm Pilot model and two more upgrades and loved them. Until I got an HP PDA which was lightyears better. Until I got a smartphone which was lightyears better than that. I have nostalgia for the Palm Pilot (I still have it stored in my museum of obsolete technology) but I do not miss Grafitti and I do not miss the requirement to use a stylus.
The five CD box that is Totally MAD, which I wish would work properly on modern computers. It’ll install but crash upon clicking anything in the trash heap that is the main menu and Absolutely MAD suffers greatly from the lack of a search feature.
VM/SP Release 5.
