I still depend on three programs that, with various updates, started in the 80s. The first is TeX. The basic program was created around 1980, revised in 1989 and has remained stable since. There are a zillion add-ons to make it easier to use and for special purposes, but the basic program has had only a handful of bug fixes. It is a markup program and produces camera ready copy that I have published three books from. And while the fine points might be hard, it is really not hard to learn.
In 1984 I started using an editor called Kedit. It was upgraded to run under Windows during the 90s, but hasn’t changed since. For example, you install it by downloading it to a directory and running the .exe file. And I always run it from a command line (along with TeX).
Which brings me to the command line replacement that started as 4DOS and is now called TakeCommand. It has been regularly revised and is really nothing like the original, so not really old software.
I used it to create a short animation of a Menger cube (before the Borg, I might add) appearing in the distance against a fake starry backdrop, ending up with a zoom into the center of the cube. All told, the total computation time was about 5 days. Good times…
Nice! You must have had a screaming machine, though, if a whole animation only took 5 days.
One of the scenes I was most proud of at the time was a rendering of a diamond. The scene was simple enough, but I wanted realism. I rendered the scene several times while varying the light color and the index of refraction. One of the things that makes diamonds look the way they do is dispersion, which is the dependence of index of refraction on light frequency. It gives diamonds that sparkly color look. Took forever to render all the variations, but looked good in the end.
I’ve never found a simpler program to create signs,letter head, banners, posters, greeting cards etc. It was actually a program your grandmother could use and enjoy.
Ms Publisher can do the same type printing but it’s much more difficult to learn.
I still use Eudora as my local mail client for my business. I use Gmail for my personal email and Outlook online for city council mail, but I’ve never found anything as good as Eudora’s interface for a mail client.
When I went to college in 1997 they gave us 3.5" discs with Eudora.exe on it, and we carried it around with our email and settings on it. If you wanted to check your mail at school you’d go to the computer lab (nobody really had laptops) and pop in your disc and check your mail, downloading it to your disc.
It’s really getting shitty about running, or rather, displaying emails properly. But it still performs the basic functions of email…without needing a browser, and without opening multiple windows.
Quark might still be the top of the design heap. If only they had cared about their customers.
We used it, our clients used it, I taught it, and (long story) I got to see how poorly they treated their users.
I still remember an Adobe conference we all went to, and a guy giving a side lecture said Adobe was working on “a little something we call our Quark Killer”. Spontaneous standing ovation!
…
But way before that, MacPaint was an early drawing program for the first Macs… it had a vector layer AND a raster (bitmap) layer. Like Photoshop and Illustrator on top of each other… but really basic.
I have never been tempted to use Eudora, so cannot say anything good or bad about it, but doesn’t “mutt” do exactly what you want by default? It is also possible to edit the headers to say anything you want.
Like a few others have mentioned upthread, I too miss WordPerfect, and the Reveal Codes function.
I was in the Canadian military and we were first using WP in the early 90s. At the same time I was looking for a PC for home use and, at the time, PCs in the stores were loaded with MS Word which, at the time, seemed like a “toy” word-processing app. When I looked at Word I felt like I was looking at a Fisher-Price word processor.
In the late '90s the Cdn govt selected MS Office and I was personally really surprised and disappointed.
Anyway, decades later I am very comfortable with Word but damn I wish that it had an effective reveal codes function.
I’m still doing most of my statistical work with S-plus a commercial product that has been replaced by its open source doppelganger R. However Splus has an great GUI that makes it easy to plot, manipulate and explore your data. Licenses are still offered by the company but it hasn’t been updated since 2010, and is no longer offically supported. Still for now it seems to work so I am still using it. I dread the day that Windows updates to the point that it no longer works, as I have about 20 years worth of work that I will have to figure out how to transfer over to R.
Ooh. I forgot about that program. Not only did it let you nest groups, but it would make it where you could open them up as a menu on the desktop, so you didn’t have to mess with Program Manager at all. I remember actually taking an image of the Windows 95 taskbar, making my own wallpaper in Paintbrush to go with it, and putting the little tine Plugin icon where the Windows logo would be, so I could pretend I had upgraded. It was great along with Win32s, which let me actually open some 32-bit programs.
It also was the first time I had a computer where the time was always visible. It would let you put the time in the titlebar, which is what I did. I can’t remember what I put on the other side, though. (Windows 3.1 titles were centered, so you could put two different “plugins”, one on each side).
Netscape Navigator. There was something calming and at the same time optimistically uplifting about that old ship steering wheel logo. I’d still be using this browser today if it were still available.
