I’d totally forgotten about Xtree, but I did use it quite a bit.
Back in the “the internet is only for government scientists and grad students” days, I spent an inordinate amount of time on BBS’s and the lifesaving program there was the bluewave mail reader, which would bundle up all your mail messages, including all the conversations in the Fidonet groups you were following and zip it into a .qwk packet for download so you could get off your phone line (or in my case, your father’s business phone line) and avoid racking up long-distance charges and/or using up allowed time on the BBS.
Ah… those were the days… collecting thousands of “taglines” (what we’d call sigs now, I guess) into a huge file and using a separate tagline-adding program to randomly insert one in each outgoing message. (can’t recall the name of the tagline program I used, but whatever it was, it belongs on this list too.)
I also wasted a lot of time programming in BASIC. I suppose some of it was useful to apply to real languages later, but for some reason, I was fascinated with the music and drawing functions. So I would spend hours inputting sheet music like this:
10 PLAY “AC2GF#>C.B-A8<GG”
and drawing boxes like this:
20 LINE “100,20-50,40”,BF
And in the end I’d have a program that would (slowly) draw a picture of the Enterprise while it played the Star Trek theme. Whoo…
Quarterdeck was one of my favourite software companies back then. I used to also use their Desqview “OS” to run my BBS’.
Used to use this more than any other program, although I did find myself using RAR/UNRAR more and more near the end. I still have a copy of pkz204g.exe lying around for some reason?
Did everything I needed (easily) for simple image manipulation and nothing else. The big things for me are the nothing else part and adjustable jpeg compression.
“Reveal codes” in WordPerfect. I don’t know if WP is really obsolete, but in my work environment, it might as well be. Sometimes when working in Word, I long for my beloved “reveal codes” when the formatting gets FUBAR.
If anyone knows how to do the same in Word, let me know. You would be a lifesaver!
There’s a button on the standard toolbar that has a paragraph mark (a.k.a. ornate-looking-backward-P) on it. This turns on hidden characters and codes for things like mail merges.
ETA: In Word 2007, it’s on the Paragraph section of the ribbon. How apropos.
I want to nominate Cricket Graph for the Mac. That was a great little program that produced fantastic graphs and charts. The learning curve was non-existent and it produced almost anything an engineering student could want, such as best-fit curves (including least squares fits) with the click of a button. And this was back in 1987 or 1988.
That 20-year old program was still easier to use than Excel is today.
It shows a few codes, and I do use it. But it still keeps a whole lot hidden. Reveal codes makes a doc much more transparent. It looks like the image on this page.
MacPaint was a lot of fun in the 80s. It was black & white, of course, and about two levels past an Etch-a-Sketch in comparison with Illustrator CS, but it allowed your creativity to go nuts without dozens of hours of training.
Yes, kiddies, there were computer games long before micro computers…
p.s. - mainframes also had the first point-and-click technologies - see “light pen”. Never went anywhere - numeris menus and a jump character gets an experienced techie around pretty quick