General discussion

  • Creator
    Topic
  • #2228853

    Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

    Locked

    by seanferd ·

    What DOS apps did you like (or hate)? Which were interesting? Do you wish for a Windows eqivalent of some old DOS apps? Any you just remember? 🙂 For nostalgic/ curiostity purposes only.

All Comments

  • Author
    Replies
    • #2470275

      Dbase2, 3, 3+ and 4

      by drowningnotwaving ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Made me a sh1t-load of money. I was on over $150 per hour, in 1985, whilst still at uni full time finishing my degree. Wrote an app for transport subcontracting / billing / payables that made me money for another 10 years.

      All of which I p1ssed up against the wall.

      It was still fun! 🙂

      • #2471196

        Heck yeah

        by seanferd ·

        In reply to Dbase2, 3, 3+ and 4

        I had some version of dBase on an old 386, not that I used it much, but it was good software. Much better than setting up form or (whatever they called it) on a VAX. I know a lot of people a little older than myself who swore by it. Once I even had a full size dBase poster, with a grid-array of ball bearings on it.

      • #2471544

        We’re still using

        by tonythetiger ·

        In reply to Dbase2, 3, 3+ and 4

        several Dbase apps. Potential replacements always seemed to fall short for one reason or other.

        • #2470582

          One of our major competitor’s App is written in Clipper

          by drowningnotwaving ·

          In reply to We’re still using

          We sell software to the asset finance / leasing industry. Our competitor with the largest installed base in Aus/NZ is a char-screen application still written in Clipper.

          It’s slowly going away but it is hard to the answer the client’s question “so why should I change apps when this one just keeps on working?”.

          The answers “Because it’s a farking dinosaur and you can’t get new reports” doesn’t always work. That’s when the pepper spray comes out. Or photos of said client with said client’s personal assistant.

          Sales 101. Luv it.

        • #2467195

          Re. “you can’t get new reports”

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to One of our major competitor’s App is written in Clipper

          Why not?

          Concentric R&R Report Writer works just fine with Clipper apps.

    • #2470206

      I liked a lot of the DOS utilities

      by dadspad ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      XTree is the only one that comes to mind now.

      • #2471192

        Was XTree a file manager? [nt]

        by seanferd ·

        In reply to I liked a lot of the DOS utilities

        nt

        • #2471615

          Yes, it added colors also

          by dadspad ·

          In reply to Was XTree a file manager? [nt]

          It made file management easy in DOS!!

          Haven’t used it in years. I heard they had a version for Windows, but seems not as usefull now.

      • #2624138

        Vernon Buerg’s “LIST” utility

        by pwiddicombe ·

        In reply to I liked a lot of the DOS utilities

        This simple list program was a fast file organizer/viewer, that I still use under Windows (although it has code that doesn’t work so well for long file names and date sorting, now that we’re past 1999).

        • #2467988

          Hooray for List..

          by dave7072 ·

          In reply to Vernon Buerg’s “LIST” utility

          I still use that pgrm too. 🙂
          It is terrific coz if youve set it up it in windows as one of the ‘Send To’ options, you can just right click on anything to look into the file/pgrm without executing it.

          It saves heaps of time!

      • #2624085
        Avatar photo

        xtree

        by rbeltempo ·

        In reply to I liked a lot of the DOS utilities

        That sure brings back a ton of memories. Windows 3.0 and xtree oh yea!

        • #2652432

          xtree – good old days of DOS, and a fan site!

          by 2wired ·

          In reply to xtree

          Man I’ll never forget the first time i got my hands on xtree…i was only like 8 at time and it just made life so much easier hehe….

          for those really feeling nostalgic, heres the main fansite!
          http://www.xtreefanpage.org

        • #2642753

          No doubt many of us here used XTree.

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to xtree – good old days of DOS, and a fan site!

          And, if we dig deep enough, can still find a copy somewhere at home.

        • #2642146
          Avatar photo

          Actually I saw these just recently

          by hal 9000 ·

          In reply to No doubt many of us here used XTree.

          Granted I was installing 98 onto a NB that required Floppies to install but I didn’t have to even look hard to find my Install Copies.

          Col

        • #3024675

          Z-Tree, Baby

          by schaefer.oneill ·

          In reply to No doubt many of us here used XTree.

          XTree went to die at Symantec .. as all dead-man-walking products do .. scoop up the last $$ and let-em die … the Symantec Way ..

          Alas, ZTREE.COM is everything XTree should have grown up to be … take a look, I have used this beautiful product for years! 🙂

        • #3024661

          Cool, I’ll check it out.

          by seanferd ·

          In reply to Z-Tree, Baby

          I must admit, I was surprised to see this thread resurrected from the dead. 😉

    • #2470198

      There was ‘File Manager’ . . .

      by older mycroft ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Which I recall was much like Norton Commander but ran in a sort-of DOS GUI (if that makes sense)

      ‘File Manager’ then made a jump onto the Amiga platform, where it became much more powerful. It in turn was responsible for the utterly crazy ‘Directory Opus’ which I see has made a PC comeback recently.

      There was also a little DOS screen-toy where a little Pacman zoomed across the DOS screen ‘gobbling’ directory trees as it moved.

      • #2471190

        IBM Fixed Disk Organizer?

        by seanferd ·

        In reply to There was ‘File Manager’ . . .

        I had that one on a 386. Looking back, it seems like it was mostly a batch file for starting apps. Your items sound more interesting. How about DOSshell? That was fun.

        • #2471612

          There were a lot of file managers, I remember DOSShell

          by dadspad ·

          In reply to IBM Fixed Disk Organizer?

          I used it, but when I wanted quick file management, I still just went to Xtree.

          I also remember there were a lot of tricky dos prompts! Like the YoYooo!!

        • #2624080
          Avatar photo

          dos commands

          by rbeltempo ·

          In reply to There were a lot of file managers, I remember DOSShell

          One that I used quite a bit was “fork”, sent output to 2 places at once.

        • #2468053

          You mean DOS Hell?

          by boomchuck1 ·

          In reply to IBM Fixed Disk Organizer?

          I hated that interface. But then even now I find myself running CMD so I can get back out to DOS to do some of the serious work.

    • #2471345

      DOS boot disks

      by mjd420nova ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      I use a large number of DOS boot disks for diagnostics. This insures me that I can boot and troubleshoot a system without having to rely on and OS platform that maybe the cause of the problems I’m trying to diagnose. I have many versions to support the many levels of hardware that are still out there in the real world.

      • #2471186

        You have to love DOS boot disks

        by seanferd ·

        In reply to DOS boot disks

        Great way to load just what you need and no more. I somewhat lament the demise of the floppy drive for this reason. Of course you could use CDs, but putting what fits on one or two floppies on optical media seems… a waste? I also miss real mode DOS. http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/helpdesk/wp-trackback.php?p=115

        • #2471608

          I remember using the DOS floppies

          by dadspad ·

          In reply to You have to love DOS boot disks

          I still have several and also Floppy drive diagnostics disc, both 5 1/4 & 3 1/2; used to service them, now they are just replaceable commodities.

        • #2471542

          We ghost from floppy

          by tonythetiger ·

          In reply to You have to love DOS boot disks

          and use USB floppy drives.

        • #2471504

          We did here too util they made a bootable CD

          by dadspad ·

          In reply to We ghost from floppy

          that allows you to grab the correct image from the network.

          In a pinch, a Ghost floppy and a CD with image is still used in non network situations.

    • #2471178

      RE: Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      by rob miners ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      The original PC Tools comes to mind as well as the Peter Norton Utilities Suites. They got me out of trouble a few times. I still have copies of these as well as DBaseIII. Those were the days. Lament……..

      • #2471588

        Man, forgot about those

        by dadspad ·

        In reply to RE: Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

        I still have those utilities. PC Tools was my favorite, but I used Norton Utilities also. Wasn’t PC Tools bought by Norton/Samantec? I really miss the Norton boot floppies and CD that used unerase to recover files on HDD. Now the Norton CD just checks for viruses when booting, all utilities have to be installed and Windows booted. In fact, I just threw out some old Peter Norton books that helped me in the past.

        I had DbaseII and III, never really used it. The problem with Dbase applications were the modifications (kluges) that were made for individual companies. There were a number of companies left in the lurch when the tech support person that did all the modifications to DBase left with no notes on what he did.

        • #2470522

          Yeah

          by rob miners ·

          In reply to Man, forgot about those

          it was a bummer when I couldn’t use them anymore. I had to find alternatives that didn’t quite do the same things. Peter Norton and Central Point had some powerful utilites before being bought out by Symantec.
          Unfortunately with PCTools after version 6 it was crap. I might dust off some cobwebs and make a list of my old software.

      • #2468811

        Both of those….

        by learn4ever ·

        In reply to RE: Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

        … were the most useful apps for sure. They got me out of trouble many times. Old and reliable.

        • #2469038

          Reliable

          by rob miners ·

          In reply to Both of those….

          You could almost always guarantee the outcome. It’s a pity modern software can’t live up to it. At the moment I am testing SP1 for Vista, can’t browse this site properly because Java won’t enable. How times have changed.

    • #2471168

      Wordperfect 5.1

      by av . ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      At one time, this was the cat’s meow. Some people today are still hooked on it and refuse to change.

      DOS itself was great. No DLL hell to contend with. You install an application and all files sit in the same directory. You could control everything from the command line.

      AV

      • #2471569

        The greatest thing about WP 5.1 was the support

        by dadspad ·

        In reply to Wordperfect 5.1

        You called an 800 number and they only asked what product and version you used. Then helped you. Secretaries used WP 5.1 a lot, and when they needed help, there was no time to search for an answer in the manual like they want you to do today. I used to supply them with a list of 800 numbers they could call, the phones were answered by a person and helped quickly with the problem. Best support I have ever seen.

        Too bad about what happened with with the company WordPerfect, it was ruined before Corel did even more damage.

      • #2471535

        Hear you there…

        by jamesrl ·

        In reply to Wordperfect 5.1

        In the late 80s, my wife worked for a small one man law firm. The lawyer bought from me a PC setup with WP 5.1 and a daisywheel printer with a sound enclosure.

        Almost ten years later he was still using it. He had written alot of macros for standard legalise that he couldn’t bear the thought of taking the time to rewrite them or import them into something else. He didn’t use the computer for anything else.

        I taught DOS scripting and enjoyed that part. The frustrating part was memory management when Windows sat on top of DOS. If you had a program like dBase which wanted expanded memory, and Windows which wanted extended, you naturally had conflicts.

        When I was working at one of my PC Tech jobs, we used to compete with each other to get the most free memory used. Yes you could buy tools for this, and later versions of DOS had some tools as well, but nothing worked as well as the manual method.

        We may not have had DLL hell, but we did have IRQ hell….

        James

        • #2471480

          hmmm.. I remember during the Y2K challenge

          by dadspad ·

          In reply to Hear you there…

          we had to install IBM DOS 9 or 10 on machines that used DOS software, I never saw any information on it being released, but the floppies were identified with it. Gave a lot more utilities than the old ones.

          Think I still have them somewhere.

        • #2471465

          I thought DOS 6.1 was the last

          by jamesrl ·

          In reply to hmmm.. I remember during the Y2K challenge

          I was Y2K guru for a billion dollar a year company.

          They had an app on a PC at about 3000 customer sites that was DOS based (4.0) and it was non compliant. The development team had put in requirements for an object oriented windows based replacement that would require a pretty powerful PC, to replace a fairly simple app, and whats more they hadn’t really started coding and time was a waisting.

          I made no friends, but I hired the original developer on a 3 month contract to make his app work with 4 digit years, and we replaced the PCs in the field with new ones that ran DOS 6.1, and Bobs your uncle. It is now 7 years later, and my latest employer has one of those systems, and it is still the DOS based app. I saved at least $1500 per PC by using something low end, I eliminated a lot of new development and testing, and we came in on an acceptable schedule.

          It didn’t suprise me when a couple of years after I left I heard that they had cleaned house and got rid of many of the IT gang.

          James

        • #2624187

          MS did a good job of hiding DOS 7 from most users.

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to I thought DOS 6.1 was the last

          Publicly, they portayed Win 95/98 as being an OS, when in fact it was still but a GUI running on top of DOS; in this case, DOS 7.

        • #2624980

          Of course! :)

          by seanferd ·

          In reply to MS did a good job of hiding DOS 7 from most users.

          DOS 6.21 6.22

        • #2624951

          DOS 6.2x and DOS 7 are different.

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to Of course! :)

          The former was a standalone product, while the latter was available only as a component of Windows 9x.

        • #2625417

          I know that, deepsand :)

          by seanferd ·

          In reply to Of course! :)

          It’s just that I considered DOS 6 kind of “hidden”, as I never hear anyone refer to a DOS version after 5 (outside of TR). A very large thanks to you and everone else posting here!

        • #2625322

          Why do you consider DOS 6.x to have been hidden?

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to Of course! :)

          It was marketed and readily available as a retail product.

        • #2468238

          Well, not “hidden” as such

          by seanferd ·

          In reply to Of course! :)

          it is just that in my personal experience (which is not as a professional, I’m just a “go-to” guy for pc support) most of the people I know who used DOS had no experience with anything past DOS 5 except for Windows. I didn’t mean my post to be an over-genealization. I actually have the 6.21 disks in my drawer [Plus Enhanced Tools!]. Since it had no DOSshell, some of these folks may have been using it without knowing. Also, I suppose I didn’t find DOS 7 as hidden as you are suggesting (with the Command folder and a PIF in the start menu), but that probably points to my inexperience with anyone actually looking for DOS in a Windows 9x setup. For myself, I made a boot/setup floppy set out of DOS 7 + some of the missing items from prior versions, like Tree. I guess DOS 6 wasn’t as unknown as it seemed to me. 🙂 p.s. I agree entirely that Win 9x was still actually sitting on top of DOS. Had lots of fun arguments over that one back in the day.

        • #2467194

          Understood

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to Of course! :)

          I was using “hidden” from the perspective of MS and their explicit admission of the existence of 6.x, while declining to even tacitly acknowledge that of 7.

        • #2469642

          Ah, I see. Good point. NT

          by seanferd ·

          In reply to Of course! :)

          nt

        • #2470591

          Many law firms still can’t give up their Wordperfect

          by av . ·

          In reply to Hear you there…

          They can’t get over not having reveal codes to show whats going on in their documents. Even though Word does have a reveal formatting, diehard Wordperfect users never took to Word reveal codes.

          I have to admit, Wordperfect was perfect back then. I do remember the memory challenges that we faced and IRQ issues, which were particularly thorny, but compared to dll hell, well, I guess pick your poison.

          I had used dBase alot back then (late 80’s). Lotus 1-2-3 and Harvard Graphics. I remember sending obscure setup codes to the printer to format spreadsheets.

          Heres one thing that I applaud about Windows apps that younger people probably take for granted. None of the old applications could interchange data easily, if at all. You couldn’t cut and paste a Lotus spreadsheet into Word or vice versa without alot of pain. You had to convert to ASCII delimited files and spend lots of time reformatting. It was hard to do, but if you could, you were a God.

          There was no viruses. People didn’t use email much and if they did it was mostly internal. We used to use modems (14.4 back then) to download from bulletin boards. That was always a nightmare.

          Wow. What a different world it was.

          AV

        • #2624882

          DIF files to the rescue!

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to Many law firms still can’t give up their Wordperfect

          Of course, the use of mathematical terms, i.e. Vectors and Tuples, to describe them made them seem much more mysterious than they really are.

        • #2467962

          And then Novell took over WP Corp and completely f****d up the GUI

          by big ole jack ·

          In reply to Many law firms still can’t give up their Wordperfect

          I too was an avid user of WP for DOS and Windows, but when Novell took them over and did a complete botch-up job of revamping the GUI and menus, I dumped the product altogether and started using MS Word and never looked back. It’s funny you say that lawfirms are still stuck on WordPerfect because I’m finding that many have already made the switch to MS Office a while ago and are now having a hard time finding a suitable document management solution to integrate with MS Word.

        • #2467258

          Law firms went kicking and screaming to Word

          by av . ·

          In reply to And then Novell took over WP Corp and completely f****d up the GUI

          After law firms realized they weren’t compatible with their clients, they had to move or suffer converting documents between Wordperfect and Word all the time. Not a pretty sight.

          I did one of these transitions to Word and some lawyers downright refused to use it. It was a whole lotta grief for me. Like taking candy from a baby.

          Yeah, when Novell took Wordperfect over and then dumped it later, it was the end of a really good product. They did the same thing with Soft Solutions, an older document management program that was ahead of its time. Novell bought that and then took away all the functionality so we couldn’t use it anymore.

          Interwoven document management (it was Imanage) works very well with Word. Its not cheap though, but worth it. If you ever had to search through thousands of documents with a rudimentary search tool, you realize that its worth every penny. Hummingbird DM or PC DOCs from Opentext is another document management system. Its not nearly as good as Interwoven though.

          AV

        • #2624915

          Oh, yeah!

          by jackofalltech ·

          In reply to Hear you there…

          I got so good at optimizing the PCs, they actually started a project and scheduled me to go around and do each one in the company (around 3000). This was before we came up with a standard install process. I remember a short while before that, my boss handed me a couple of disk from Novell with this new TCP/IP stack and told me to make it work. No manuals, not training, but in 2 weeks had it done. Man, that was fun!

          Ralph

        • #2467960

          Wow, I recall getting that to work back in Netware 3.x

          by big ole jack ·

          In reply to Oh, yeah!

          The link support layer, frame type, NIC driver, all loaded and scripted from a simple floppy disk. Back then, it was a challenge because we didn’t have the internet and not much info was published online as is today on how to get this stuff working. Back then, one had to really use his/her brain to figure things out, as the manuals sucked and not many people could actually help you.

        • #2467335

          Could you read me your autoexec.bat and

          by t.rohner ·

          In reply to Wow, I recall getting that to work back in Netware 3.x

          config.sys please. I still have one or two NW 3.12 in the field. It was quite a advance to the network we used to have before that.(Arrrgh)
          Netware was(still is) really reliable, once you figured it out how to configure it. I still have those red books around somewhere. I once made a mistake by striping two HD’s in order to enlarge a volume. One of the SCSI disks failed, and the users retrospect backup running on a mac didn’t back up the files for a while. The Dat tape went south and nobody noticed. He had really important data lost and asked me for a solution. I asked Ontrak and other recovery companies for a quote, they told me it’s in the 10-20 grand region. In a last ditch effort, i ordered the same HD from our supplier.(I was lucky he had one left) I changed the electronics board on the defective HD and it mounted again.
          That was the time, when i started using RAID5 disk subsystems, when the customers were willing/able to pay for it.

        • #2630338

          Are you serious?

          by jackofalltech ·

          In reply to Could you read me your autoexec.bat and

          I’m sorry, that was 20 years ago!

          Ralph

        • #2630273

          Netware 3.12 is only about 15 years ago

          by t.rohner ·

          In reply to Are you serious?

          NW 2.x ist in the 20 year region.
          What i meant with read me your autoexec.bat… was that i was asked it by some support dudes from Novell back then. This was in a time we had both a dos and a windows version of our main app installed on most of our customers PC’s. The windows version didn’t have all the features of its dos forefathers back then.
          For the sake of simplicity, i mostly used the IPX protocol. It ran smoothly with my file and print servers and later it was a natural firewall to the TCP/IP traffic on the same cable…
          In the beginning of the evolving internet, most of our customers used a dial-up connection to the internet, if any. The small “mom and pop” customers started to want their pc’s networked, when wfw/aka win3.11 came out. No dedicated server and no additional costs, besides nic’s and some RG58-cabling. No routing was needed so we used NETBEUI as the protocol then. Since our larger customers had Mac’s in addition to the PC’s, we ran Netware with Appletalk on it.
          This was the time of BBS, Compuserve, the upcoming internet and Netware 3.11.(around 1991 i think. NW312 came out in 93 if i’m correct.)

        • #2467982

          Moving jumpers on i/o cards to use a spare IRQ

          by dave7072 ·

          In reply to Hear you there…

          We used to use Wordstar i/o Word Perfect.
          (I’ve still got a copy on my box today)

          I remember fiddling with those little black jumpers on the i/o cards just so you remove the conflict and change to an unused IRQ. And the instructions that came with the cards (from taiwan) were sometimes printed in reverse, so after you’d set the jumpers and inserted the card, only then did you discover you had to rip it out and do the reverse and cross your fingers. Those were the days when the 16550 uart came out and BBS’s were still around 🙂

      • #2625623

        And don’t forget

        by rob miners ·

        In reply to Wordperfect 5.1

        the Template. It sat at the top of the keyboard. At one stage all I was doing was copying the Templates because the kids were pinching them at a rate of knots.

      • #2467918

        I hated WP!

        by bill stuntz ·

        In reply to Wordperfect 5.1

        The programming editors all used WordStar key codes – I think they were built into my fingers by the time I tried WP.

        F3 for help? Everybody else was starting to use F1 for help.

        F3 “What key do you want help with?”

        How the heck should I know what key I want help with? Somebody stole the *&^#%* keyboard overlay. F3 F1 – nope. F3 Alt-F1 – nope. F3 Ctrl-F1 – nope…… etc. Did I miss looking at F3 Alt-F4? Its GOTTA be there somewhere. I know what I want to do. Show me a list of things I can do & tell me which key I should press to do it – without the overlay. And if by some miracle the overlay is there, does red mean CRTL or ALT? Or it’s a xerox copy of the overlay with no color so I can’t tell anyway.

    • #2471603

      The OFF button

      by nodisalsi ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      LOL – I miss the luxury of just switching off without having to Start>Shut down>Select from (Restart, Log off, Standby, Turn Off)>Are you sure? (Y/N)>Waiting for 2 minutes>”It is now safe to turn off”>WTF! why is it restarting??>etc. etc.

      • #2471552

        Also the faster boot ups

        by dadspad ·

        In reply to The OFF button

        😀

      • #2625529

        Whoa! Hold on…

        by seanferd ·

        In reply to The OFF button

        Didn’t you have to park the heads?

        • #2624152

          For the most part

          by jbaviera ·

          In reply to Whoa! Hold on…

          I had to park the heads on my old Zenith SuperSport Laptop, but I rarely did on my desktop!

        • #2623858

          hahaha, yeah, I remember

          by mikemulren ·

          In reply to Whoa! Hold on…

          parking the heads…

        • #2467334

          This was only on HD’s with stepper head

          by t.rohner ·

          In reply to Whoa! Hold on…

          positioning, when it took half a second from the innermost to the outermost “cylinder”…

    • #2471549

      Autosketch

      by tonythetiger ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Cadd for non-Cadd people

      • #2471478

        What was the name of the competing 2D cadd

        by dadspad ·

        In reply to Autosketch

        software that was better than Autosketch, then Autosketch bought it and buried it. It had a lot of dedicated users and they were pissed.

        added note: may have been TurboCad, but not positive.

        • #2471471

          I think you’re right.

          by tonythetiger ·

          In reply to What was the name of the competing 2D cadd

          TurboCad was great too, but I thought a little harder to use. Of course, I bought the new version of AutoSketch and don’t like it either 🙂

        • #2624768

          Generic Cad

          by j-mart ·

          In reply to What was the name of the competing 2D cadd

          Ran on anything, much faster than Autodesk
          products of same vintage, many great
          features, superior to autodesk products of
          same era, for much less cost, purchased by
          Autocad and buried.

        • #2624977

          John Walker, founder of Autodesk, Inc. and co-author of AutoCAD

          by seanferd ·

          In reply to Generic Cad

          Has an interesting site: http://www.fourmilab.ch/

        • #2468038

          I used to use a product called DesignCad 3D for DOS

          by big ole jack ·

          In reply to Generic Cad

          It was far less cheaper than AutoCad for DOS back then, a few tens of thousands of dollars cheaper.

        • #2624139

          PC CAD

          by Anonymous ·

          In reply to What was the name of the competing 2D cadd

          There was one called PC CAD which, over the years evolved into DesignCAD 3D. I used PC CAD in the mid-80’s with great results.

        • #2468050

          MicroStation

          by mellsworth ·

          In reply to What was the name of the competing 2D cadd

          MicroStation was what I learned on in High School, today I wish I still had it around somewhere as it was definitely the easiest to use.

    • #2471468

      4DOS

      by tonythetiger ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      not really an app, but a replacement command processor. You could do a lot with its batch file commands and internal functions.

      • #2624184

        Forgot about this one.

        by deepsand ·

        In reply to 4DOS

        For my part, I would classify it as an app, since it was neither part of the OS nor a driver.

        A command processor is no different than a programming language package, in that it ultimately converts humanly readable intructions into machine code.

        • #2468275

          I wrote a series

          by tonythetiger ·

          In reply to Forgot about this one.

          of BTMs for a guy that sent songs and commercials to a satellite uplink. All the songs were renamed to begin with the number of seconds, and they moved to another directory once played so they wouldn’t be repeated. The number of seconds was used to calculate what would fit between the commercial and news breaks. Songs would be selected to fit the space then that set would be randomly played with either a two or three second gap (or a stationID) between. His controller card came with DOS utilities to trigger relays which either sent music, commercial, stationID, or news up the link. It was pretty cheap for him too, $50 an evening for 4 days.

        • #2467191

          Those were the days

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to I wrote a series

          No layers of “abstraction” standing between you & your bits/bytes on the one side and the click/clack of relays sending electrons of to work on the other.

          Lean & mean. Or as [i]Dr. Dobbs[/i] used to say, “with no over-byte.”

    • #2470508

      Oh, dear, where to begin?

      by deepsand ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      In no particular order:

      1) VisiCalc
      2) Word Star
      3) Word Perfect
      4) xBase
      5) CBasic
      6) Formatter
      7) Concentric R&R Report Writer
      8) ProForm/FormPro

      • #2623904

        Was VisiCalc on DOS?

        by rodbell101 ·

        In reply to Oh, dear, where to begin?

        VisiCalc first came out as an Apple (II?) app and was the genius “killer app” for small computers. I’m not saying it didn’t, but I don’t remember it migrating to DOS except, of course, in the form of an improved version of the basic idea, Lotus123.

        • #2474240

          Yup.

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to Was VisiCalc on DOS?

          It was, at the least, available for CP/M & its derivatives, such as TurboDOS, PC-DOS, and TRS-DOS/LSI-DOS.

    • #2624163

      Does anyone remember Q&A for DOS?

      by av . ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      That was a great simple database app with a built in Word Processor. It was the first database program I ever worked on and how I got hooked on computers. It was simple and had the Intelligent Assistant that could make reports for your database using natural language. It came out around 1985 I think, but was definitely ahead of its time.

      AV

      • #2624820

        That’s another one that I forgot; and, good one too.

        by deepsand ·

        In reply to Does anyone remember Q&A for DOS?

        In fact, I still use it, on a Tandy 1000A.

        • #2624801

          You still have a Tandy?

          by av . ·

          In reply to That’s another one that I forgot; and, good one too.

          Incredible, Sandy. Thats a real collector’s item. You never know when that might become handy.

          AV

        • #2624751

          [u]Five[/u] of them, in fact, plus various peripherals

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to You still have a Tandy?

          1) TRS-80 Model I, Level I

          2) TRS-80 Model I, Level II, w/ Disk Drives, Screen Printer, Voice Synthesizer & Voice Recognizer

          3) TRS-80 Pocket Computer, w/ Printer/Cassette Interface

          4) TRS-80 Model 4P

          5) Tandy Model 1000A

          6) TRS-80 Line Printer V (dot matrix w/ tractor feed)

          7) Tandy DWP 230 (daisy wheel, w/ tractor feed)

          In addition to the 1000A, I still use the 4P as well.

        • #2624976

          Ohio Scientific

          by seanferd ·

          In reply to [u]Five[/u] of them, in fact, plus various peripherals

          Anyone ever use one of their machines? Lost mine to a flood. It was connected to a tape player, and a b&w tv via an ATV Research RF unit positioned by the antenna. Company was bought by M/Acom (sp?), pron. may-com. The computers disappeared.

        • #2624949

          Once a well known & reputable name.

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to Ohio Scientific

          Although I’ve not used one, it is a name well known to me.

        • #2467354

          Was this a PC compatible?

          by t.rohner ·

          In reply to Ohio Scientific

          I think i had one of these back in the “long long ago”. But it was Rockwell 6502 based, like the Commodores PET’s and the Apple II’s. When i remember correctly, it was called Challenger Superboard with a whopping 16k of memory and a chirping cassette interface. Later i turned over to Z80 based systems, because their parts were readily available at the company i worked. This was the time, when “users” read the f***riendly manuals and were happy to write a character graphic based pong game in basic and some assembler. Later i moved to more useful projects like stepper and servo controllers. Still later some adaptive heater controllers, which couldn’t have been done with just OP-Amps and the other analog devices.

        • #2467189

          Pre-“PC”

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to Was this a PC compatible?

          Back then, about the only things that were on their way to being standardized were data buses; the rest of the architecture was pretty much proprietary.

          The 6502, which was actually from MOS Technology, was a good choice then; not only was its architecture and instruction set simple yet powerful, but it could be run on batteries as well, which made it a good choice for DIYers.

        • #2474675

          Check This

          by seanferd ·

          In reply to Was this a PC compatible?

          http://maben.homeip.net:8217/static/S100/ohioscient/index.html
          There is an interesting index, but I’m currently getting 503 errors clicking the links.

          A search for 6502 also has interesting results. OSI has an entry at Wikipedia, too.

        • #2467265

          Bought one, used it and still lhave it !!

          by rick ·

          In reply to Ohio Scientific

          28 years on and I still have an Ohio Scientific Superboard II – It’s a model 600 for those who care. Not sure if it still works but it just might. I bought extra memory to bring the total to whopping 8Kbytes. The processor is a 6502 clocked at 1MHz. It runs a version of Microsoft Basic which I think is dated 1978. Was connected to a portable b/w TV (Which I also still have and it does work – made by Sharp!) you ‘saved’ your programs to casette tape and, if you were lucky, you could load them back in again.
          I could go on and on but…

        • #2624966

          Thats like having your own computer museum

          by av . ·

          In reply to [u]Five[/u] of them, in fact, plus various peripherals

          You really are a collector, aren’t you? Do they all still work?

          AV

        • #2624952

          A qualified “yes.”

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to Thats like having your own computer museum

          The Mod I Level II needs a new FD Controller chip, but otherwise is fine.

          The Pocket PC hasn’t been used for a while, and needs a new battery; presumably it still works.

          And, the 4P has a flaky power supply connector, which I’ve worked around by using a rubberband to tension it into a sweet spot.

        • #2624939

          Ah, the rubberband fix

          by av . ·

          In reply to A qualified “yes.”

          Hey, whatever works. I’m sure parts must be almost non-existant. Its amazing that any of it still works, but back then they made PCs to last.

          AV

        • #2624883

          Rubber-bands: Advantages & disadvantages.

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to A qualified “yes.”

          As rubber naturally ages & deteriorates, especially when close to the heat from a power supply, the rubber-bands regularly break & need to be replaced, which means opening up the case, followed by opening up the power supply, etc..

          On the other hand, it’s difficult to find & then maintain the proper tension, at the proper angle, on the connector with an inelastic material. Of course, if I’d put some effort into it, I could use a spring and a turn-buckle; but, …

    • #2625098

      4Dos, Deskview, Terminate

      by neon samurai ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      I still use Terminate through a telnet modem emulator on occassion.

      Deskview and win3.11 swapped back and forth for multi-tasking (as best could be had then anyhow).

      4Dos was a great command.com replacement.

      Renegade BBs was probably the only other major Dos app used outside of whatever game was interesting that week.

      • #2467978

        Terminate & DrDos (memories)..

        by dave7072 ·

        In reply to 4Dos, Deskview, Terminate

        Yeah I used Terminate for a few years. It was great coz you could use it to talk with just about anything. BBS’s Fidonet etc.. And when DrDos came out I remember switching to that for a while i/o MSDos, but I went back. I still used to use the Format.com utility though from the DrDos OS coz it was faster than microsoft’s version. I tried Deskview too for a while but I gave up on it coz it was too slow and gave me heaps of memory (ram) problems (from memory).

    • #2625077

      Lotus 1-2-3 Version 2.01

      by rknrlkid ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      I used Lotus alot when I was in the military. Spreadsheets were like a revelation for getting many tasks done. I had a budget spreadsheet and an ammunition spreadsheet that made life sooo much easier.

      • #2625061

        Cool

        by tonythetiger ·

        In reply to Lotus 1-2-3 Version 2.01

        I just didn’t care for their copy protection scheme… using the wrong de-fragmenting tool on your hard drive could render it inoperable.

        By the way, I done my basic and AIT at Ft. Sill in ’76. It sure did look great in the rear-view mirror 🙂

        • #2624948

          Yup; the “this cluster damned well better be where [u]we[/u] say” scheme ..

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to Cool

          killed many an installation. And, not just from defragmenting; having one particular cluster go bad left you dead in the water.

        • #2625361

          I agree

          by rknrlkid ·

          In reply to Yup; the “this cluster damned well better be where [u]we[/u] say” scheme ..

          While a good product, Lotus’ greatest frustration was its copy protection scheme. While I do not agree with pirating, I think there should be a bit more flexiblity with a legit copy than they offered.

          Oh, for those who do not know what we are talking about:

          Lotus 1-2-3 had a copy protection scheme where a hidden file was written to the hard drive from the install disk. The install disk would not re-install on a second hard disk if the program was already installed on a hard disk. The program had to be un-installed back onto the floppy to make the floppy useable to put the program on another computer. When you did that, of course, the 1-2-3 program on the first computer was unuseable. In order to use 1-2-3 on the first computer, you had to have the floppy in the disk drive to get it to start.

          Sounds like fun, doesn’t it 🙂

          If something happened to your hard drive, you were basically hosed. As far as I knew, there was no way to recover that hidden file in the event of hard drive failure. While there was a “spare” installation disk, it had the same copy protection scheme too. Between 1-2-3 and dBase, you now know why programs to foil copy protection were invented!

        • #2625315

          I’ve a vague recollection of solution to that problem, …

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to I agree

          but don’t remember any of the specifics.

        • #2625353

          You wouldn’t recognize it now

          by rknrlkid ·

          In reply to Cool

          The “old” Fort Sill that you knew was bulldozed. Gone are the WWII barracks, replaced with modern “hotel-style” quads. Some of the historic parts were kept (like the post headquarters building, and the museum) but the post was almost completely “modernized” (i.e., less than 20 years old!).

          sill-www.army.mil

          So you can see its new face 🙂

        • #2468255

          I was in

          by tonythetiger ·

          In reply to You wouldn’t recognize it now

          one of the first sets of quads in basic, but in the old barracks in AIT. But in AIT we had a civilian run mess hall (eggs “any way you want them” instead of “any way you want them as long as they’re scrambled”), so it kinda evened out 🙂

      • #2623984

        remember Allways?

        by twpcpaulap ·

        In reply to Lotus 1-2-3 Version 2.01

        first WYSIWYG reporting tool for 1-2-3.

        • #2468010

          Boy this is a walk down memory lane

          by av . ·

          In reply to remember Allways?

          Yes. That was a must-have add in at the time – around 1990 I think. It was really hard back then to format and print the spreadsheets so they looked nice. I remember sending setup strings to the printer to print Lotus spreadsheets the right way.

          Oh, the things we take for granted today! Even the simple things, like printing, were hard to do back then.

          AV

        • #2469804

          Still have a copy

          by rknrlkid ·

          In reply to remember Allways?

          I still have a copy of this in my collection (with manual!).

          I loved these kinds of add-ons. It showed the ingenuity of people to solve a specific problem for everyone (and this was pre-open source too!).

      • #2630265

        I still use the latest Lotus 123 v9.8

        by acruz02 ·

        In reply to Lotus 1-2-3 Version 2.01

        Although I have to use Excel to deal with customers, I still prefer Lotus 123 for all my internal spreadsheets.

    • #2467498

      Reflex versions 1 and 2

      by sytze de jong ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      I really liked the usefulness & speed of reflex, with its spreadsheet look, reporting tools etc. What I missed there was the possiblility to use multiple files (or tables) more than programmability

      I’ve noticed it didn’t work properly under Windows XP, but if a Vista version would come I definitely will give it a chance.

    • #2467493

      Oh my! The memories…

      by four-eyes_z ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      1) Norton Commander
      2) PC Tools
      3) MS-DOS boot disk

      Couldn’t leave home without it…

      Also had this game called LHX attack chopper (it fit on 2 5.25-inch floppies). Really fun considering we only had monochrome and green screen monitors at the time…

    • #2467491

      Word 5.5 and 6.0

      by firstaborean ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      The last two versions of Microsoft Word for DOS were so good that I still have them on my hard drive. I can do things in those that are not at all doable in any Windows word processor. Try this on for size: I have a folder on my Windows XP desktop, “Jobs.” If I open any of the files within that folder, it launches a version of Word customized just for that job, including special, job-specific spell-check word lists, search paths, screen characteristics, macros, and automatic text, and then it opens the same windows as last were opened for that job, each one having the same portion of its file on-screen, with the cursor where it was when I’d last closed that job. I can even have the job specify which printer and printer port to use. All this at the expense of only four more disk clusters to store and access the job!

      Microsoft, of course, never gave directions for doing this sort of thing, but it’s easy, once one realizes that the necesary information is all stored in one file, mw.ini, which, like all files not in use, is easily copied and stored. I store each job in its own folder, which makes backing it up child’s play.

      Word 6.0 added some nice new features to those of 5.5, but it also added a bug that sometimes prevents Print Preview, so I have both versions on my hard drive. Oh, by the way, I also have Winword, too. As a professional writer, I live by my word processors, all of them.

    • #2467484

      Lotus Agenda

      by iihamd ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Best personal organizer, calendar, reminder, note-taker anyone’s never heard of.

    • #2467481

      SuperCalc & Wordcraft

      by iansheridan ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      supercalc 5 (used to run it on a twin floppy amstrad PPC ) and had to convert the data files to produce graphs…. still have the floppy disks for it in a large box at home….but sadly dont have a single floppy disk drive in the house any more.
      Also WordCraft , a wordproccesor (well duh !) that stored data in multi files based on the chapter break …

    • #2624146

      I only say NC

      by t.rohner ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      As a support dude, i liked Norton Commander the most. And it was what i most missed, when windows first came out. Although it took quite a while until i had to finally trash my dos based utilities.

      • #2624005

        Yes Norton Commander ruled ..

        by john ·

        In reply to I only say NC

        .. it was like turning on the light switch in DOS.

        • #2468037

          And that’s before Symantec got their claws on it and f*****d it up

          by big ole jack ·

          In reply to Yes Norton Commander ruled ..

          like the rest of the products they now control

        • #2468023

          Norton Commander

          by minor.morales ·

          In reply to Yes Norton Commander ruled ..

          I do remember using the NC to do several tasks
          in my old office using a X286 X386 X486
          and then came windows…but you can still get back to the old days with Midnight Commander (of course a NC clon) in Linux
          Oh great BASIIC () 😉 and ASCII old fellows…

      • #2467940

        If you liked NC, you’ll love Total Commander

        by bill stuntz ·

        In reply to I only say NC

        Originally Windows Commander, copyright 1993-2007, by Christian Ghisler.

        http://www.ghisler.com

        IMHO, absitively, posolutely, the BEST file manager avaliable! I’ve been a registered user since V2 or V3, don’t remember for sure. It’s up to V7.02a & constantly improving. My key file is dated 1999, and I used the unregistered version for a year or more before that.

        I have a shareware copy of it on all my diagnostic CD’s, flash drives, etc. And the registered version installed on my U3 thumb drive.

        It is BY FAR the best $35 or so I’ve ever spent on software.

        • #2467347

          Is this the one with a FTP client?

          by t.rohner ·

          In reply to If you liked NC, you’ll love Total Commander

          I think i tested it once, many years ago. It wasn’t there, when i most needed it. This was the time, when Win3.0/3.1 came out with the fileman on board. Of course it was possible to open a Dos-box to edit all those Ini-files in Nc, but in many (customers)places it wasn’t on the HD. In fact, i started using NC in the time when you had to use edlin to edit a text file with Dos on board tools. Or you could use debug, if you really had a masochistic touch.
          I will have a look for total commander and see if it’s useful for me.

          Thanks for the hint

        • #2467288

          Yes, and just about any other file management function you can think of!

          by bill stuntz ·

          In reply to Is this the one with a FTP client?

          FTP client, works both local to server & server to server. Also handles multiple types of archive files & treats them as if they were directories. The 2 panel interface is VERY consistent & works very much like NC. In 1 way it’s TOO much like NC – it defaults to use the RIGHT mouse button to select, like NC did, but it’s easy to reconfigure to use Windows mouse button conventions. Things work basically the same way no matter where the data is – local, lan share, FTP, inside archive files, etc. Will also compare directory contents, file contents, synchronize directories, view files similar to Vernon Buerg’s List which was mentioned in another post. I can’t think of much of anything I’ve ever wanted to do to a file that I can’t do with TC.

          Christian Ghisler’s web site is http://www.ghisler.com.

          Hey t.rohner – I just noticed that you’re in Switzerland – so is Christian Ghisler. So maybe I should mention the multilingual features, too. Doesn’t help me as a monolingual American, but you might like to be able to switch languages on the fly. I still have the floppy mailer with Swiss stamps & the original Windows Commander 1.44 disk that he sent me when I purchased it years ago. I wonder if he sends CDs now, since the installer won’t quite fit on a floppy anymore. I find it amazing that TC can do so much when the installer is only 2M! NO bloat here!!!!

        • #2467188

          Forgotten & presumed dead.

          by deepsand ·

          In reply to If you liked NC, you’ll love Total Commander

          Thanks for pointing out that it’s alive and well.

    • #2624145

      DOS still lives

      by dogcatcher ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      These old DOS apps I still use fairly regularly:

      Directory Freedom (a file manager)
      Norton Utilities
      PartitionMagic & BootMagic
      QEdit

      These have been retired:

      WordPerfect 5.1
      XTree

      • #2624121

        DataEAse

        by techrep ·

        In reply to DOS still lives

        In 1988 I made a quickie property management application using DataEase 2.5 to handle my investment properties at that time. My portfolio has grown, but I still use it–running it in WinXP Pro, along with an Epson LQ-1000 and Oki OL810e from that era.

    • #2624144

      Telemate

      by clint ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Telemate was an AWESOME Terminal program that made it wasy to dial up all those BBSs that I frequented. It supported Zmodem and with the right mod you could do bidirectional transfers with HS-Link. In addition if you had qview resident you could watch Gif’s as they downloaded!

      BBS Software of choice… VBBS. I still have my old BBS that I ran on my 85 MEG hard drive all zipped up. I’ll take it out periodically and turn it up using Telnet just to see if anybody stumbles upon it. Thre were many door games, a leet file section and the best darn SysOP around.

      🙂 Is my Geek showing? (:

    • #2624135

      I liked my old Microfocus Cobol 83 editor

      by the listed ‘g man’ ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Many an hour spend stepping through procedures on that app late at night!

    • #2624128

      Borland’s Turbo Pascal V3.0

      by rickdavey ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Still use it to write my own little utils.
      Even for XP!

      (You know – when you want an easy way to do something, but don’t want to download and install something with 48 other useless utils.)

      • #2624076

        Good call on TP 3.0…

        by sigman ·

        In reply to Borland’s Turbo Pascal V3.0

        I still have mine somewhere, too.

      • #2467966

        Wow, the first time I used Turbo Pascal was back in HS in the late 80s’.

        by big ole jack ·

        In reply to Borland’s Turbo Pascal V3.0

        Oh man, those were fun times. I still recall how I blew the teacher and students away when I wrote a Turbo Pascal program to play the Lambada tune through the PC speaker note for note. The other student hated me for it because I excelled faster than anyone else in the class, but I didn’t care because jealousy is a form of flattery and I knew where I was going in life, which is more than I could say for the rest of the class.

    • #2624099

      X-TREE is the best

      by joe722 ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Nothing has come close to replacing X-Tree as far as the number of fuctions it preformed. You could view dozens of text and graphic file types without loading any other sofeware. You could text edit, mass rename, hex decimal edit, manage ZIP files, lauch apps and more. It made searching easy. Since it did not have the ton of usless graphics that Windows buries us with, it was easy to understand the information on the screen.
      Prior to Windows I used X-Tree as my ‘desktop’ and even on a 386 it out performed the fatware that Windows calls a file manager.

    • #2624098

      X-TREE is the best

      by joe722 ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Nothing has come close to replacing X-Tree as far as the number of fuctions it preformed. You could view dozens of text and graphic file types without loading any other sofeware. You could text edit, mass rename, hex decimal edit, manage ZIP files, lauch apps and more. It made searching easy. Since it did not have the ton of usless graphics that Windows buries us with, it was easy to understand the information on the screen.
      Prior to Windows I used X-Tree as my ‘desktop’ and even on a 386 it out performed the fatware that Windows calls a file manager.

      • #2624069
        Avatar photo

        point and shoot

        by rbeltempo ·

        In reply to X-TREE is the best

        I agree nothing comes close to xtree. How about a program called point and shoot for backup and restore.

    • #2624088

      Quarterdeck Memory Manager

      by karenc ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      for all those damn driver programs that wouldn’t fit in ram together unless you were a ram allocation origami expert or just didn’t have 3 hours to spare juggling things around, this was a godsend

    • #2624075

      Borland’s Sidekick

      by richard.figueiredo ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      anyone else rememebers this?
      It was TSR (terminante and stay resident) app which featured thinks like a notepad, a calculator, calendar with appointment scheduler, ascii table…It was so amazing you could bring it on the screen at any time – by pressing Ctr+Shift or Alt+Shift – and Sidekick would magically come to your screen on top of the program you were using. That was multi-tasking! (grin)

      • #2623835

        And SuperKey

        by 50-50 ·

        In reply to Borland’s Sidekick

        Hell yes! Combining Borland’s SuperKey with Sidekick was the dream combination for editing text, adding programmable cut-and-paste functionality to program editors, running terminal emulators, etc. I still miss it. The switch to Windows was a huge step backwards for dealing with pure text.

    • #2624071

      Still using a few

      by dr_bill ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      I still design some prototype PC boards with Protel Autotrax and Schematic. They’re limited, but do the job I need and still run even under Windows XP. There are windows versions, but I’ve never needed more.

    • #2624053

      Fave was.

      by bbpellet ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      I loved TSX-32, a multi-user serial (yeah yeah) networking OS that overlayed DOS. Then I ran Lotus 123 over the top. Great times they were….NO DAMN blue screens/Red Screens.

    • #2624013

      Javelin Plus

      by dwillner ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Best spreadsheet modeling software

    • #2624006

      PCTools

      by cosmic_ant ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      It made life a lot lot easier, in those good ol`days that`ll never come back.

    • #2624002

      Borland Reflex

      by kch50 ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      This was the best tool I had in my arsenal in those days. I could shuffle info around and it printed great reports with ease.

    • #2623998

      Magellan; ZyIndex

      by krsmav ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Lotus Magellan – infinitely flexible, amazingly fast, and automatically viewed each file as you scrolled down, which no Windows manager does – I can’t tell you how much I miss it.

      ZyIndex – instantaneous searching, fast indexing, jumps immediately to “hit” in even a large file – I still use it for a big dBase3+ file. Available for Windows, but bloated, and costs a king’s ransom.

    • #2623987

      Direct Access

      by twpcpaulap ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      made adoption by non-IT folks possible.

      • #2467921

        I absolutely HATED Direct Access & such

        by bill stuntz ·

        In reply to Direct Access

        It 100% guaranteed that the user would NEVER learn anything NEW about how to use their computer after the moment it was installed.

        And the guy who set up DA was always either on vacation or no longer with the company when pressing 1 no longer made Word Perfect happen & that letter absolutely had to be at the Post Office in an hour.

        Come on now, HOW hard would it have been to learn to type “WP” instead of “1” to run WP????? And “123” instead of “2” for Lotus????

        Ever try to help one of those users by phone? Totally impossible! “No, I can’t go to a C prompt. My menu isn’t working and the only thing I see on the screen is C dot-dot slash arrow and a blinking line.”

        AAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH!!!! (plus the sound of me ripping out my hair!) I had a LOT more hair back then!

    • #2623985

      Norton Commander

      by mbennett ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      This product was ahead of its time.

      • #2468035

        Norton Commander was a kick ass product for its time

        by big ole jack ·

        In reply to Norton Commander

        I actually still have a copy of it, both for DOS and Windows, but I find it useless today with all the stuff built into Windows.

        • #2467929

          Try Total Commander by Christian Ghisler

          by bill stuntz ·

          In reply to Norton Commander was a kick ass product for its time

          It’s a MUCH better file manager than anything built into ANY version of Windows.

          No more:
          select all.. loop: delete.. (oops, locked file..) select all.. de-select the locked file(s).. goto loop: eventually done.

          No more:
          select all.. loop: copy.. (oops, file exists, overwrite?).. No.. re-select everything below the one(s) you don’t want to overwrite.. goto loop: eventually done.

          Those 2 things alone probably save me at least 5-10 minutes on every PC I de-crap & reorganize. I’d go nuts without TC!

        • #2467343

          I’ll definitely have a look into it…

          by t.rohner ·

          In reply to Try Total Commander by Christian Ghisler

          These are tasks i often have to do, this really could help. I thought those file managers have become more or less obsolete, but as we say: the better is the enemy of the good…

    • #2623972

      ProfessionalWrite

      by campagna ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      I still use it in a DOS box, since it is the only word processing application that can erase a rectangle from the middle of a text file without going to the end of line. Great for taking out unneeded columns of numbers in a text table.

      • #2623851

        Column Delete in Word

        by mccleld ·

        In reply to ProfessionalWrite

        If you want to delete a column in a plain text file, it’s easy in MS-Word.

        MS-Word has done this since 2.0 that I know of.

        Hold down the Alt key and click and drag a box around the text you want to select. Then just hit the delete key.

        • #2467886

          col. delete

          by campagna ·

          In reply to Column Delete in Word

          I never knew about the alt key option till just now. I still like PW though.

      • #2623846

        PFS: ProfessionalWrite was great!

        by blainebauer ·

        In reply to ProfessionalWrite

        I used it to write my Master’s thesis, complete with custom fonts and graphics from Harvard Graphics. That was pretty awesome stuff in 1988!

        • #2623839

          Telemate – just used it yesterday!

          by blainebauer ·

          In reply to PFS: ProfessionalWrite was great!

          I still have an old ’90s laptop that I occasionally use as a portable terminal for configuring routers. I have it boot directly to Telemate, which can cut & paste just like Windows.

    • #2623952

      PCTools had a great selection of tools

      by kevin.speidel ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Brings back good and bad memories

    • #2623944

      Grandview – the best outliner!

      by tom_jacobson ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Hi all,

      I still use Symantec’s Grandview. The best outliner I’ve ever used. It was totally customizable with macros. Had hoist & de-hoist, which is a feature I haven’t seen in any outliner. I’d use it all the time if it wasn’t such a pain to print. I still use it alot for procedures.

    • #2623933

      WS2000, ?DiskCopy? and others

      by sanjaya.tio ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      I’m starting at 80’s so:
      Norton Utilities: NDD, Unerase, DiskEdit.
      It’s fun to hex-edit files, including the time-stamp. I find replacement for DiskEdit in Hex.
      Norton Commander is the best File Manager at the moment
      Quarterdeck Memory Manager. Amen to karenc.

      DiskCopy? (correct me if i’m wrong) format 5 1/4″ disk from 1.2M to 1.5 and 3 1/2″ 1.44M to 1.7

      WS2000 for Column block capability. This is the only SW I still keep in my hard drive until I found UltraEdit.

    • #2623888

      Slapper!

      by digitalfrog ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Slapper was a great prank program. It was essentially a DOS shell that you could load on an unsuspecting co-worker (or even slip into the logon scripts). All it would do is come back to the standard DOS prompt. Whenever you entered a DOS commmand, it would stop and insult you first, wait a few seconds, then go ahead and run the command for you. The insults were composed at random from a list of first and second half phrases and could be edited with a hex editor to put your own insult lines in.

    • #2623871

      Oh~ I always remember C/PM 86 not MSDOS

      by faye2040 ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Ah~ Because I once used Apple soft and Apple CP/M 80 (zilog 80), so I use C/PM 86 for a while for those old PC, PC/XT, and PC/AT
      No~ no~ hey Microsoft, you copied idea of C/PM into DOS.

      • #2467183

        Actually, it was QDOS (Quick & Dirty OS), that was the precursor of PC-DOS.

        by deepsand ·

        In reply to Oh~ I always remember C/PM 86 not MSDOS

        QDOS was one of several variants of CP/M, which ran on the 8-bit 8080, that were adapted to run on the 16-bit 8086.

        IBM was actually most interested in Digital Research’s CP/M-86, but were blown off by Gary Kildall; so, they turned to Gates, who had bought the rights to QDOS from Seattle Computer Products.

    • #2623861

      Had to be the games!!!

      by mikemulren ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      And my favorite game was the Ultima Series.
      Richard Garriot and crew knew how
      to “…create worlds.” I remember really
      having to tear through the Config.sys and
      Autoexec.bat files to leave enough free ram
      to run these games. Loved them all!!!

      • #2468139

        DOS Games

        by tec1000 ·

        In reply to Had to be the games!!!

        My favorite game whic ran on my Epson Equity II was KOEI’s Nobunaga’s Ambition 2

      • #2467958

        I was into combat flight simulators and such

        by big ole jack ·

        In reply to Had to be the games!!!

        I think the best DOS based game I had at the time had to be Comanche. It ran straight from DOS and had graphics that looked like they were generated using today’s DirectX or OpenGL code. Also, the rendering was smooth even on a crappy old 486 PC with a few megs of RAM. That game was very well coded to run on the hardware of that decade, which is more than I can say for the complete bloated garbage being sold now that requires crazy amounts of RAM and the graphics still look like a 5 year old rendered them.

    • #2623860

      Disk Copy Fast

      by mccleld ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Recently I had some network-influenced GHOST issues that, due to time constraints, made me reach for an old 100mb hub. So, without DHCP, I suddenly needed 70 GHOST disks. I reached deep into my bag of tricks and out came Disk Copy Fast. A great little program that Formats/Copies/Verifies disks easily from an image in memory. With a trio of machines and my P-Touch labeller, I had the disks ready in short order.

      So does anybody have a lead on a small, solid, free, DHCP server that would run as an app?

      • #2467957

        I always carry a small D-Link broadband router in my bag

        by big ole jack ·

        In reply to Disk Copy Fast

        It’s the cheapest and simplest DHCP server and switch I can think of and works wonders for ghosting machines because you can connect a hub or another switch to it.

    • #2623823

      Nutshell, Sidekick, and, of course, XONIX!!!

      by charlie.sumpter ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Anybody remember Xonix? I loved that game. With one computer upgrade I actually had to push the turbo button to turn it off…otherwise Xonix was nearly impossible to play!

      A few others…Paperboy, Police Quest (I think?), Mad Racer, Qmodem, Test Drive, Qbert…

    • #2468055

      PE2 – Personal Editor 2

      by boomchuck1 ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      This was the text editor that I cut my teeth on for programming in dBase III, IV, and FoxPro DOS. Truly powerful and easy to use. One great feature was that it would allow you to cut and paste a column of text, like say 10 characters wide and 20 rows long. Really made it easy to move those statements for building screens etc. around. IBM, I believe, bought it and came out with an updated version but it really lost a lot of the feel and features so I never bothered with it.

    • #2468033

      PC Anywhere for DOS. Ahh yes, the RDP protocol of the times.

      by big ole jack ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      How else would one remote control a PC? That product was a lifesaver back in the days of DOS based PCs’ and Non GUI servers like Netware 3.x and such.

      • #2468005

        Oh, yeah

        by av . ·

        In reply to PC Anywhere for DOS. Ahh yes, the RDP protocol of the times.

        PC Anywhere for DOS was the standard for remote control. It had the callback feature for security (that was always tricky). We used to have a modem pool with it on our Netware 3.2 network so people could dial-in from home.

        That was before the big onslaught of viruses and spam. Running a network was so different then.

        AV

      • #2467338

        I bought my first Copy in a SF Egghead store

        by t.rohner ·

        In reply to PC Anywhere for DOS. Ahh yes, the RDP protocol of the times.

        in my first transatlantic vacation. It needed some tinkering to get the AT commands straight on all the different modem types. Now we use PC-Visit or Net-Viewer with great success. It’s quite a “green” technology. It saves many thousand miles, i don’t have to travel.

    • #2468009

      What’s this “were”

      by britannia5 ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Why use the past tense? I still use ‘attrib’ to get round Windows blocked files!

      • #2467337

        You are right, but

        by t.rohner ·

        In reply to What’s this “were”

        the microdudes want them to be called shell commands nowadays. I use the dir command pretty often and of course xcopy.

    • #2468004

      Cental Point’s PC Tools and Copywright for obvious reasons.

      by sleepin’dawg ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      On a personal basis I was into software piracy; until going into business for myself. Then I became law abiding and wouldn’t permit any bootlegged software near me at my work.

      Programs I really liked were Lotus 1-2-3 and Sidekick with honourable mention for programs like WordStar and DBase II. Loved Page Maker on Apple for desktop crap as well as Corel on the PC for massaging text.

      [b]Dawg[/b] ]:)

      • #2467972

        Hey…we all pirated software for personal and education reasons at a point

        by big ole jack ·

        In reply to Cental Point’s PC Tools and Copywright for obvious reasons.

        There was no other way to really learn this stuff without shelling out a huge chunk of cash to buy it, especially when you are a teenager just starting to tinker with computers, but one would never sell pirated copies, only play with it and get good at it, which is how I learned most of the stuff I know today. Anyhow, I remember Central Point as I bought one of those old “option boards” to allow me to copy 5 1/4″ copy protected floppies back then. If you recall, something was done to the boot sector to prevent standard floppy drives from being able to read and copy it, but the option board fine tuned the drive head movement to allow it to catch that data in the sector. Wow, this stuff bring back memories of 16 bit ISA 286 and 386 machines.

    • #2467986

      Stacker

      by bralin-23 ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Back in the day of the 10 MB hard drives, Stacker was definitely one of my best friends!

      • #2467970

        Stacker was awesome, but then MS ripped off the idea with Doublespace

        by big ole jack ·

        In reply to Stacker

        and caused more drive corruption than one could shake a stick at. I wasn’t too fond of drive compression software because of all the cross linked and corrupt files it resulted in.

    • #2467951

      Harvard Graphics

      by steeltrepid ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Or was that too expensive for you guys back then?

      • #2467893

        I loved this one

        by richard.figueiredo ·

        In reply to Harvard Graphics

        But not expensive, actually I must confess I had a pirated copy of it. In fact, in those days we used to care far more less about piracy.

      • #2467255

        That was a great product

        by av . ·

        In reply to Harvard Graphics

        Back in the early ’90s it was the corporate standard for graphics. There was no Powerpoint back then.

        AV

      • #2469639

        Ah, yes…

        by seanferd ·

        In reply to Harvard Graphics

        Running a fine bit of graphics software on an amber monochrome monitor. I got it free on a junked machine. Was just a toy for me, though.

    • #2467936

      DR GEM

      by rumblebee ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Since we are talking about apps I would think the old Digital Research answer to MS Windows, GEM (Graphics Environment Manager)looked pretty clean for its’ time. Its’ downfall was that most other apps for a GUI interface were for MS Windows. I think today’s GUI world would be far more advanced and reliable if we had more than just MS Windows as a choice for a GUI. Remember that back in the days any app including GUIs were installed on top of DOS. I am sure the old timers remember this.

      • #2467340

        You could have used Apple…

        by t.rohner ·

        In reply to DR GEM

        If their prices were a bit lower. We bought a Mac IIci for some 10 grand back then. This included a 14′ CRT…
        A main competitor sold a Gem based system before MS brought a usable GUI OS. I watched it with envy back then. We had a dos based menu generator to give our product a “graphical touch”.

    • #2467900

      Borland Paradox

      by teresaacourtney ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Despite the advantages Windows adds to the functionality of many programs, the DOS version of Paradox was every bit as functional and powerful. Been using Paradox since 1985 and never found a better relational DB. Ran my businesses on it for over 20 yrs & still use it.

    • #2467883

      RIP Scripts

      by campagna ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      This was used on BBS dial up locations. Instead of sending great graphics and button GUIs over slow phone lines, it just sent the graphics commands. This allowed a 486/33 to produce screens in the time of a CR. What ever happened to them?

      • #2468826

        Was this sort of a display postscript?

        by t.rohner ·

        In reply to RIP Scripts

        If yes, it was used in Job’s Nextstep or later Openstep. I think it got obsolete with Directx and missing features. (It won’t help much with bitmap oriented screen content.) There was another graphical system called Dgis. We used it to drive 20′ CRT’s in graphical applications. But it was very expensive and not too many suppliers built them. I think our products cam from NEC. (Full length ISA cards…) 2-3 years later, you could achieve the same with cheap Tseng ET4000 cards.

    • #2467881

      Lotus 123 v2.4

      by campagna ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      This was the last 123 written in assembler. It still beats modern spreadsheets for speed. Still use it for some stuff.

    • #2467253

      Soft Solutions

      by av . ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Does anyone remember this document management system? It was the greatest in the early ’90s.

      AV

    • #2467230

      XTree, XTree and XTree (Gold!)

      by the.famous.blurt ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Title says it all, really…

    • #2467208

      UMB loader

      by qtvinsta ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      I bearly remember a shareware/freeware UMB loader that i couldn’t live without in the DOS days… giving me well over 600K in memory because i was able to load most things into the Upper Memory Block

    • #2467192

      Bah Humbug DOS. CP/M !! hahahaha

      by pmcgee3 ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      DOS is overhyped!
      CP/M will one day rule the world!
      ahahahahaha
      hahahahaha
      hahaha
      <>

      • #2467181

        Nah; TurboDOS long ago surpassed MP/M as the NOS of choice.

        by deepsand ·

        In reply to Bah Humbug DOS. CP/M !! hahahaha

        Unfortunately, even though it supported the 808x/80x8x class of CPUs, TurboDOS was never modified to run on what became IBM’s PC architectural standard.

    • #2467172

      FALCON 3.0!

      by jefftcg ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      It started the whole online flying and fighting for the rest of the world.

      • #2623798

        I remember that.. oh it beat me bad

        by neon samurai ·

        In reply to FALCON 3.0!

        I could never get the hang of landing that damn f16.

        I think the only flight sim I played before that was Jetfighter with it’s vector graphics and modest selection of planes. The final of the training missions was landing on a carrier before you got into the combat missions. gah.. I’d love to find a copy of it now though it’s probably based off CPU rather than clock time so it wouldn’t run at the correct speed now.

        I still can’t stand having the numlock on and not using the number pad for navigation after so many hours of using it for stick control.

    • #2469110

      Spin Rite HDD Utility…

      by mccleld ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Back in the days of 20MB HDD’s, a guy brought a full height 80MB MFM Micropolis monstrosity to me.

      Spinrite not only allowed me to determine that one of the R/W heads was intermittant(I think there were 9), it also allowed me to turn it off. We were then able to get most of the data off minus that one platter. He gave me the drive and for the fun of it, I used it for a couple of more years.

      • #2469058

        SpinRite’s alive and well.

        by deepsand ·

        In reply to Spin Rite HDD Utility…

        And, since SpinRite’s debut, Steve Gibson’s come up with quite a number of useful goodies, many of them still available for free at http://www.grc.com/default.htm .

        BTW, do [b]not[/b] go to http://www.gibsonresearch.com/ .

      • #2469022

        Spinrite is alive and kicking

        by t.rohner ·

        In reply to Spin Rite HDD Utility…

        In fact, at this moment it’s in use on one of my home PC’s. In it’s latest version, 6.1 if i’m correct, it works on all file systems.
        Be it Fat32, Ntfs, ext(x) or reiser or whatever. It starts from a CD with a free dos clone.
        This is definitely what you need, if everything else fails.

    • #2469635

      Anyone ever use DOS Navigator? [&Edit]

      by seanferd ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      I stumbled across this. There is a slightly newer open source version. Actally 2 versions, one for FAT and one for NTFS. Also a link back to the original author’s final version, now freeware.
      http://www.dnosp.com/e_index.php
      and
      http://www.ritlabs.com/dn/
      The DOS Navigator site has an amusing DOS-ish command bar.

      >edit< Actually, there are more than two versions, I don't know why I said that, I knew better. There are several flavors, to satisfy your environmental needs.

    • #2630258

      Beagle Brothers need I say more???

      by acruz02 ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      I’m going to show my age with this one Beagle Brothers…
      http://stevenf.com/beagle/contents.html

      • #2623773

        Age-wise, you’ve plenty of company here.

        by deepsand ·

        In reply to Beagle Brothers need I say more???

        Obviously, no one here mentioning products from yesteryear is even close to being a youngster.

        The newbies have certainly missed some great times.

    • #2807982

      Ashton Tate’s FrameworkIII and Bondwell’s RAPS

      by gudufl ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      I Love FWIII and am running it in Win2KSVR, Win2K, WinXPSP2 on PII and upward PC’s without clocking issues. Ashton Tate could have made MS look s…d if they had persued their concepts they developed with this integrated software.
      I also run an old twin Floppy, Batch-Processing Accounting package, “RAPS” which I can launch and view on those machines, but have to run it on a DOS6.22 PC (486DX2/66)in order to update batch files as I have not cracked the “subst” routine I need to let it work properly in the other OS’s.
      A Forum comment I saw recently and realy liked: If you dont know DOS, you dont know Windows…

    • #3009496

      EDT ,PCtools,and WP 5.1

      by dch ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      EDT was a DEC screen editor and when it appeared for DOS I bought it straight away.
      PCtools, speaks for itself really a great toolkit and finally – the best WP known to man Wordperfect 5.1 and it’s great blue screen
      Happy days
      Dave Hickman

      • #3004764

        WP5.1 in MS VPC2004

        by gudufl ·

        In reply to EDT ,PCtools,and WP 5.1

        Dave, you can run WP5.1 on an XP machine using the MS-VPC (Microsoft Virtual PC) by creating a DOS-VPC. You will requier a copy of the DOS OS though. By the way this applies to other DOS based apps. One would be able to use PCtools in the VPC. I have created a 20MB DOS-VPC that is running some of my old DOS-apps, but had to connect a Floppy and Stiffy drive to the PC to install the OS and other DOS-apps. Apparently their is a workaround to this by using the Network options in the MS-VPC2004 which I have not tested yet.

    • #3024656

      Destruction Derby

      by slayer_ ·

      In reply to Which old apps for DOS were your favorites?

      Damn that was a fun game

Viewing 64 reply threads