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Ask HN: What were your favorite MS-DOS productivity programs?

8 pointsby wkoszekabout 5 years ago
Some of the MS-DOS stuff was a productivity heaven. Norton Commander comes to mind. Then Turbo Vision apps, including Turbo Pascal editor. Any else you remember?

11 comments

helph67about 5 years ago
NewKey for storing/recall of keyboard macros. Lots of people raved about SideKick which loaded as (one of the first?) T.S.R utilities.
photaweabout 5 years ago
Norton Commander was insanely awesome.<p>Borland C++ was really cool (even back then, I favored C++ over Pascal :D).
ObsoleteNerdabout 5 years ago
Xtree blew my mind when I first found it and it was then THE first thing I installed on every new DOS computer I built&#x2F;got.
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pwasonabout 5 years ago
Tornado - which ended up being the IMHO insanely overpriced and now almost unusable InfoSelect. I once wrote an inventory app using Tornado, batch scripts, and a barcode interface... Was insanely fast.
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qefxabout 5 years ago
Lotus Metro I preferred it over Borland Sidekick
leejoramoabout 5 years ago
Borland Sidekick<p>QuarterDeck Desqview<p>Borland Reflex<p>Microsoft Word
osullivjabout 5 years ago
GrandView: a note taking outliner.
kazinatorabout 5 years ago
SemWare&#x27;s QEdit
lprovenabout 5 years ago
Lots, many of which have been mentioned, but there is one whole category of app that didn&#x27;t really make the leap to Windows (or Mac OS X over in Apple-land) and is basically dead now:<p>Outliners -- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;outliners.scripting.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;outliners.scripting.com&#x2F;</a><p>The seminal PC Outline was shareware and it&#x27;s still out there: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.outlinersoftware.com&#x2F;topics&#x2F;viewt&#x2F;2200&#x2F;0&#x2F;pc-outline" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.outlinersoftware.com&#x2F;topics&#x2F;viewt&#x2F;2200&#x2F;0&#x2F;pc-outl...</a><p>But it evolved into Grandview: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;welcometosherwood.wordpress.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;grandview&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;welcometosherwood.wordpress.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;grandview...</a><p>As for the others... well, there were lots! Back in the boom days of MS-DOS (DOS 3.x, mainly, and before) it didn&#x27;t include a decent text editor, directory navigator, file manager, memory manager, program launcher, task-switcher, inter-computer file-transfer tool, file or disk compression and lots of other things, so there were many 3rd party replacements.<p>Some still have fans.<p>DOS 4 started to fix some of that, including a pretty good file manager&#x2F;program launcher called DOSShell, but otherwise it was bloated: it was buggy and took a lot of RAM, a scarce resource under DOS.<p>DR responded with DR-DOS 5, which was leaner, meaner, gave you more free RAM than even MS-DOS 3.3, but gave you big (&gt;32MB) partitions, a graphical shell, a full-screen editor and lots more.<p>MS responded with MS-DOS 5, the first ever retail version, which included all this and more.<p>There was a brief &quot;arms race&quot; -- DR-DOS 6, then MS-DOS 6, 6.2, 6.21, 6.22, DR-DOS 7. I&#x27;ve blogged about this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liam-on-linux.livejournal.com&#x2F;58013.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liam-on-linux.livejournal.com&#x2F;58013.html</a><p>Then Windows 95 integrated DOS and that ended the battle.<p>DR-DOS got acquired by Novell, then spun off with Caldera, then went FOSS. I am working on some updates: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liam-on-linux.livejournal.com&#x2F;58013.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liam-on-linux.livejournal.com&#x2F;58013.html</a><p>IBM continued with PC DOS 7 and the little-known PC DOS 7.1, which fixes a load of bugs, adds FAT32 support, LBA disk access, support for modern &gt;8GB disks, and more. It&#x27;s a free download if you know where to look: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liam-on-linux.livejournal.com&#x2F;59703.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liam-on-linux.livejournal.com&#x2F;59703.html</a><p>These later versions of DOS -- DR-DOS 5, 6 &amp; 7, MS-DOS 5 &amp; 6, and PC-DOS 6, 7 &amp; 7.1 -- included replacements for most of the 3rd party utilities. 32-bit Windows then made most of them irrelevant. A lot of the companies went under.<p>Most of the office-type apps made the jump to Windows: WordPerfect ended up a good word-processor. Borland&#x27;s DOS apps got bundled with it. IBM bought Lotus, Samna and others and made SmartSuite.<p>There&#x27;s no burning reason to favour the ancient DOS versions now.<p>But outliners never really made that leap and so there&#x27;s now a choice of MS Word or run ancient DOS stuff. The FOSS world has never embraced outliners: LibreOffice doesn&#x27;t include one. There are some FOSS 2-pane outliners -- what Wikipedia calls &quot;extrinsic&quot; outliners -- but they are a totally separate, different type of app, and personally I have no use for them.<p>So I run an ancient version of MS Word, Word 97, just for Outline mode. It runs perfectly under WINE on Ubuntu and other distros.
formerchampabout 5 years ago
edit.com
bediger4000about 5 years ago
xenix
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