The Peter Norton thread below go me thinking ...
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How many of the "killer applications" that I started my PC life with - the really original, useful, amazing ones - do I still use? None. Remember "Brief - the Programmers Editor"? Gone. Xtree? (XTree Gold, Pro, Gold Pro, Gold Pro Ultimate Wonder CuresBaldnessAndScurvy Edition included)? You couldn't live without it, but ... despite a couple of (pretty poor) Windows versions it died a death. 1-2-3? Nope. Wordstar? Dead. Samna Word / Ami Pro / Lotus Word Pro? (The best word processor ever created) It lost out to the MS Office juggernaut: Roadkill. Got anything you started off with still in regular use?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Like some others I started in DOS, so nothing really would have survived to now. I also used Brief and really liked it, and of course for a long time afterwards any editor would have good Brief emulation. But eventually it faded away and I had to get used to the more common Windows schemes. I started with C (Turbo C? Can't remember) and assembler. I remember going to the store and buying the IBM assembler package and being really excited, and get the BIOS manual with all of the BIOS code. Talk about spaghetti, I think they might have reused single bytes via jump sometimes. But 8K ain't a lot to work with. I'm guessing I also used Turbo Pascal some as well. I remember when I moved to OS/2. It used to drive me freaking crazy that the hard drive would start moving on its own. In DOS unless your program told the hard drive to do something it didn't do anything. I was constantly jerking around at the sound of the hard drive (and they were't quiet in those days) suddenly grinding on its own and having a moment of fear that something bad was happening.
Explorans limites defectum
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Like some others I started in DOS, so nothing really would have survived to now. I also used Brief and really liked it, and of course for a long time afterwards any editor would have good Brief emulation. But eventually it faded away and I had to get used to the more common Windows schemes. I started with C (Turbo C? Can't remember) and assembler. I remember going to the store and buying the IBM assembler package and being really excited, and get the BIOS manual with all of the BIOS code. Talk about spaghetti, I think they might have reused single bytes via jump sometimes. But 8K ain't a lot to work with. I'm guessing I also used Turbo Pascal some as well. I remember when I moved to OS/2. It used to drive me freaking crazy that the hard drive would start moving on its own. In DOS unless your program told the hard drive to do something it didn't do anything. I was constantly jerking around at the sound of the hard drive (and they were't quiet in those days) suddenly grinding on its own and having a moment of fear that something bad was happening.
Explorans limites defectum
Dean Roddey wrote:
the sound of the hard drive (and they were't quiet in those days) suddenly grinding on its own and having a moment of fear that something bad was happening
That's a nightmare I lived a couple of years ago, awakened in the middle of the night by a strange tick-tick-ticking sound coming from the home/office server. :omg: It was then that I realized it had been months since I did a complete backup. X| Lesson learned.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Yep. I shudder to think of how many MB I copied using that program. But it was very good at what it did.
Socialism is the Axe Body Spray of political ideologies: It never does what it claims to do, but people too young to know better keep buying it anyway. (Glenn Reynolds)
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I remember buying Visual C++ V1.0 myself, with my own money! Two foot thick shelf of books and a similar pile of pound notes ... :laugh:
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
The one we had came on CDROM and we had to scramble to find someone with a portable CDROM drive. Install took freaking forever (the joys of 2x CDROMs)
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LapLink! Wow; I'm going to get floppy nightmares now!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
Forogar wrote:
floppy nightmares
Really - how about the dreaded 'token ring network' nightmares!
Socialism is the Axe Body Spray of political ideologies: It never does what it claims to do, but people too young to know better keep buying it anyway. (Glenn Reynolds)
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Command Prompt :)
“The palest ink is better than the best memory.” - Chinese Proverb
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I think there's only one application I've used on a daily basis for about twenty years now... Winamp! :D It still kicks (llama's) ass :D I'm still on v5.666 though (you think that version is a coincidence?), didn't recently bother to upgrade to the new "leaked" 5.8. And hell yes it's a productivity tool!
Best, Sander sanderrossel.com Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly
Sander Rossel wrote:
I think there's only one application I've used on a daily basis for about twenty years now... Winamp! :-D
+1
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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The one we had came on CDROM and we had to scramble to find someone with a portable CDROM drive. Install took freaking forever (the joys of 2x CDROMs)
Mine was CD as well - I'd got heartily sick of "Insert disk 27 in Drive A: and press any key"* * - Normally followed by "General error reading Drive A:" and copious swearing.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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How many of the "killer applications" that I started my PC life with - the really original, useful, amazing ones - do I still use? None. Remember "Brief - the Programmers Editor"? Gone. Xtree? (XTree Gold, Pro, Gold Pro, Gold Pro Ultimate Wonder CuresBaldnessAndScurvy Edition included)? You couldn't live without it, but ... despite a couple of (pretty poor) Windows versions it died a death. 1-2-3? Nope. Wordstar? Dead. Samna Word / Ami Pro / Lotus Word Pro? (The best word processor ever created) It lost out to the MS Office juggernaut: Roadkill. Got anything you started off with still in regular use?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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How many of the "killer applications" that I started my PC life with - the really original, useful, amazing ones - do I still use? None. Remember "Brief - the Programmers Editor"? Gone. Xtree? (XTree Gold, Pro, Gold Pro, Gold Pro Ultimate Wonder CuresBaldnessAndScurvy Edition included)? You couldn't live without it, but ... despite a couple of (pretty poor) Windows versions it died a death. 1-2-3? Nope. Wordstar? Dead. Samna Word / Ami Pro / Lotus Word Pro? (The best word processor ever created) It lost out to the MS Office juggernaut: Roadkill. Got anything you started off with still in regular use?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
As my first work in computers was writing Excel macros (converting Lotus 123) I can safely claim Excel as a tool I still use. I still have the installation disks (2 x 3.25") for SuperBase, no drive of course. What a magic program that was, 1 disk for the database, another for the application and you had a solution to deliver. Even made 9600 baud viable.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity - RAH I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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QuickC - made the switch-over from FORTRAN quite pleasant. A bunch of .COM files I created - and for that matter, all the stuff that used the ROM BIOS went belly up. Well, the versions change, but at least you can still get ROGUE !
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
Dito - I was wondering if someone would mention it. I created a complete DOS windowing system using QuickC.
INTP "Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." - Edsger Dijkstra "I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks. " - Daniel Boone
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Some trivia for you - but in VC 1.51 math. The math function tan() flip the values between -180 and 180 degrees of the y axis. I found this during unit testing of my existing graphing library using the latest compiler/IDE from MS.
INTP "Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." - Edsger Dijkstra "I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks. " - Daniel Boone
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How many of the "killer applications" that I started my PC life with - the really original, useful, amazing ones - do I still use? None. Remember "Brief - the Programmers Editor"? Gone. Xtree? (XTree Gold, Pro, Gold Pro, Gold Pro Ultimate Wonder CuresBaldnessAndScurvy Edition included)? You couldn't live without it, but ... despite a couple of (pretty poor) Windows versions it died a death. 1-2-3? Nope. Wordstar? Dead. Samna Word / Ami Pro / Lotus Word Pro? (The best word processor ever created) It lost out to the MS Office juggernaut: Roadkill. Got anything you started off with still in regular use?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Still use NE (Norton editor) for assembler stuff, mostly within DOS emulators.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment "Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst "I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Some trivia for you - but in VC 1.51 math. The math function tan() flip the values between -180 and 180 degrees of the y axis. I found this during unit testing of my existing graphing library using the latest compiler/IDE from MS.
INTP "Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." - Edsger Dijkstra "I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks. " - Daniel Boone
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How many of the "killer applications" that I started my PC life with - the really original, useful, amazing ones - do I still use? None. Remember "Brief - the Programmers Editor"? Gone. Xtree? (XTree Gold, Pro, Gold Pro, Gold Pro Ultimate Wonder CuresBaldnessAndScurvy Edition included)? You couldn't live without it, but ... despite a couple of (pretty poor) Windows versions it died a death. 1-2-3? Nope. Wordstar? Dead. Samna Word / Ami Pro / Lotus Word Pro? (The best word processor ever created) It lost out to the MS Office juggernaut: Roadkill. Got anything you started off with still in regular use?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Still use Xtree Pro - it does one particular thing well that nothing else does as easily or efficiently, so I use it for that: it allows you to compare two directory trees containing identically named files that may vary in size only and find all the larger, smaller or identical ones and manipulate the results en-mass. Directory Opus is the nearest Windows UI equivalent I can find ( and I use that all the time ) - this is, of course, a port of the excellent Amiga program! I have a friend who still uses Xtree Pro as his primary file manager (on Windows 10) every day. I still use (and much prefer) Wordperfect as a word processor (first used Version 4.2 under DOS). (Word, despite millions of man years of development and billions of dollars of investment, is still an abomination of the worst kind for anything more complex than very simple documents; compared with Excel which has - with one or two blips - steadily improved over the years and is probably the most useful and used MS product I possess other than the OSs themselves.) Although I still have a working copy of Brief, I mainly use Jetbrains products now for software dev: a great shame no one has done a Brief keyboard emulation for it though as I can still remember the keystrokes! And of course, under linux, I still use the many of the same utilities that I started with under Microport Unix - things I learnt then still work today. Sure I could come up with some more if I thought hard enough... 8)
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How many of the "killer applications" that I started my PC life with - the really original, useful, amazing ones - do I still use? None. Remember "Brief - the Programmers Editor"? Gone. Xtree? (XTree Gold, Pro, Gold Pro, Gold Pro Ultimate Wonder CuresBaldnessAndScurvy Edition included)? You couldn't live without it, but ... despite a couple of (pretty poor) Windows versions it died a death. 1-2-3? Nope. Wordstar? Dead. Samna Word / Ami Pro / Lotus Word Pro? (The best word processor ever created) It lost out to the MS Office juggernaut: Roadkill. Got anything you started off with still in regular use?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Commander Keen was with me back then and he still is now :D
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Still use Xtree Pro - it does one particular thing well that nothing else does as easily or efficiently, so I use it for that: it allows you to compare two directory trees containing identically named files that may vary in size only and find all the larger, smaller or identical ones and manipulate the results en-mass. Directory Opus is the nearest Windows UI equivalent I can find ( and I use that all the time ) - this is, of course, a port of the excellent Amiga program! I have a friend who still uses Xtree Pro as his primary file manager (on Windows 10) every day. I still use (and much prefer) Wordperfect as a word processor (first used Version 4.2 under DOS). (Word, despite millions of man years of development and billions of dollars of investment, is still an abomination of the worst kind for anything more complex than very simple documents; compared with Excel which has - with one or two blips - steadily improved over the years and is probably the most useful and used MS product I possess other than the OSs themselves.) Although I still have a working copy of Brief, I mainly use Jetbrains products now for software dev: a great shame no one has done a Brief keyboard emulation for it though as I can still remember the keystrokes! And of course, under linux, I still use the many of the same utilities that I started with under Microport Unix - things I learnt then still work today. Sure I could come up with some more if I thought hard enough... 8)
Totally agree with you on both Word and Excel - Excel is just such a brilliant spreadsheet it's hard to think of improvements (apart from replacing the damn ribbon with a working UI ... but that goes without saying).
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I also used Brief - I miss it now and then - XTree, Wordstar and I still have a floppy disk of Norton Utilities - even though my main machines no longer have a floppy disk device! I tried Norton Commander for a while but didn't really like it. Ghost - I think it was called that; for low level disky things - gone now. I wrote some utilities myself for various things, floppy disk backups, disk hex editors, early messaging and a sort of email over TCP/IP (before internet, just on the office network) - all gone now; I can't even find the floppy with the source code!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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For me it was Borland Turbo Pascal & C++, learn to code on those two. Still have the installer floppies (but no floppy drive!, :( well a USB but...)
I used Turbo Pascal, then Turbo Prolog. Loved Brief back then. Used dBase ][, its successors and then Paradox. It's too bad that Corel stopped supporting Paradox. For many applications it was superior to Access and certainly faster. Paradox's developers were geniuses at making important small things work -- for example, you could could copy/paste a comma-formatted number into a number field and Paradox would clean up the string and convert it to a number without choking. You could enter today's date in a date field by pressing the space bar 3x. Nice!
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How many of the "killer applications" that I started my PC life with - the really original, useful, amazing ones - do I still use? None. Remember "Brief - the Programmers Editor"? Gone. Xtree? (XTree Gold, Pro, Gold Pro, Gold Pro Ultimate Wonder CuresBaldnessAndScurvy Edition included)? You couldn't live without it, but ... despite a couple of (pretty poor) Windows versions it died a death. 1-2-3? Nope. Wordstar? Dead. Samna Word / Ami Pro / Lotus Word Pro? (The best word processor ever created) It lost out to the MS Office juggernaut: Roadkill. Got anything you started off with still in regular use?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Brief for sure. I loved the keystroke minimalism. I added Brief key mapping to my IDE's for a long time. Never felt as comfortable, though. I also liked 4DOS and (don't laugh!) REXX by Mansfield Software Group for complex scripting. Hard to imagine but I once thought a 20mb HDD was such a bounty! Now, it wouldn't hold one RAW-format picture.
Cheers, Mike Fidler "I intend to live forever - so far, so good." Steven Wright "I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met." Also Steven Wright "I'm addicted to placebos. I could quit, but it wouldn't matter." Steven Wright yet again.
