The Peter Norton thread below go me thinking ...

[jeron1]

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

[Rick York]

I think there is/was a tan2 function that correctly dealt with the signs of the two arguments, x and y.

[Mike Winiberg]

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)

[Member 9167057]

Commander Keen was with me back then and he still is now :D

[OriginalGriff]

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!

[milo xml]

Ghost is still around although I don't think they've updated any of the code.

[Harrison Pratt]

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!

[MikeTheFid]

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.

[OriginalGriff]

Heck, 20MB wouldn't run a modern app at all! I remember when Doom came out - that was what, 4 floppies? And we thought that was a lot! :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!

[englebart]

Still in use * grep * sed Things that I started with that have disappeared that I do not miss: Thin wire Ethernet Token ring networks tiny monitors! EGA anyone? Paper only documentation. Floppy drives (Mostly hardware, I see)

[darktrick544]

Brief, jeez, I knew that editor at the cellular level in my fingers. And, Norton Commander as well

[Stuart Dootson]

The *oldest* software that I still use today... probably vi. Although now it's vim, of course... And my first use of it was on a Sun3/180 running SunOS 3, not a PC... Apart from that, probably Office is the single piece of software that has the longest unbroken lineage from when I first used it. I started working life on VAX/VMS, and DOS pretty much passed me by - straight into the joys of Windows 95 (which sucked in comparison to VMS!).

Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p

[Forogar]

I started REXX on a mainframe running VM. I became a Rexxpert and ended up writing Rexx interpreters built in to a couple of different products over time. I used the PC implementation with OS/2 and then Windows. I miss it now.

- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.

[Slow Eddie]

Me too. Still using VB6 and supporting legacy apps. Started with VB1.0 and went through all of the versions up to VB6. The ROI IS truly incredible. Converting to C#. While I heard others in this forum talk about how "Verbose" VB6 is compared to C#, I could not disagree more. In the end however, it is all just syntax. I believe it is the "B" (for Basic) in the name that causes the academics, and academic taught programmers ("developers" according to them) to hate VB6. Finally, I need to point out that Bill Gates and Microsoft's first product wad GW-Basic. And I started out on Apple Basic.:cool:

[obermd]

Notepad was a killer app - seriously. In the original release of Windows NT 3.1 if you pressed Alt-F4 to exit Notepad you actually exited Windows to a nice blue screen.

[Alexey Biriukov]

Modern day Norton Commader reincarnations - Midnight Commander and FAR Manager - on daily basis. Ah yes of course, the whole bunch of unix tools - grep, awk, sed, and so on. This is something that is standing above all times.

[MikeTheFid]

I started with CLIST on TSO. REXX was the replacement. I wrote a program to build and submit JCL in order to more easily extract hardware diagnostic information for mainframes and peripherals. I later wrote a program in REXX on VM called the Interactive Questionnaire Facility (IQF) when I worked at the IBM Education Centre on Don Mills Rd in Toronto. It helped Instructors to compose, administer, and report on Instructor and course evaluations. Thanks for evoking those memories of fun times. :)

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.

[ProfessorDan]

Vedit was one of the first full featured editors I used with CP/M and then when I built my first IBM AT clone it also became available for DOS although I do not use it now it was one of the best programming editors of the day, the company is still around (surprise) Greenview Data Company Overview[^]

[Forogar]

On VM there was a great editor called XEDIT. You could write macros for this in REXX. I wrote a full-blown hex editor (for some colleagues working on TPF) using this combo. I also wrote a bulletin board system. I miss XEDIT and REXX!

- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.

[DaveArel]

dBase III+(Ashton-Tate) => SQL server Clipper(Nantucket Corp) => Visual Studio LANtastic => Windows 3.11 and now Active Directory Sad they're gone but a lot of programmers like me learned to develop database programs in a network environment with all the locks control that now is almost unnecessary. Good days... :-D