The Peter Norton thread below go me thinking ...

[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

[atali]

Norton Commander was ok, now most of that functionality is in FAR Manager, I use it all the time.

[builderjohn]

I still use Visual SlickEdit - in Brief emulation mode. - Good macro handling, or at least one that my fingers still remember.

[Kirk 10389821]

DOS (now COMMAND). LOL. Progress has killed it, but you are confusing KILLER APP with SPECIFIC APP... BRIEF => most features available in most editors nowadays (port of emacs, LOL). Lots 123= Spreadsheet (Still have one) Oracle = Database = Still have 3..4 But the world has moved a LOT since these tools were created. They were valuable in their time. Currently I use ActionOutline a thousand times a day. It's windows based, and I am looking to create a web based alternative so I can access it from my phone and other devices. Does this decrease the Value of an indispensable tool, NO! will I stop using AA at some point. Yep. But I will replace it with a Cloud Based tool where my data is backed up and stored, and potentially secured in even better ways. Potentially making some aspects shareable with other people, which simply cannot happen the way it works today. So, of all of those tools you had, if you look back at the tool itself, not the BRAND... Did it just get absorbed into the life and times of other tools? I used to write batch files. I prefer Python now. I used to write quick and dirty EXE Files. I can do much in a Javascript window. We move on, our tools change... I also had corded drills, and 12V cordless drills. My dad has a crank (hand drill). Things have improved...

[sasadler]

Hm, that would be tough. My first computer with an OS (CP/M) was prePC. I eventually got WordStar on it and to this day, all my IDE's/editors/word processors all use WordStar control sequences for editing. I wrote an AutoHotKey script to translate the WordStar control sequences to the particular editors sequences.