DOOM (1993) 26 DOS

Doom is the original fully immersive 3-D first person shooter from ID software.

• Alphas
• 1.0
• 1.1
• 1.2
• 1.25

Turbo Pascal Toolbox (1985) 26 DOS CPM

The Borland Turbo Pascal Toolbox consists of several sets of sample source code for different purposes. They are designed for use in conjunction with the Turbo Pascal Compiler product. The sets include Turbo Graphix Toobox, Turbo Database Toolbox, Turbo GameWorks Tooolbox (new in 1986 with TP 3), and Turbo Editor Toolbox (new in 1986 with TP 3). Also see the Turbo Pascal Tutor.

• 1.x
• 4.0

Watcom C/C++ (1989) 23 DOS OS2 Windows

The Watcom C/C++ is a powerful compiler for DOS, Windows, and OS/2. Its key selling point was superior cross platform support. It supported DOS, extended DOS 32-bit, Win16, Win32, and OS/2. Notably, it was used to produce the video game DOOM as a 32-bit DOS extended program.

• 7.0
• 8.5
• 9.0
• 10.0
• 10.5
• 11.0

Microsoft C/C++ (1983) 22 DOS Windows OS2

This is the original standalone Microsoft C/C++ compiler for DOS and Windows - Later versions were rebranded and renumbered as Microsoft Visual C++ and were bundled with Visual Studio or the SDKs.

• 2.x
• 3.x
• 4.0
• 5.x
• 6.x
• 7.x

Clipper (1990) 22 DOS Windows

Clipper, from Nantucket Corp and later Computer Associates, started out as a native code compiler for dBase III databases, and later evolved in to a full fledge database language and application development environment.

• 5.x

Norton Utilities (1983) 20 Utility DOS

The Norton Utilities is a suite of disk and system utilities designed to enhance system performance and stability. It started off as a set of disk utilities written by Peter Norton, and later was sold by Symantec. It competed against Central Point PC Tools and the Mace Utilities. In 2003, Norton Utilities was merged with Norton SystemWorks, but later split back out.

• 3.00
• 3.10
• 4.0
• 4.5
• 5.0
• 6.0
• 7.0
• 8.0

DR DOS (1990) 20 DOS

DR DOS is an MS-DOS compatible operating system from Digital Research that evolved from their earlier CP/M-86 based products Concurrent DOS and DOS Plus.

• 5.x
• 6.x
• 7.x
• 8.x

QuickBasic (1985) 20 DOS

Microsoft QuickBasic, not to be confused with the lesser QBasic, was a Basic interpreter and compiler product loosely based on GW-Basic. Version 2.0 for DOS and later included an Integrated Development Environment. Microsoft also produced QuickPascal and QuickC with similar integrated environments.

• 1.x
• 2.x
• 3.0
• 4.0
• 4.5

QuickC (1987) 18 DOS

Microsoft QuickC is a C compiler with an Integrated Development Environment, designed to compete with Borland Turbo C. It was targeted at home/hobbyist users with a much lower price tag than Microsoft's corporate-oriented professional products. Microsoft also produced QuickPascal and QuickBasic with similar integrated environments.

• 1.x
• 2.x

Instant Artist / Print Artist (1992) 17 Graphics Publishing Novelty DOS

Instant Artist, later renamed to Print Artist, is a greeting card and sign creation program that uses vectorized graphics. It was created by The Pixellite Group, the original authors of The Print Shop, and published in 1992 by Autodesk. It was later sold by Sierra On-line. It features a high quality set of generic reusable clip art. The clip art uses vector based technology that was also used in BannerMania.

• 1.0 (DOS)

MS CD Extensions (MSCDEX) (1997) 17 DOS

MSCDEX is the real-mode MS-DOS file system redirector used in conjunction with your CD-ROM driver for accessing CD drives. The CD-ROM driver, which is provided by your CD-ROM drive manufacturer, provides the hardware and protocol specific software interface to your drive. MSCDEX interfaces with this driver to present the raw CD-ROM data as a file system accessible as a DOS drive letter.

• 1.25

Turbo Prolog (1986) 16 DOS

Borland Turbo Prolog is an implementation of the Prolog language, a "natural" language used for "Artificial Intelligence" software development. Turbo Prolog is a Borland licensed version of PDC Prolog. It competed against Arity Prolog. Borland also produced a companion Turbo Pascal Toolbox product.

• 1.x
• 2.x

PC Tools (1985) 15 Utility DOS

PC Tools, from Central Point Software, is a system and disk utility suite similar to the Norton Utilities. Central Point also produced a similar set of tools for the Apple Macintosh known as MacTools. Central Point Backup, bundled as part of PC-Tools, was also offered as a standalone product.

• 1.x
• 2.x
• 3.x
• 4.x
• 5.x
• 6.x
• 7.x
• 8.x
• 1.0 for Windows
• 9.x

CheckIt (1988) 15 Utility DOS

CheckIt, from TouchStone Software Corporation, is a diagnostic tool for generic PC/XT/AT compatible computers. It can perform tests on RAM, hard disks, video cards, floppy disks, motherboard resources, and I/O devices. It has an easy to use menu interface but can also run tests non-interactively. It was followed up by the product WINCheckit.

• 1.x
• 2.1
• 3.0
• LAN 2.x
• Pro 1.x

Harvard Graphics (1986) 14 Graphics DOS

Harvard Graphics, from Software Publishing Corporation and initially called Harvard Presentation Graphics, is a graphing/plotting/presentation creation application for DOS. It was extremely popular in the late 1980s. At release, it competed against many graphing products such as PFS:Graph (AKA IBM Graphing Assistant ), Microsoft Chart, ChartMaster, and Cricket Graph, just to name a small few. A Windows port was released in 1991, but it lost out to Microsoft Powerpoint.

• A.00
• A.01
• 2.x
• 3.x

Stacker (1991) 14 Utility Archive DOS Windows

Stacker, from Stack Electronics, was a hard drive compression tool. It was wildly popular until Microsoft virtually eliminated the third party market for this by including their own drive compression tool with MS-DOS 6. and Expandz! Plus.

• 1.0 (DOS)
• 2.0 (DOS)
• 3.x (DOS)
• 4.0 (DOS)

PKZip (1990) 14 Utility DOS

Pkzip is the most common archiver for MS-DOS based systems. It implements a an open compression method and is much faster than other archivers of its time.

• 1.x
• 2.0x

Wolfenstein 3D (1992) 14 DOS

An early first person shooter developed by ID Software. In this game you play a captured spy that must defeat Nazi soldiers to escape from Castle Wolfenstein.

• All

QEMM (1990) 13 Utility DOS Windows

Quarterdeck QEMM is a DOS Extended Memory Manager for 386+ computer which allows you to make use of memory beyond the 640kb barrier. It can also be used with QRAM, a utility for freeing up the 640k base memory.

• 5.x
• 6.x
• 7.x
• 8.x
• 9.x

Sidekick (1984) 13 Utility PIM DOS

Borland Sidekick is a DOS based PIM (Personal Information Manager) and one of the first widely-used TSR (terminate and stay resident) programs. The key feature of Sidekick was that one could use Sidekick's utilities while using most other MS-DOS applications. This was important because MS-DOS had no built-in multi-tasking or task switching capabilities.

• 1.x
• Plus
• 2.0

Multitasking MS-DOS 4.00 (1985) 13 DOS

Multitasking "MS-DOS 4.00" is a developmental version of MS-DOS that was never released to retail consumers. It was eventually licensed to some companies for internal use. Development started in parallel during the DOS 2.x days, and was intended to be the successor to MS-DOS 3.x. It would have competed against Digital Research's Concurrent DOS.

• 4.00

Adobe Acrobat Reader (1994) 12 Document DOS MacOS

Acrobat Reader is the free software from Adobe used to read, view, and print documents created by the commercial Adobe Acrobat product. Its primary strength is that documents appear and print identically across differing systems.

• 1.0

CodeView (1987) 12 DOS

CodeView was a standalone debugger created by David Norris at Microsoft in 1985 as part of its development toolset. It originally shipped with Microsoft C 4.0 and later. It also shipped with Visual Basic for MS-DOS, Microsoft Basic PDS, and a number of other Microsoft language products. It was one of the first debuggers on the MS-DOS platform that was full-screen oriented.

• 2.x
• 3.x

GEM (1985) 12 DOS

GEM is a graphical application environment that runs on top of MS/PC-DOS. It was built on the technology of Digital Research's GSX portable runtime (Used in DR Draw and DR Graph ) . Notably, a port of GEM and CP/M was used as the primary GUI on the M68k based Atari ST. GEM was also bundled with Amstrad computers.

• 1.x

Tandy Deskmate (1984) 12 DOS

Deskmate is a GUI shell, program environment, and organizational application suite bundled by Tandy with their computers. The first two fully graphical versions were renamed "Personal Deskmate" I and II. Earlier versions were text based.

• DeskMate I
• Personal DeskMate 2
• Deskmate 3.x