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Adobe Illustrator (1988)

113 Graphics Windows MacOS Unix

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Adobe Systems. It was often sold as a companion product to the bit-map/photo editor Adobe Photoshop. Illustrator was originally released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh. Early versions were ported to NexT, Silicon Graphics, and Sun Solaris.

CircuitMaker (1998)

71 Engineering Windows

CircuitMaker, from MicroCode Engineering, is an easy-to-use schematic design and simulation tool. This product was discontinued in 2000 after being bought out by Altium, and is not related to the current software of a similar name.

6.x
2000

Picture It! (1996)

56 Graphics Windows

Picture It!, from Microsoft, is a photo image adjustment tool for novice users. It includes a number of standard touch-up functions such as red-eye adjustment, resizing, brightness, contrast, and cropping. It can make direct use of scanners and digital cameras. All functions are presented as a dumbed down step-by step series of tabs and menus. Picture-It competed against Adobe Photodeluxe.

3D Home Architect (1993)

48 Graphics Windows

Broderbund's 3D Home Architect is a home-design oriented CAD program. It includes a variety of home decor related objects, and can render the results in 3D.

1.0
2.0

CorelDraw! (1989)

44 Graphics Publishing Windows OS2 Unix

Corel Draw is a vector based drawing and illustration program. It is primarily a Windows application, but was ported to Mac OS, Mac OS X, Linux, CTOS and OS/2. It competed against Aldus Freehand, Adobe Illustrator, and Micrografx Designer.

Photoshop (1988)

41 Graphics MacOS Windows

Photoshop is a powerful drawing and photo manipulation program for both Mac and Windows. The Macintosh version was released by Adobe in 1990, although a very small number were bundled with Barneyscan slide scanners prior to that. Photoshop contained many advanced features including layered images, advanced color control, and plug-ins. Prior to its release, many of its features were only found in high end dedicated photo pre-processing systems.

Paint Shop Pro (1990)

31 Graphics Windows

JASC Paint Shop Pro is a simple and easy to use bit-mapped graphics editor. It supports a wide variety of file formats, and photo manipulation functions that were comparable to PhotoShop. It has good support for editing 256 color palletized images that made it ideal for editing web graphics. It was first released in 1990 for Windows 3.0 as just "Paint Shop", and early versions gained popularity through the distribution of shareware releases. It lost popularity in 2003 when 8.0 was introduced with a redesigned UI and in 2004, JASC was acquired by Corel.

Flash (1999)

31 Graphics Video Windows

Macromedia Flash is a vector animation package originally developed by FutureWave and later acquired by Adobe. Flash can export animation as video files or in its own proprietary interactive vector animation format playable by the Flash Player. Flash versions prior to 5 do not include the ActionScript scripting language. The interaction is instead scripted using drag-an-drop "actions".

4.x
5.x

Instant Artist / Print Artist (1992)

24 Graphics Publishing Novelty DOS Windows

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.

Autodesk AutoCAD (1984)

21 Graphics Engineering DOS MacOS Unix Windows

AutoCAD, from Autodesk and first released in 1982, is a powerful Computer Aided Design tool. It was, and still is, often considered the standard for CAD tools. Primarily for the IBM PC platform, it was ported to x86 machines with higher video resolutions such as the Zenith Z-100 and NEC APC. Intermittently, versions for the Macintosh appeared. Later versions use a dongle copy protection.

PC Paintbrush (1984)

20 Graphics DOS Windows

ZSoft PC Paintbrush is a bitmap drawing program visually similar to MacPaint. The earlier DOS versions were often bundled with Microsoft and Microsoft compatible mice, and were notable for supporting a huge variety of video adapters. It competed against Mouse Systems PC Paint (not related despite the similar name). ZSoft PC Paintbrush eventually became Microsoft Paintbrush included in Windows 3.x. For Microsoft's rebranded version see Microsoft Mouse and Microsoft Paintbrush

ArcView GIS (1996)

18 Graphics Other Database Windows

ArcView, from Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. is a geographical information system program for Win9x/NT.

3.0
3.3

3D Studio (1992)

16 Graphics DOS

3D Studio, not to be confused with the later "3d Studio Max" product, is a DOS-based tool from Autodesk for creating 3d models and animations.

Windows Media Center (2004)

9 Video Audio Media Player Windows

Windows Media Center was a full-screen media player and video recorder designed for use on home theater PCs. It competed against digital recording devices like the Tivo.

Visio (1992)

8 Graphics Windows

Visio is a flow-chart diagramming program for Microsoft Windows originally from Shapeware/Visio Corp. Visio was specifically designed as a flow charting tool rather than a generic drawing tool. It featured easy to use drag-and-drop diagram creation, and shipped with a wide variety of stencils. In 2000 Visio Corp was acquired by Microsoft. It competed with Aldus Intellidraw and Micrografx Snapgraphics and Meta Software's MetaDesign.

Stanford Graphics (1993)

8 Graphics Windows

Stanford Graphics is a combination of Presentation and Analysis software. It contains both common slide making and graphing abilities as well as powerful statistical and technical analysis tools. Specialized technical graphics include contour and color keyed contour plots, polar plots, smith and 3-D Smith chars, and planar and XYZ vector and trajectory plots. Sigma Plot, and BBN Software RS/1 Harvard Graphics.

2.x
3.0

Harvard Graphics (1986)

7 Graphics DOS Windows

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.

Micrografx Designer (1988)

6 Graphics Publishing Windows OS2

Micrografx Designer, originally released as IN-A-VISON for Windows 1.x, is a vector based drawing and design program. It features ease of use, multiple layers, and dimensioning. Micrografx also sold large libraries of clip art. It competed against Corel Draw.

AutoSketch (1987)

6 Graphics DOS Windows

AutoSketch is a 2D vector program sold by Autodesk. Unlike artistic drawing programs, AutoSketch is specifically geared towards engineering applications. Although not as powerful as AutoCAD, it can work with 2D AutoCAD files. Autodesk also produced AutoCAD LT, a higher end 2-D drawing program. But unlike AutoSketch, AutoCAD LT was based directly on AutoCAD and worked similarly.

Freelance Graphics (1985)

6 Presentations Graphics DOS OS2 Windows

GCI/Lotus/IBM Freelance Graphics is a vector based presentation and graphing package developed for DOS, OS/2, and Windows. It was intended for use alongside Lotus 1-2-3. Later versions were part of SmartSuite. Before it was acquired by Lotus it was known Freelance, from Graphic Communications.

Framework (1984)

6 Word Processor Spreadsheet Graphics Communications Database DOS

Originally created by Forefront Corporation for Ashton-Tate and first released in 1984, Framework was an early integrated office suite for DOS. It has a built in word processor, spreadsheet, database, outliner, graphing, and telecommunications.

Autodesk Animator Pro (1993)

5 Graphics DOS

First released in 1989, AutoDesk Animator was a DOS-based professional animation tool. It could create full motion animations using VGA 320*200 256 color resolutions. It supports a number of animation techniques, and includes a freely redistributable animation player. It saves animations to the .FLI or "QuickFlick" format. This format was extremely popular during the very early 90s, and was one of the few that could do 256 colors, including pallet manipulation.

1.x

Adobe Premiere (1991)

5 Video MacOS Windows

Originally developed for the Mac, Adobe Premiere is a tool for editing videos.

Microsoft GIF Animator (1997)

5 Graphics Windows

Back before HTML 5, Flash, or fancy scripting, the only way you could be sure that you would annoy your readers was to use animated GIFs. Not wanting to disappoint, Microsoft made their own GIF creation program: GIF Construction Set. In the late 90's sprit of crushing competition, Microsoft gave it away for free. It was also bundled with Microsoft Image Composer and Microsoft FrontPage. Construction Set. Although in practice GIF Construction set worked better for building the animated GIFs, and then GIF Animator was useful for touching things up afterwards. (Mainly removing the shareware GIF Construction Set's "created by" comment text. :P )

1.0

PrintMaster (1985)

4 Graphics DOS Windows

Print Master was another sign and banner creation program similar to The Print Shop. The earlier version got in to trouble for looking too much like the Print Shop.