Adobe Acrobat (1993) 25 Publishing MacOS Windows Unix

Adobe Acrobat, first released in 1993, is a tool for creating portable electronic documents. Its documents retain complex formatting when used across differing systems, so that they appear identical when viewed on screen or printed to a printer. Acrobat accomplishes this by encapsulating Adobe's PostSript printer language in to a document file format and offering the ability to embed fonts that are not present on the target system.

• 1.x
• 2.x
• 3.x
• 4.x

Adobe Dimensions (1992) 4 Graphics Publishing MacOS

Adobe Dimensions was a low cost 3-d object editing and rendering program. Unlike other 3d rendering programs, Dimensions is specifically geared towards producing illustrations for print. programs, such as Adobe Illustrator or Freehand, and edited to create 3d objects. Then, instead of outputting a pixilated raster image, it outputs in postscript bezier curves, which can then be further processed by other 2d illustration packages.

• 1.0
• 2.0

Adobe PageMill (1997) 0 Publishing MacOS

PageMill, from Adobe, is a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get web page authoring tool. It was discontinued in February 2000, due to the acquisition and promotion of Adobe GoLive.

• 2.0

After Dark (1989) 12 Novelty MacOS DOS

After Dark, from Berkeley Systems, Inc, is a set of entertaining screen savers for Mac and Windows. After Dark for Windows started off as "Magic Screen Saver" for Windows 2.x. After Dark was most famous for its "Flying Toasters" screen saver. Afterdark was very popular on both the early Macintosh computers and Windows 3.0, as neither included any kind of screen saver or screen blanker that would help prevent screen burn-in.

• 1.0 for Macintosh
• 1.0 for DOS
• 9

Award Maker Plus (1987) 0 Publishing DOS

AwardMaker, from Baudville, Inc., is a tool for printing nice looking awards and certificates on a dot-matrix printer from a set of about 200 templates. It lacks any print preview, so you must have the manual to know what the templates look like. This is almost identical to Springboard Certificate Maker, however it contains a different set of templates and graphics.

• 1

Banner Blue Movie Guide (1991) 0 Novelty DOS

Banner Blue Movie Guide, from Banner Blue Software, is a searchable movie database with built in trivia games.It features entries for more than 9000 popular movies.

• 1.0

Calendar Creator Plus (1990) 0 Novelty PIM DOS

Calendar Creator Plus from Vermont Creative Software/Power Up, and later Spinnaker Software, is a tool for creating printed calendars with different styles and custom lists of events.

• 3.x (DOS)

Dilbert Break A Day (1997) 0 Novelty Windows MacOS

Released in 1997 by DayBreak Software, Break A Day is a calendar that shows a different Dilbert comic every day. Includes a 16-bit Windows 3.1 version, 32-bit Windows 9x/NT version, and a Mac version.

• 1

Dr. Sbaitso (1992) 3 Novelty Audio DOS

Dr. Sbaitso is a simple AI program, similar to the famous "Eliza", that makes use of text-to-speech software. Distributed as a demonstration application with Creative Labs Sound Blaster cards.

• 2.x

Easy Working Desktop Publisher (1992) 0 Publishing DOS

Easy Working Desktop Publisher is a rebranded version of PFS:First Publisher. PFS:First Publisher and the other PFS titles were acquired from Software Publishing Corp by Spinnaker Software in 1991.

• 1.0

FreeHand (1988) 5 Graphics Publishing MacOS

FreeHand is a vector based drawing program used to create illustrations. It is similar to CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator. Initially it offered more features and flexibility than illustrator. It was created by Altsys, sold through Aldus, then sold to Macromedia, and then finally was assimilated by Adobe. Later versions repositioned itself as a content creation system for the web through Flash. The final version was Freehand MX (version 11) in 2003.

• 1.0
• 2.0

Friday! (1983) 0 PIM Database DOS

Friday! is an early simplified database filing system, sometimes considered a personal information manager, built on top of dBase II. It is easily customizable, completely menu driven, simple, and easy to use. It was targeted at new computer users, and lacks advanced functionally. There were versions for both DOS and CP/M.

• 1.x
• 2.x

GEM Desktop Publisher (1988) 0 Publishing DOS

GEM Desktop Publisher, from Digital Research, is a GEM 3.x based Desktop publishing program. It is not as sophisticated as Ventura Publisher. It uses a VMM (Virtual Memory Manager) in place of EMS/XMS, and requires a hard disk. It can be used with GEM Artline to provide illustrations.

• 2.x

Get Organized (1984) 0 Word Processor Communications PIM DOS

Get Organized is a bare-bones integrated tool that includes a word processor, address book, index card file, notepad, calculator, calendar, and simplistic telecommunications. It was targeted at high end home users and low end business users.

• 1.x

Halo DPE (1987) 0 Graphics Publishing DOS

Halo DPE (Desktop Publishing Editor) was an attempt by Media Cybernetics to enter the desktop publishing market by shoehorning additional text processing abilities in to their Dr. Halo II product.

• 1.x

HyperDOS (1990) 0 Utility PIM DOS

HyperDOS is a simplistic menu shell bundled with Leading Technology PCs and offered as a standalone commercial product. It includes a file manager, built in help, and a number of accessories. It tries to clone the general appearance of the IBM PS/1 shell. Oddly, it starts off in a GUI mode, but all of the tools are text mode programs. Version 2.0 includes the ability to use sound cards.

• 1.x

Jingle Disk (1986) 0 Novelty DOS

ThoughtWare's Jingle Disk was a stocking stuffer for the computer geek in 1986. It plays several pieces of music on the PC speaker as it animates several winter images. It can also print a simple greeting card to a dot matrix printer using these images. While there were similar shareware or freeware programs, this was a commercial program

• 1986

Key Form Designer (1989) 0 Publishing DOS

Key Form Designer, from SoftKey Software Products Inc, is an inexpensive tool for quickly producing, filling, and printing professional looking forms.

• 1.x (DOS)

Lotus Agenda (1988) 0 PIM DOS

Agenda is DOS based Personal Information Manager that features customizable categories, and many data retrieval features. It was criticized for not being easy to use and lacking features found in other PIMs. It was replaced by Lotus Organizer.

• 1.x
• 2.0

Popcorn Desktop (1986) 0 Utility PIM DOS

Popcorn desktop is a set of TSR utilities similar to Borland Sidekick. It includes a text editor, a calculator, and a calendar. It can copy information from currently running programs displayed on the screen.

• 1.x

Ready Set GO (1986) 0 Publishing MacOS

Ready Set GO, from Manhattan Graphics Corporation, is a desktop publishing program for the Apple Macintosh. It competed against Mac Publisher, Scoop, Quark Xpress, and PageMaker.

• 3
• 4.5
• 6.0

Schedule+ (1990) 2 PIM Windows MacOS

Schedule Plus is a calendar/personal information manager. It is designed to operate using a shared network Microsoft Mail "mailbox" over a LAN.

• 1.x

Sidekick (1984) 4 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

Springboard Certificate Maker (1986) 0 Publishing DOS

Certificate Maker, from Springboard, is a fun little program for printing a variety of styled certificates on your dot-matrix printer. You must refer to the manual to see what the templates look like, as it provides no on screen preview. Award Maker seems to be an offshoot of this product.

• 1

Springboard The Newsroom (1985) 0 Publishing DOS

"The Newsroom" is a very simplified desktop publishing program aimed at novices and children. It uses a simplified step-by-step interface similar to the original "The Print Shop", and bundles a variety of fun clipart images. requires a PC or PCJr with one floppy drive, CGA, and 128K of ram. Additionally, there were versions for the Apple II, and Commodore 64. transfer documents between any two instances of The Newsroom, even between the IBM/Apple/C64 platforms.

• 1985
• Pro 1989