Mac OS X (1997) 280 Mac OS X

MacOS X was Apple's replacement for their classic MacOS. MacOS X is based on NeXTSTEP, a Unix-based OS. The first consumer release also featured a new user interface appearance called "Aqua". | 1.x-6.x | 7.x | 8.x | 9.x | MacOS X | All |

• 10.3

Microsoft Word (1983) 75 Word Processor Unix

The Microsoft Word word processor was first introduced for MS-DOS in 1983. Its design made use of a mouse and WYSIWYG graphics. Its crude WYSIWYG/mouse support was a direct response to the Apple Lisa/Mac, and VisiCorp Visi On. Initially it competed against many popular word processors such as WordStar, Multimate, and WordPerfect. Word for DOS was never really successful.

• 3.x (Unix)
• 5.x (UNIX)

Lotus 1-2-3 (1983) 51 Spreadsheet Unix

Lotus 1-2-3 was an early spreadsheet application available for MS-DOS. It became extremely popular in the late 1980s, displacing the former leader VisiCalc. Lotus had difficulties adapting 1-2-3 to the Windows environment, and was overtaken by Microsoft Excel. Spreadsheet functionality was also included in Lotus Symphony. Later versions were included in Lotus SmartSuite.

• 1.x (Unix)

Adobe Illustrator (1988) 41 Graphics Unix MacOS

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.

• 5.5

NeXTStep (1987) 36 Unix

NeXTSTEP, from NeXT Computers headed by Steve Jobs, is a Unix based operating system designed to run on m68K NeXT workstations. It later became the basis for OS X, with APIs and concepts preserved today.

• 0.x
• 1.x
• 2.x
• 3.x
• 4.x

AT&T System V Unix (1991) 35 Unix

AT&T UNIX System V ("System Five"), first released in 1983, is significant as it was one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was the result of much collaboration between vendors and became the core basis for many other operating systems including Xenix, AIX, UnixWare, Solaris, and HP-UX.

• 2.x

Netscape (1994) 31 Web Browser Windows Unix MacOS OS2 Linux Other Mac OS X

Netscape Navigator/Communicator was the first commercial web browser, displacing the free NCSA Mosaic. 1.0 was first released in December 1994, and initially offered advanced features such as progressively rendering pages as they loaded. It quickly gained many other features and capabilities and became the most popular web browser in the mid 1990s. One reason for its popularity, it was licensed freely for personal and non-profit use, although companies were expected to pay for a license. It later competed with Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari, and eventually was open sourced in to the Mozilla browser.

• 1.x
• 2.x
• 3.0.x
• 4.0x
• 4.5x
• 7.x

Sun Solaris (1989) 22 Unix

Solaris is a Unix based operating system created by Sun Microsystems (now purchased by Oracle in 2010). It is the successor to SunOS and was released initially in June of 1992. The OS is based off of System V Unix and its first release was known internally as SunOS 5. This OS was typically used on SPARC based processors, up until 1994 when it began to support x86 and x86-64 based machines. Versions of Solaris up until version 8 are considered abandoned, with version 9's support ending in October 2014.

• 1.x
• 2.x
• 7.x
• 8

Microsoft BASIC (1981) 16 Unix

Although Microsoft did not invent BASIC, their founding product was a BASIC interpreter for the Altair computer. The descendants below includes Microsoft's BASIC-80 (MBASIC), BASIC-86 (pre-GWBasic), BASIC for Mac, BASIC Compiler 86/88, Basic Compiler for Mac, and Professional Development System 7.x. IBM Personal Computer Basic Compiler, GW-BASIC, QuickBasic, and Visual Basic are listed separately.

• 5.x for Xenix

Norton Utilities (1983) 14 Utility Unix

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.

• For System V

Autodesk AutoCAD (1984) 9 Graphics Engineering Unix

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.

• r10 (Unix)

BeOS (1995) 9 Other

BeOS was an OS developed to run on the BeBox hardware, a PowerPC based machine. The OS was first released in October 1995 for use on the AT&T Hobbit, and later moved over to the PowerPC platform the next year. A Intel x86 port of the OS began in March 1998 with version R3. The last version released was R5.1 in November 2001 for x86 only. This OS was meant to be used for multimedia applications. It is POSIX compatible but is not a UNIX derived operating system (Windows is actually POSIX complient also).

• Developer Release 1
• 3.x
• 4.x
• 5

FoxBASE (1987) 8 Database DOS Unix MacOS

FoxBASE, a relational database from Fox Software, started off in 1984 as a clone of dBase II that boasted many speed improvements. FoxBASE+ adds feature parity and compatibility with dBase III Plus. It was later aquired by Microsoft and became FoxPro

• Plus 1.x
• Plus 2.x

Lotus Improv (1991) 5 Spreadsheet Other

Improv is a spreadsheet program that attempted to re-imagine how one would create and interact with spreadsheets. It was first released in 1991 for NeXT computers, and for a time became one of the NeXT's "Killer Apps". In 1993 Lotus released Improv 2.0 for Microsoft Windows. It was not marketed as a direct replacement to Lotus 1-2-3, and 1-2-3 remained dominant until both were overtaken by Microsoft Excel.

• 1.0

SunOS (1985) 4 Unix

SunOS was a UNIX based OS derived from BSD. Initially released in 1982, it was the standard OS on Sun Machines at that time. Platforms supported by this OS were the Motorola 68000, the Sun 386i, and the SPARC. SunOS machines are still actually in use today powering dams and bread factories.

• 2.x
• 3.x
• 4.x

Tandy Deskmate (1984) 4 Other

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.

• 1.00 for TRS-80 M4

StarOffice (1995) 4 Word Processor Windows Unix Linux

StarOffice, initially from Star Division GmbH is an office suite containing a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing program, and graphing program. It was later owned by Sun Microsystems and then Oracle, and spawned the open source OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Also see the earlier StarWriter

• 6.0

AppleWorks (1986) 3 Word Processor Spreadsheet Presentations Graphics Communications Database Other MacOS Mac OS X

AppleWorks is an all-in-one Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Database, Graphics Editor, and Presentations tool. The original product was a text-based product for the Apple II. The Apple Macintosh and Windows versions were forked from ClarisWorks in 1998 by Apple. At the time, Apple was under a lot of pressure to have a direct alternative to Microsoft Office. There were serious concerns that Microsoft might pull Microsoft Office for the Macintosh from development.

• 2.x (Apple II)
• 6.x

Sun Java Workshop (1997) 2 Windows Unix

Sun's Java WorkShop is a powerful, visual development tool for professional Java programmers. Java WorkShop offers a complete, easy-to-use (for bizarre masochistic definitions of easy) toolset for building JavaBeans, Java applets and applications faster and easier than ever before.

• 2.0

UCSD p-System (1984) 2 Other

The UCSD p-System is a highly portable operating system. It uses the Pascal programming language, and all applications are compiled to interpreted bytecode. This means an application written for the p-System should run on any p-System platform, regardless of the CPU and architecture. However, depending on the use, it could be quite slow. p-System, but it lost its portability advantage as the industry standardized on the x86 IBM PC architecture.

• II
• IV

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984) 2 Other

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a text based interactive fiction game where you play the part of Arthur Dent, who begins an exciting and confounding space journey right as the world ends.

• 1984

TI Writer Word Processor (1982) 2 Word Processor Other

TI-Writer was the standard word processor for the TI-99/4A. To use TI-Writer, you must have the TI-Writer cartridge (needed to load the disk software) and a TI-99/4A with the 32k RAM and disk expansion options.

• 1982

IBM VisualAge C++ (1995) 2 Windows OS2 Unix

IBM VisualAge C++ is a set of development tools that include an IDE, compiler, debugger, code browser, and on-line help. VisualAge C++ is the successor of IBM C Set

• 4.x

FreeBSD (1993) 1 Unix

FreeBSD is an open source Unix variant based on BSD Unix 4.3. Its licensing terms permit use of its code with more restrictive / closed-source code.

• 1.0

VisiCalc (1982) 1 Spreadsheet Other

VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program for personal computers. It was extremely successful, and pivotal as it was significantly responsible for moving personal computing out of the realm of hobbyists and in to the realm of serious business tools. application suite that also included VisiWord, VisiFile, VisiSpell, VisiTrend/Plot, VisiSchedule and VisiTutor. a GUI based environment. But that did not catch on. The similarly named Visi On Calc spreadsheet is not at all related to VisiCalc, and later had to be renamed to Visi On Plan.

• Advanced Apple III