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Software Hall of Fame

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Curt:
InDesign is the successor isn't it? -rgdot (August 05, 2011, 01:46 PM)
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-yes

Current PageMaker customers can upgrade to the Adobe InDesign® CS5 PageMaker Upgrade at a special price.-Adobe
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I learned to love PageMaker between 1993 and 1995.

Also, Jasc PaintShop from back then. The marker/selector 17 years ago makes nearly all of today's photo editors look as if progress has been paused or even reversed.

rjbull:
-40hz (August 04, 2011, 02:33 PM)
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I'd add Silver Xpress, FrontDoor and Portal of Power-oblivion (August 05, 2011, 02:17 AM)
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I'd add BinkleyTerm, Squish, and GoldED  8)

+1 each for Vern Buerg's LIST and DESQview.  DV + QEMM + NDOS (Norton-ized version of 4DOS) was the most productive system I ever had.

Also: PC-Write, PC-File 5, Procomm Plus, Terminate, Visual Display Editor (VDE), XTree Pro, StereoShell, File Wizard, Horst Schaeffer's PBATS collection, Newkey, Early Bird, and many more...  [/end DOS nostalgia trip]

On Windows: Total Commander, Macro Express, PowerPro, EverNote, TED Notepad, Crimson Editor, NoteTab Pro, Magic Mail Monitor, TheBat!, MemPad, ArsClip, CHS, WebSite-Watcher, LinkStash, XPDF, BareGrepPro, Taskill, Hilitext, Kleptomania (now MIA), and others.

oblivion:
That's because PageMaker was "it" back in the day!  ;D-40hz (August 05, 2011, 01:21 PM)
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My first DTP was called (oddly) Timeworks, and it ran under GEM. Slow, weird, but it ran on an 8086 box and wasn't bad for its time.

My first Windows DTP was Serif's PagePlus, and I've stayed with it ever since. MUCH cheaper than PageMaker. Just as capable, too. (Well, almost.)

Sidekick -- lots of people loved it, but I couldn't do anything useful with it hogging all that RAM.

Sprint -- I remember being impressed with Philippe Kahn's demo (have a secretary pounding text into it and whisk the plug out of the wall in the middle of the typing frenzy, then power back on to see just how much was lost (nothing.) But it wasn't a "nice" WP -- can't define what I liked and didn't like, it just didn't suit me -- and I went back to WordStar.

PC Outline I had a license for, but it didn't leave a significant impression on me. LIST, though, I had forgotten about but I absolutely loved it.

This is not helping me feel any younger... :)

f0dder:
You were smart enough to use  DESQview and QEMM, bt you fell for SpinRite? O_o
-f0dder (August 04, 2011, 05:19 PM)
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You never needed to reinterleave an MFM HD, I take it? Spinrite was  8)-oblivion (August 05, 2011, 02:04 AM)
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Nah, not sure if I've ever used a machine with anything older than IDE drives - definitely never owned one. Fair enough, SpinRite might have had some Raison d'être then.

I grant it lost a lot of its usefulness once RLL drives came along, and IDE and subsequent technologies have made it a niche "recover from low-level errors" thing that I think I've only ever needed to suggest somebody use once in the last decade or so, but I still appreciate the quality of the program -- from a distance.-oblivion (August 05, 2011, 02:04 AM)
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My main problem with SR is that it's so g*dd*mn full of snake-oil. A lot of tech mumbo-jumbo, the aura of "zomg it's programmed in ASEMBLARHG! I'M A WIZARD!" (christ, get over yourself, assembly is hardly rocket science and only retards and kids did 100%-assembly applications even back then), and the program was built to show a lot of useless but "geeh, that looks techy!" stuff on screen.

Using it for "error recovery" is a stupendously bad idea, too - what it does puts insane amounts of stress on a drive, and is a pretty good way to kill a drive if it's already failing. If you've got something really messed up, what you want to attempt is doing a superfast imaging operation to a healthy drive, skipping bad sectors... trying to read bad sectors a zillion times with a failing read/write head? Yeah, THAT'S a good idea. (You might want to attempt such an operation *after* the initial pass, but it's not really rocket science). Oh, and as for the "recovering bad disks by doing magnetic reconstruction" mumbo jumbo? Geez.

Sorry for harping on this, but I've always had a really big problem with false prophets :)

disk was slow :)-f0dder
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That's what you get for not using Spinrite [DARFC]  :)
-oblivion (August 05, 2011, 02:04 AM)
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[/quote]The only thing SpinRite sped up on IDE disks was demise ;)

Nuts & Bolts - The best defragger, ever.-app103 (August 05, 2011, 02:53 AM)
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Oh yeah, that one was almost magic! I really like how it did extensive pre-planning before the defrag procedure so it could reduce the amount of data shuffled. Nothing quite like it has ever appeared for the NT-based OSes.

One app I really liked in the DOS days, and even used for a while in the 9x days, was the RAT - Resident Ascii Table. Was a great TSR for looking up ascii codes for the codepage 865 box-drawing chars (and other stuff) you used a fair amount when doing text-based DOS GUIs :)

widgewunner:
... only retards and kids did 100%-assembly applications even back then ...-f0dder (August 05, 2011, 05:42 PM)
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I find this statement to be more than just a little bit offensive.

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