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What was a great program that's now been forgotten?
ibay770:
The one that comes to mind for me is WordStar, a ground breaking word processor from back in the character-mode CP/M & DOS days. It didn't successfully make the jump to graphical environments. They got killed by WordPerfect and MS Word.
Pioneered the use of the ESDX 'diamond' for cursor movement (when the Ctrl key was held down). Way back then keyboards didn't always have dedicated arrow keys. Made far more sense to me than Vi's HLJK scheme.
I just threw out an old manual/floppy box from the 80's that I had kept around for nostalgia reasons.
-mwb1100 (January 24, 2020, 12:29 PM)
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"ESDX 'diamond' for cursor movement (when the Ctrl key was held down" can you clarify what this means? Also whats stopping someone from writing an addon for wordperfect to do the same?
ibay770:
For me it was WinXP. I'm still using it (among all later versions of Win) since I am using programs I need for work that have never been upgraded for later Win Versions. WinXP is actually the master sys to network all computers running later systems. WinXP still proves to be the most stable system. Win7,8, and even 10 are crashing (not often of course!) WinXP doesn't. The system runs 12 hours 7 days at average. The only problem is now to not get good graphic cards anymore that would run with XP. So far I failed to find an nvdia for my system. The old graphic card gets weaker and weaker, it won't supply any more dual screen, and when it fails completely, that would be the end of my XPeriance. Very sad!
-Wuffke (March 24, 2020, 10:42 PM)
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Sounds like you would enjoy this: https://archive.org/details/WinXPIntegralEdition-211221
It's a team effort to keep xp running on modern hardware.
ibay770:
I know what web page I miss: Zaine's Great Software List.
In 2005 it was the bee's knees, and somewhat of an inspiration for donationcoder..
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=8988
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-mouser (January 24, 2020, 06:48 PM)
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A more modern version here: https://github.com/Awesome-Windows/Awesome
40hz:
Two of my old favorites were FoxPro and Rbase. Rbase (my fav) actually could reasonably claim to be fully relational. Rbase had the better built-in query language and programmability of the two. I mostly used the BCD edition of Turbo Pascal when I needed to do any real FoxPro programming. But FoxPro was the absolute performance leader due to its indexing optimization technology FoxPro called:Rushmore.
From what I could gather, it was somehow “indexing the indexes” in the database as those more knowledgeable than me claimed. Sort and lookup speeds were utterly phenomenal for the era and PC platforms available. Instantaneous compared to the competition. But both were exceptional database frameworks.
My big “thing” back in those days was inventory management and MRP II, which has since been replaced by ERP. (PC type CPUs technology and software of that era lacked the horsepower and resources needed to run a genuine ERP program.) Something I had a fair degree of expertise in back then. I did a lot of development and programming for SMB clients with those two databases back in the days when I was still mostly a programmer - or “coder” in today’s vernacular. ;)
I also very much miss Microsoft Money. Superior in every way to Quicken AFAIC. :Thmbsup:
ibay770:
HiJaak Pro was a great screen capture and graphic converter that was included with corel trace as of the last version i had used
-ShadowMaster (January 30, 2020, 08:23 PM)
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What could it do that today's programs can't? You have Sharex for screenshots and Sagethumbs for thumbnails.
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