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Ask HN: What were your favorite MS-DOS productivity programs?

by wkoszek on 2/24/20, 5:55 PM with 14 comments

Some of the MS-DOS stuff was a productivity heaven. Norton Commander comes to mind. Then Turbo Vision apps, including Turbo Pascal editor. Any else you remember?

  • by helph67 on 2/24/20, 8:44 PM

    NewKey for storing/recall of keyboard macros. Lots of people raved about SideKick which loaded as (one of the first?) T.S.R utilities.

  • by photawe on 2/25/20, 1:19 AM

    Norton Commander was insanely awesome.

    Borland C++ was really cool (even back then, I favored C++ over Pascal :D).

  • by ObsoleteNerd on 2/25/20, 2:09 AM

    Xtree blew my mind when I first found it and it was then THE first thing I installed on every new DOS computer I built/got.

  • by pwason on 2/24/20, 6:35 PM

    Tornado - which ended up being the IMHO insanely overpriced and now almost unusable InfoSelect. I once wrote an inventory app using Tornado, batch scripts, and a barcode interface... Was insanely fast.

  • by qefx on 2/28/20, 1:32 PM

    Lotus Metro I preferred it over Borland Sidekick

  • by leejoramo on 2/27/20, 3:27 PM

    Borland Sidekick

    QuarterDeck Desqview

    Borland Reflex

    Microsoft Word

  • by osullivj on 2/27/20, 3:30 PM

    GrandView: a note taking outliner.

  • by kazinator on 2/26/20, 11:33 PM

    SemWare's QEdit

  • by lproven on 2/27/20, 5:14 PM

    Lots, many of which have been mentioned, but there is one whole category of app that didn't really make the leap to Windows (or Mac OS X over in Apple-land) and is basically dead now:

    Outliners -- http://outliners.scripting.com/

    The seminal PC Outline was shareware and it's still out there: https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2200/0/pc-outl...

    But it evolved into Grandview: https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/grandview...

    As for the others... well, there were lots! Back in the boom days of MS-DOS (DOS 3.x, mainly, and before) it didn't include a decent text editor, directory navigator, file manager, memory manager, program launcher, task-switcher, inter-computer file-transfer tool, file or disk compression and lots of other things, so there were many 3rd party replacements.

    Some still have fans.

    DOS 4 started to fix some of that, including a pretty good file manager/program launcher called DOSShell, but otherwise it was bloated: it was buggy and took a lot of RAM, a scarce resource under DOS.

    DR responded with DR-DOS 5, which was leaner, meaner, gave you more free RAM than even MS-DOS 3.3, but gave you big (>32MB) partitions, a graphical shell, a full-screen editor and lots more.

    MS responded with MS-DOS 5, the first ever retail version, which included all this and more.

    There was a brief "arms race" -- DR-DOS 6, then MS-DOS 6, 6.2, 6.21, 6.22, DR-DOS 7. I've blogged about this: https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/58013.html

    Then Windows 95 integrated DOS and that ended the battle.

    DR-DOS got acquired by Novell, then spun off with Caldera, then went FOSS. I am working on some updates: https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/58013.html

    IBM continued with PC DOS 7 and the little-known PC DOS 7.1, which fixes a load of bugs, adds FAT32 support, LBA disk access, support for modern >8GB disks, and more. It's a free download if you know where to look: https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/59703.html

    These later versions of DOS -- DR-DOS 5, 6 & 7, MS-DOS 5 & 6, and PC-DOS 6, 7 & 7.1 -- included replacements for most of the 3rd party utilities. 32-bit Windows then made most of them irrelevant. A lot of the companies went under.

    Most of the office-type apps made the jump to Windows: WordPerfect ended up a good word-processor. Borland's DOS apps got bundled with it. IBM bought Lotus, Samna and others and made SmartSuite.

    There's no burning reason to favour the ancient DOS versions now.

    But outliners never really made that leap and so there's now a choice of MS Word or run ancient DOS stuff. The FOSS world has never embraced outliners: LibreOffice doesn't include one. There are some FOSS 2-pane outliners -- what Wikipedia calls "extrinsic" outliners -- but they are a totally separate, different type of app, and personally I have no use for them.

    So I run an ancient version of MS Word, Word 97, just for Outline mode. It runs perfectly under WINE on Ubuntu and other distros.

  • by formerchamp on 2/26/20, 3:34 AM

    edit.com

  • by bediger4000 on 2/24/20, 6:12 PM

    xenix