Norton Utilities (1983) 20 Utility MacOS

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.

• 1.0 for Mac
• 2.0 for Mac
• 3.x for Mac
• 4.x for Mac
• 5.0 for Mac
• 6.0 for Mac

Age of Empires (1997) 20 MacOS

Age of Empires is a civilization simulator strategy game where different empires fight to rule.

• 1.0

Encarta (1993) 19 Reference Windows MacOS

Microsoft Encarta was a home oriented interactive encyclopedia that was often sold with new OEM machines. Unlike a paper encyclopedia, Encarta took full advantage of being on a computer, with updates from the Internet, sound clips and movies, interactive charts and games, and good navigation.

• 1995
• 1997

Adobe Type Manager (1991) 17 Windows MacOS

Adobe Type Manager was designed to provide scalable fonts on early Mac and Windows 3.0 systems that did not provide similar functionality natively. ATM is required by a number of graphics application originally designed to work in these environments. ATM is packaged as a "lite" installable runtime. Later releases offer a "Deluxe" version with extra font management abilities. Other OSes including NeXTSTEP, DESQview, and OS/2 come with ATM functionality built-in.

• 4.x

Bookshelf (1987) 17 Reference MacOS

Microsoft Bookshelf is a CD-ROM based multimedia reference tool from Microsoft, including a dictionary, thesaurus, quotations, atlas, and other types of references. Some versions were included and integrated with Microsoft Office, albeit sometimes stripped down.

• 96-97

PowerPoint (1987) 13 Presentations MacOS Windows

Microsoft PowerPoint is a graphical presentation tool that is today part of Microsoft Office. Prior to its acquisition by Microsoft, it was known as "Presenter" from Forethought Inc. These are the standalone versions. For the Office bundled versions, see Microsoft Office.

• 1.0
• 3.x
• 4.x
• 97/98

Autodesk AutoCAD (1984) 13 Graphics Engineering MacOS

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 (Mac)
• r11 (Mac)
• r12 (Mac)

Photoshop (1988) 12 Graphics MacOS Windows

Photoshop is a powerful drawing and photo manipulation program for both Mac and Windows. The Macintosh version was released by Adobe in 1990, although a very small number were bundled with Barneyscan slide scanners prior to that. Photoshop contained many advanced features including layered images, advanced color control, and plug-ins. Prior to its release, many of its features were only found in high end dedicated photo pre-processing systems.

• 0.x (beta)
• 2.x
• 3.x
• 4.x
• 5.x

The Print Shop (1984) 12 Publishing MacOS

The Print Shop is a home oriented publisher capable of creating calendars, banners, greeting cards and other printable goods. It started off on the Apple II and Commodore 64 where it became popular for its simplicity and ease of use. From day one, it featured interactive editing, on-screen artwork/layout selection, print previewing, and a library of customizable clipart.

• 1.x (Mac)
• Deluxe 1.x (Mac)

Adobe Acrobat Reader (1994) 11 Document DOS MacOS

Acrobat Reader is the free software from Adobe used to read, view, and print documents created by the commercial Adobe Acrobat product. Its primary strength is that documents appear and print identically across differing systems.

• 1.0

Multiplan (1983) 11 Spreadsheet MacOS

Microsoft Multiplan was an early 8-bit spreadsheet application for CP/M and MS-DOS with ports to numerous other platforms in the early 80s. Initially it competed against VisiCalc and later Lotus 1-2-3. A companion product, Microsoft Chart, provided graphing support. Multiplan was never ported to Windows, where it was replaced with Microsoft Excel. Excel also replaced Multiplan on the Macintosh platform.

• 1.x (Mac)

Adobe Acrobat (1993) 11 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

Mac OS 8 (1994) 10 MacOS

Apple Mac OS 8 was another major overhaul of the OS from the earlier Mac OS 7. It added a new Platinum visual theme, a multi threaded Finder, better virtual memory, and many customization options. 8.5 and later require a PPC CPU. It was followed up by Mac OS 9. | 1.x-6.x | 7.x | 8.x | 9.x | MacOS X | All |

• Copland
• 8.0
• 8.2 Beta
• 8.1
• 8.5
• 8.6
• 8.7 Beta

FileMaker (1984) 10 Database MacOS Windows

FileMaker is a very easy to use graphical flat-file database management tool from Claris that allows for visual form and report creation. Originally for DOS, there were Macintosh versions and later it was ported to Windows.

• 1.00
• 4.0
• Pro 1.x
• Pro 3.x
• Pro 4.x
• Pro 5.x

Adobe Premiere (1991) 10 Video MacOS

Originally developed for the Mac, Adobe Premiere is a tool for editing videos.

• 1.0 (Mac)

MacWrite (1984) 9 Word Processor MacOS

MacWrite was one of two applications released with the Apple Macintosh in 1984 - the other being MacPaint. These applications defined the Macintosh, and helped define what users expected from GUI applications.

• 1.0
• 2.20
• 4.x
• 5.0
• II (1989)
• Pro 1.x

SimCity (1989) 9 Windows Linux MacOS

SimCity is a strategy game in which you are the mayor of your own virtual city and you can control the aspects of it - from city planning of land use, development of infrastructure, zoning of schools, police and fire, and the problems that come with a city such as crime, education quality, etc...

• 3000

Norton Anti-Virus (1990) 8 Utility MacOS

Originally written by Symantec and sold as Symantec Antivrus for Macintosh, it became part of the "Norton" branded products sold by Symantec after they acquired Peter Norton Computing. Norton Anti-Virus became a popular product on DOS, Windows, and Macintosh (SAM was renamed to NAV in 1998) and battled the then-new threat of malicious software. In 2015, Symantec unified their security product lineup under the single "Norton Security" product. It was also bundled with Norton SystemWorks.

• 6.x
• 7.x
• 8.x
• 9.x

At Ease (1992) 8 Other MacOS

Apple At Ease is a simplified menu shell for the Macintosh that replaces the default Finder desktop. It is intended primarily for kiosk, shared, or public computers where users should only have access to designated application programs. At Ease was available in both standard and workgroup flavors.

• 1.x
• 2.x
• 3.x

PhotoDeluxe (1996) 7 Graphics Windows MacOS

Adobe PhotoDeluxe is a simplified photo manipulation tool targeted at novice users. It performs a variety of tasks, including red-eye removal, shadow dropping, smudging, and cloning and can produce "projects" such as cards and calendars. It is designed to integrate with scanners and digital cameras. It competed against Microsoft Picture-It

• 2.0
• 3.x
• 4.x

Mathcad (1989) 7 Mathematics MacOS

Mathcad is computer software primarily intended for the verification, validation, documentation and re-use of engineering calculations.

• 2.0

Adobe Photoshop Elements (2001) 7 Graphics Windows MacOS

Adobe Photoshop Elements is the successor to Photoshop LE, a somewhat reduced, home-oriented version of Adobe Photoshop.

• 1.0
• 2.0

Schedule+ (1990) 6 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

StarOffice (1995) 6 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

Mandrake Linux (1999) 6 Linux

Mandrake Linux was a highly polished and easy to use Linux distribution, originally based on Red Hat Linux with KDE. In 2005, Mandrake Linux became Mandriva.

• 6.5
• 7.0
• 9.0 PowerPack