Adobe Acrobat (1993) 56 Publishing Windows MacOS 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.

• 2.x
• 3.x
• 4.x
• 5.x
• 6.x

The Print Shop (1984) 30 Publishing Windows

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.

• Deluxe (Win)
• Deluxe 2.0 (Win)
• Deluxe III
• Premier 5.x (Win)
• Deluxe 6.0 (Win)
• Ensemble III
• 2002 (Mac)

Adobe InDesign (1999) 16 Publishing Windows

Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing tool that replaced Aldus/Adobe PageMaker. Initially it competed with Quark XPress

• 1.0
• 1.5
• 2.0

Microsoft Office (1991) 336 Word Processor Spreadsheet Presentations Publishing PIM Database Windows MacOS

Microsoft Office is a bundle of Microsoft's productivity application. This includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and later Mail, Office Manager, and Outlook. The "1.x" versions of Microsoft Office were simply a marketing bundle of the standalone products sold together with no other packaging changes. Even though these were distinct applications, rather than one single monolithic program, they shared a similar user interface, integrated well together and shared the ability to embed documents from one application in the documents of another.

• 2.x
• 3.x
• 4.0
• 4.2
• 4.3
• 95
• 97/98
• 2000
• XP (2002 Beta)

Instant Artist / Print Artist (1992) 38 Graphics Publishing Novelty Windows

Instant Artist, later renamed to Print Artist, is a greeting card and sign creation program that uses vectorized graphics. It was created by The Pixellite Group, the original authors of The Print Shop, and published in 1992 by Autodesk. It was later sold by Sierra On-line. It features a high quality set of generic reusable clip art. The clip art uses vector based technology that was also used in BannerMania.

• 1.0
• 2.0
• 3.0
• 4.0
• 6.0
• 8.0

Adobe PressReady (1999) 2 Publishing Windows

Adobe PressReady is a professional printing and proofing tool that was aimed for selected inkjet printers to allow better color reproduction from screen to print. Requires Windows 95/98 with at least 48 MB RAM, otherwise NT 4.0 with 64 MB RAM. Supported printer models were: Canon BJC-8500, Epson Stylus Color 800, 850, 1520, and 3000, and HP DeskJet 895C, 1120C, and 2000C. The choice of printers were supposedly what inkjet printers graphic designers were using at the time.

• 1.0

Microsoft Vizact (1999) 9 Publishing Windows

Microsoft Vizact 2000, was an application used to create HTML+TIME documents, adding effects such as animation.

• 2000

CorelDraw! (1989) 72 Graphics Publishing Windows OS2 Unix

Corel Draw is a vector based drawing and illustration program. It is primarily a Windows application, but was ported to Mac OS, Mac OS X, Linux, CTOS and OS/2. It competed against Aldus Freehand, Adobe Illustrator, and Micrografx Designer.

• 1.x
• 2.0
• 2.5
• 3.0
• 4.0
• 5.0
• 3.5 (Unix)
• 6.0
• 7.0

Microsoft FrontPage (1995) 16 Publishing Windows

Microsoft FrontPage is a WYSIWYG HTML editor/Cuisinart for Microsoft Windows.

• 1.0
• 1.1
• 97 (v2)
• 98 (v3)

Adobe PageMill (1997) 6 Publishing Windows

PageMill, from Adobe, is a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get web page authoring tool. It was discontinued in February 2000, due to the acquisition and promotion of Adobe GoLive.

• 3.0

Microsoft Greetings (1997) 3 Publishing Novelty Windows

Microsoft Greetings is a greeting card maker for Microsoft Windows 9x/NT. It was made in conjunction with Hallmark.

• Workshop 2.0
• 99 (3.0)

Expert Stationery Shop (1998) 1 Publishing Windows

Expert Stationery Shop is a budget-oriented graphics program that specialized in quickly and easily creating glitzy looking business related documents, such as letterhead, envelopes, fax cover sheets, business cards, signs, and awards. It features specialized clipart, extra TrueType fonts, extra text effects, and a logo creation tool.

• 1.0

Microsoft Publisher (1991) 15 Publishing Windows

Publisher is a desktop publishing tool from Microsoft geared towards ease of use with the home user. Microsoft publisher can be used to created professional looking newsletters, flyers, forms, and more. It includes guides and wizards that walk users through creation of common document types, while still offering powerful flexibility.

• 1.0
• 2.0
• 95 (3.0)
• 97 (4.0)
• 98 (5.0)

Xerox Globalview (1992) 2 Word Processor Spreadsheet Presentations Graphics Publishing Communications Database Unix Windows

Xerox Globalview is a desktop environment and office suite originally developed for the Xerox Star. It was developed in the MESA programming language on the Xerox Star, and ported to Sun Solaris, OS/2, and Windows 3.1 (The OS/2 version requires a MESA emulator card).

• 1.00 for X / SunOS
• 1.05 for X / SunOS
• 2.1 for Windows
• 2.3 for Windows

QuarkXPress (1986) 21 Publishing Windows

QuarkXPress was THE standard publishing software during the 1990s. However it failed to update its product line to newer technologies in a timely manager, charged insane amounts for updates or additional features that should have been built in to the software, and became very abusive to their customers. Later versions required a parallel port/ADB copy protection dongle. They lost most of their market share to Adobe InDesign.

• 4.0

ClarisWorks (1991) 24 Word Processor Spreadsheet Presentations Graphics Publishing Database Windows MacOS

ClarisWorks is an all-in-one Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Database, Graphics Editor, and Presentations tool from Claris. In 1998, after version 5.0.2, ClairsWorks was purchased by Apple and re-branded under the "AppleWorks" name. It is not related to the Apple II AppleWorks product.

• 1.x
• 2.x
• 3.x
• 4.x

Adobe Streamline (1992) 5 Graphics Publishing Windows

Adobe Streamline is an image conversion and manipulation tool that aids conversion of bit-mapped images in to PostScript line art for use in tools such as Adobe Illustrator.

• 3.0
• 4.0

The Print Shop PressWriter (1997) 0 Publishing Windows

The Print Shop PressWriter, from Broderbund, is a desktop publishing tool aimed at novice users. It comes with a simplified selection of pre-defined templates for newsletters, flyers, reports, resumes, brochures, and booklets. It includes a selection of extra fonts and clipart. It competed against PrintMaster Gold. Some versions were bundled with The Print Shop Deluxe for Windows.

• 1.0

Adobe Dimensions (1992) 4 Graphics Publishing Windows

Adobe Dimensions was a low cost 3-d object editing and rendering program. Unlike other 3d rendering programs, Dimensions is specifically geared towards producing illustrations for print. programs, such as Adobe Illustrator or Freehand, and edited to create 3d objects. Then, instead of outputting a pixilated raster image, it outputs in postscript bezier curves, which can then be further processed by other 2d illustration packages.

• 3.0

Micrografx Picture Publisher (1990) 13 Graphics Publishing Windows

Formerly Astral Picture Publisher, Micrografx Picture Publisher is a bitmapped image editor for Windows that offered powerful and feature rich 24-bit color image editing on the Microsoft Windows platform prior to Photoshop for Windows. Picture Publisher was briefly considered the leading image editor on the Microsoft Windows platform until Adobe made Photoshop available for Windows.

• 2.x
• 3.1
• 4.0
• 5.0
• LE
• 6.0

Deneba Canvas (1994) 2 Graphics Publishing Windows

Deneba Canvas is a shape based drawing and illustration program for the PC and mac. Unlike other publishing programs of the time, Canvas combined the ability to use vector graphics and raster images. It could also function as a word processor.

• 3.x
• 5.x

HiJaak (1991) 1 Graphics Publishing Windows

The original HiJaak program, from Inset Systems, is a powerful screen capture tool and image converter that can perform batch conversion between a large number of formats. The later Windows version are a powerful raster-to-vector graphics conversion and editing tool that can convert between a huge number of bitmap and vector file formats.

• 2.0 (Win)
• 3.0
• 95
• 4.0

FrameReader (1996) 2 Publishing Windows

FrameReader is a document viewer for Frame Technology/Adobe FrameMaker.

• 5.x

Greetings (1996) 0 Publishing Windows

Greetings, from Parsons Technologies, is a budget greeting card, poster, and banner generator for Macintosh and Windows. It includes a set of graphic clipart. Greetings is more free-form than most card creators and does not try to guide the user through each step. It was sometimes given away as a freebee. Not to be confused with Microsoft Greetings.

• 2.0

Policies Now! (1993) 1 Utility Publishing Windows

Policies Now is a document creation wizard that specializes in corporate policies. It provides general purpose templates with carefully constructed language that are customized via a series of questions. The results may be manually customized further with a built in text editor. accompanied by "DescriptionsWrite Now!" (A job description writing tool), and "Personal Policy Expert". These were renamed to "Policies Now!", "Description Now!", and "Policies Now! HR Pro Edition" respectively.

• 5.x