AppleWorks (1986) 8 Word Processor Spreadsheet Presentations Graphics Communications Database MacOS

AppleWorks is an all-in-one Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Database, Graphics Editor, and Presentations tool. The original product was a text-based product for the Apple II. The Apple Macintosh and Windows versions were forked from ClarisWorks in 1998 by Apple. At the time, Apple was under a lot of pressure to have a direct alternative to Microsoft Office. There were serious concerns that Microsoft might pull Microsoft Office for the Macintosh from development.

• 5.x

Adobe Acrobat (1993) 25 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

The Print Shop (1984) 4 Publishing MacOS 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 1.x (Mac)
• Deluxe 2.0 (Win)
• Deluxe III
• Premier 5.x (Win)

Microsoft Office (1991) 276 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.

• 4.0
• 4.2
• 4.3
• 95
• 97/98

Adobe Illustrator (1988) 54 Graphics Windows Unix MacOS

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Adobe Systems. It was often sold as a companion product to the bit-map/photo editor Adobe Photoshop. Illustrator was originally released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh. Early versions were ported to NexT, Silicon Graphics, and Sun Solaris.

• 4.x
• 5.5
• 7.0

Photoshop (1988) 21 Graphics Windows MacOS

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.

• 3.x
• 4.x

Paint Shop Pro (1990) 14 Graphics Windows

JASC Paint Shop Pro is a simple and easy to use bit-mapped graphics editor. It supports a wide variety of file formats, and photo manipulation functions that were comparable to PhotoShop. It has good support for editing 256 color palletized images that made it ideal for editing web graphics. It was first released in 1990 for Windows 3.0 as just "Paint Shop", and early versions gained popularity through the distribution of shareware releases. It lost popularity in 2003 when 8.0 was introduced with a redesigned UI and in 2004, JASC was acquired by Corel.

• 3.x
• 4.x

PhotoDeluxe (1996) 4 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

• 1.0
• 2.0

Instant Artist / Print Artist (1992) 34 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.

• 2.0
• 3.0
• 4.0

Visio (1992) 2 Graphics Windows

Visio is a flow-chart diagramming program for Microsoft Windows originally from Shapeware/Visio Corp. Visio was specifically designed as a flow charting tool rather than a generic drawing tool. It featured easy to use drag-and-drop diagram creation, and shipped with a wide variety of stencils. In 2000 Visio Corp was acquired by Microsoft. It competed with Aldus Intellidraw and Micrografx Snapgraphics and Meta Software's MetaDesign.

• 2.0
• 3.0
• 4.0
• 5.0

ArcView GIS (1996) 11 Graphics Other Database Windows

ArcView, from Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. is a geographical information system program for Win9x/NT.

• 3.0

CorelDraw! (1989) 61 Graphics Publishing Windows

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.

• 4.0
• 5.0
• 6.0

Microsoft FrontPage (1995) 11 Publishing Windows

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

• 1.0
• 1.1
• 97 (v2)

Micrografx Windows Draw (1986) 4 Graphics Windows

Micrografx Draw is a free-form vector based drawing program with a collection of clipart. The earlier versions are especially notable as being among the few programs produced for Microsoft Windows 1.x.

• 4.0
• 5.0

Adobe PageMill (1997) 2 Publishing MacOS

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.

• 2.0

Picture It! (1996) 2 Graphics Windows

Picture It!, from Microsoft, is a photo image adjustment tool for novice users. It includes a number of standard touch-up functions such as red-eye adjustment, resizing, brightness, contrast, and cropping. It can make direct use of scanners and digital cameras. All functions are presented as a dumbed down step-by step series of tabs and menus. Picture-It competed against Adobe Photodeluxe.

• 1.0
• 2.0

Microsoft Greetings (1997) 0 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

DeltaGraph (1992) 0 Presentations Graphics Windows

DeltaGraph, originally from DeltaPoint and later SSPS, was a powerful business and scientific statistical graphics package for the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. graphics-only packages like Excel.

• 3.x

Microsoft Publisher (1991) 12 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.

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

Xerox Globalview (1992) 0 Word Processor Spreadsheet Presentations Graphics Publishing Communications Database 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).

• 2.1 for Windows
• 2.3 for Windows

PrintMaster (1985) 6 Graphics Windows

Print Master was another sign and banner creation program similar to The Print Shop. The earlier version got in to trouble for looking too much like the Print Shop.

• Gold 3.0 (Win)
• Gold 4.0 (Win)

QuarkXPress (1986) 1 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) 3 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.

• 2.x
• 3.x
• 4.x
• 5.x
• For Kids 1.0

AutoSketch (1987) 1 Graphics Windows

AutoSketch is a 2D vector program sold by Autodesk. Unlike artistic drawing programs, AutoSketch is specifically geared towards engineering applications. Although not as powerful as AutoCAD, it can work with 2D AutoCAD files. Autodesk also produced AutoCAD LT, a higher end 2-D drawing program. But unlike AutoSketch, AutoCAD LT was based directly on AutoCAD and worked similarly.

• 2.x (Win)
• 5.x (Win)

Adobe Streamline (1992) 0 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.

• 4.0