PKZip (1990) 29 Utility Windows

Pkzip is the most common archiver for MS-DOS based systems. It implements a an open compression method and is much faster than other archivers of its time.

• 2.5 for Windows

Policies Now! (1993) 2 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

PsiWin (1994) 3 Utility Windows

PsiWin, from Psion PLC, is a tool for managing, interfacing with, and backing up PSION Personal Digital Assistants. It supports converting file formats such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Borland dBase, Quattro Pro, WordPerfect, and Lotus Smartsuite. It also contains a Windows version of the Psion Database software.

• 2.x

QEMM (1990) 47 Utility DOS Windows

Quarterdeck QEMM is a DOS Extended Memory Manager for 386+ computer which allows you to make use of memory beyond the 640kb barrier. It can also be used with QRAM, a utility for freeing up the 640k base memory.

• 8.x
• 9.x

Quarterdeck GameRunner (1995) 0 Utility DOS

Quarterdeck GameRunner, from Quarterdeck Corporation, is a specialized packaging of their QEMM memory management product that is specifically designed to automatically maximize the memory and speed available to known games. DOS based games of the time used a hodgepodge of memory access methods, that varied from product to product and often created conflicts. GameRunner attempts to mitigate some of this chaos by providing automatic configuration and management.

• 2.x

Search & Rescue (1998) 1 Utility DOS

PowerQuest Search & Rescue is an advanced file recovery tool. It operates as a set of bootable floppy disks that can scan a FAT or FAT32 hard drive, piecing together files even when partitions or file systems are damaged.

• 1.0

Sidekick (1984) 20 Utility PIM Windows

Borland Sidekick is a DOS based PIM (Personal Information Manager) and one of the first widely-used TSR (terminate and stay resident) programs. The key feature of Sidekick was that one could use Sidekick's utilities while using most other MS-DOS applications. This was important because MS-DOS had no built-in multi-tasking or task switching capabilities.

• 2.0 for Windows

SpinRite (1988) 26 Utility DOS

SpinRite, by Gibson Research, is a tool that can diagnose, repair, and rejuvenate the low-level formatting and optimize the interleave of MFM and RLL (ST412/506 interface) hard disk drives. Its pattern testing ability is also useful for verifying the operation of SCSI and IDE hard drives.

• 4.x
• 5.0

Stacker (1991) 19 Utility Archive OS2

Stacker, from Stack Electronics, was a hard drive compression tool. It was wildly popular until Microsoft virtually eliminated the third party market for this by including their own drive compression tool with MS-DOS 6. and Expandz! Plus.

• 4.0 (OS/2)

Stardock Object Desktop (1996) 0 Utility OS2

Object Desktop is a set of utilities for OS/2 power users. It provides a number of visual enhancements, define hotkeys, an improved editor, desktop configuration backup, archive management, system help advisors, and system backup.

• 1.5.x

System Commander (1996) 5 Utility DOS

System commander, from V Communications, Inc, was a commercial boot manager for PCs. It offered a graphical menu and the ability to hide other partitions from the selected OS. It supported a variety of OSes including DOS, Windows 9x, Windows NT/2000, Linux, OS/2, and various Unixes.

• 2.x
• 3.x
• Deluxe 4.00

Toast (1995) 6 Utility MacOS

Toast was a popular CD mastering and burning application for classic Apple Macintosh. It was created by Astarte, who sold it to Adaptec, and later Roxio. Adaptec sold a different program for IBM PC compatibles named CD Creator

• 2.x
• 3.x
• 4.x

ToyBox Menu Manager / Magic Desk (1992) 3 Utility DOS

ToyBox II, later renamed to Magic Desk, is a simplified graphical menu system that lets you launch your DOS applications from a selection of tiled iconic buttons. Supports nested hierarchies, includes an icon editor, and a number of common icons.

• 3.x (Magic Desk)

ViaVoice (1997) 3 Utility Novelty Windows

ViaVoice is a voice recognition program from IBM. It was available in a number of different languages. It was based on the previous VoiceType product Helloooo computer!

• 4.x
• 98

Virex (1998) 0 Utility Windows

Virex is another of the 1990's who-owns-it-this-week products. Originally a virus scanner and disk utility set for Macintosh and PC from Microcom, who then became Datawatch, sold the Macintosh version of Virex to Dr. Solomon's. In 1998 all of this was bought out by Network Associates - a merger of McAfee and Network General Corp.

• 5.x (Mac)

VoiceType (1997) 1 Utility Novelty Windows

VoiceType is a voice dictation and speech recognition program from IBM. Compared to other products, VoiceType was considered fairly fast and accurate, but required several hours of "training" to achieve that. It was aimed at a fairly niche voice dictation market.

• 3.x
• Simply Speaking 3.x

WINCheckIt (1994) 4 Utility Windows

WINCheckIt, from TouchStone Software Corporation, was a popular diagnostics and system cleaning utility for Microsoft Windows 3.1. It diagnoses issues with CMOS/BIOS setup, finds IRQ problems, tests I/O devices and memory, benchmarks system performance, removes unused application files, and fixes system files. WinCheckIt is the successor to their earlier DOS based CheckIt diagnostics.

• 4.0

WinDelete (1994) 2 Utility Windows

WinDelete, from IMSI, is a Windows 3.1 tool for uninstalling unwanted software and cleaning the system.

• 3.0

Windows Resource Kit (1991) 21 Utility Windows

The Microsoft Windows Resource kit is a set of supplementary tools for managing and deploying Microsoft Windows. The first Windows Resource kit was released in 1991 for Windows 3.0. Most, but not all, Windows versions after that had corresponding Resource Kits. These were often freely downloadable from Microsoft.

• 95
• NT 4.0
• 98
• 2000

WinImage (1996) 7 Utility Windows

A tool used for reading, writing, and editing disk images. Most of the disk images (.IMG or .IMA) on this site can be written with this tool. This is a SHAREWARE product, but is posted here for your convenience.

• 3.0

WINProbe (1995) 2 Utility Windows

WINProbe is a commercial system information and diagnostic program from Landmark International, maker of benchmark and diagnostic programs. criticized as being rather buggy. Landmark also produced the separate Sysinfo product for DOS.

• 3.1

WinZip (1997) 30 Utility Archive Windows

WinZip is an archive utility for Microsoft Windows that creates and extracts ZIP files, along with a degree of support for MS Cabinet (cab), ISO, JAR, TAR, and GZipped files.

• 6.x
• 7.0

WordPerfect Library (1998) 3 Utility Editor PIM DOS

WordPerfect Library, introduced in 1986 and later renamed WordPerfect Office (not to be confused with Corel's Windows office suite of the same name), was a package of DOS network and stand-alone utility software for use with WordPerfect. The package included a DOS menu shell and file manager, whose macros allowed text to be moved from one program to another (for example, from WordPerfect to Calendar, and vice versa), a do-all editor, apparently that of Wordperfect 3.0, which could edit binary files as well as WordPerfect or Shell macros, calendar, and a general purpose flat file database program that could be used as the data file for a merge in WordPerfect and as a contact manager.

• 2.0