Netscape (1994) 40 Web Browser Windows OS2 Unix Linux MacOS Other Mac OS X

Netscape Navigator/Communicator was the first commercial web browser, displacing the free NCSA Mosaic. 1.0 was first released in December 1994, and initially offered advanced features such as progressively rendering pages as they loaded. It quickly gained many other features and capabilities and became the most popular web browser in the mid 1990s. One reason for its popularity, it was licensed freely for personal and non-profit use, although companies were expected to pay for a license. It later competed with Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari, and eventually was open sourced in to the Mozilla browser.

• 4.5x
• 6.x
• 7.x

NetWare (1989) 29 Other

Novel NetWare was an early and powerful network/file sharing operating system. It was first released in 1983 and supported DOS and CP/M clients and was initially unique in that it shared individual files rather than entire disk volumes. Initially servers ran on a proprietary Motorola 68000 system but quickly changed to IBM PC where it supported a very wide variety of third party hardware. It used a cooperative tasking server environment and had some advanced features usually only found in mainframe products.

• 5.x
• 6.x

New Deal Office (1999) 2 Word Processor Spreadsheet Presentations DOS

Based on GeoWorks, New Deal Office was a graphical operating environment for DOS which later became Breadbox Ensemble. New Deal adds a Windows-95 like user interface with a task bar and start menu. New Deal Office targeted low-end 386 and 486 computers that were not up to the task of running Windows 95. It was also released in a "WebSuite" edition only includes the internet connectivity and web browsing tools.

• 3.1b
• 3.2a
• 2000

Norton Commander (1986) 112 Utility DOS

Norton Commander is a MS-DOS based file shell that was widely popular due to it's two column design. You could easily copy and move files between one folder or another, execute DOS commands and more. It competed against many other file managers including Gazelle Q-DOS and Xtree

• 5.5x

Ontrack Disk Manager (1987) 6 DOS

Ontrack Disk Manager is a BIOS overlay and partitioning tool that helps you overcome various BIOS hard drive size limits. It was commonly bundled with hard drives.

• 9.x

PartitionMagic (1995) 52 Utility DOS

A tool from PowerQuest, and later Symantec, that enables manipulation of partitions through its own bootable media. PartitionMagic can shrink, grow, or move partitions without the need to backup and restore files in that partition. It supported a variety of file systems, and the core DOS-based parition tool fit on a bootable 1.44mb floppy disk. It was extremely popular, and made installing or removing multiple OSes much easier.

• 4.x

pcANYWHERE (1990) 6 Communications DOS Windows

pcAnywhere is a tool that enables one to remotely control another computer, or to be remotely controlled.

• 8.0 (Win)

PTS-DOS (1995) 2 DOS

PTS-DOS is a Russian DOS clone created by the Russian company PhysTechSoft.

• 2000

Qualitas 386MAX (1992) 3 DOS

Qualitas 386MAX is a memory manager that competed with Quarterdeck QEMM and Memory Commander. It features ease use, with automated configuration and optimization. It claims to make more DOS memory available than other similar tools at the time.

• 8.x

RAR (1999) 6 Archive DOS

A console utility to extract and create RAR files.

• 2.50

Search & Rescue (1998) 0 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

SimCity (1989) 10 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

Sound Blaster Drivers (1990) 32 DOS Windows

The Sound Blaster is a series of sound cards from Create Labs. For a time, the Sound Blaster was considered a de-facto standard for DOS based gaming. Initially it competed against the uncommon IBM Music Feature card, and the Adlib cards. The original sound blaster provided 8-bit mono digital sound in addition to Adlib-compatible FM music synthesis and stereo CMS Game Blaster compatible square-wave music. Most DOS games work best with the earlier ISA cards. Later PCI cards use completely different hardware and only provide Sound Blaster compatiblity through software emulation.

• Sound Blaster AWE64

SpinRite (1988) 5 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.

• 5.0

StarOffice (1995) 4 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

System Commander (1996) 11 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.

• 2000 (5.x)

Thunderbird (2005) 0 Communications Windows Linux Mac OS X

Thunderbird is an e-mail client based on the integrated Netscape/Mozilla e-mail client. With the release Firefox, it was spun off in to a separate standalone product. It includes the same HTML rendering engine used in Firefox to render HTML formatted messages.

• 1.x

Ubuntu (2004) 3 Linux

Ubuntu is a distribution based on Debian Linux that includes many common application programs. For a time it was considered relatively easy to use and set up compared to other distributions.

• 4.10

VMS (1990) 0 Other

The Virtual Memory System (VMS) is an OS originally designed for the DEC VAX line of servers. Over time, the OS grew to support Alpha and Itanium based machines. Released initially in 1977, the OS was a major competitor at the time to UNIX based machines.

• 7.x

WordPerfect (1983) 45 Word Processor DOS Unix Linux

During the late 1980's, WordPerfect was THE standard word processor for DOS based PCs in big business. Under DOS, it competed mostly against Wordstar. WordPerfect for Windows enjoyed some success in the early Windows environments, but was quickly displaced by Microsoft Word for Windows. Later Windows versions were part of Borland Office/Novell PerfectOffice/Corel Office/Corel WordPerfect Office.

• 7.x (Unix)
• 8.x (Unix)

WordPerfect Library (1998) 0 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

Xandros Linux (2003) 5 Linux

Xandros Linux is a proprietary variant of Linux that sprung up out of the proprietary Corel Linux after they sold off their Linux business.

• 2.x
• 3.x