System Commander (1996) 13 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
• 2000 (5.x)

Talking Icons (1994) 1 Novelty Windows

Talking Icons 2.0 is a utility from Aristo-Soft for Windows 3.1 that adds silly sounds and animated icons to the Windows environment. It also features a tool (Windows FX) that changes the windows border with multiple themes, additional screen savers, wallpaper, additional mouse cursors, an icon editor, and "Talk" ready versions of Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Clock.

• 2.0

The 10 Best Fortune Teller (1991) 4 Novelty DOS

The 10 Best Fortune Teller, from Expert Software, is a fun budget fortune telling program: "Excitement awaits on your mystical adventure into the future, these fun-filled fortunes will reveal the future, your personal matters and more - the most fascinating insights you'll ever find in a PC program"

• 1991

The All-Star Utilities Pac (1992) 2 Utility Other Windows

The All-Star Utilities Pac is a set of small windows-based productivity utilities. It was a freebie given away by PC Magazine.

• 1.0

The Program Director (1989) 4 Utility DOS

The Program Director is a tiny little customizable menuing program. It was sold commercially as budget software.

• 1989

Toast (1995) 15 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

Toolworks Backup Pro (1990) 3 Utility DOS

Backup Pro, from The Software Toolworks, is an easy to use backup program for MS-DOS. It features drop down menus and mouse support. It was sometimes bundled with OEM computers, and was sold for very low cost compared to others.

• 1.x

TopView (1985) 5 Utility DOS

Released by IBM in 1984, TopView was a text-mode windowed multitasker for the IBM PC, XT, and AT computer. It featured preemptive multitasking, text-based windowed task sessions, overlapping windows, and supports the use of a mouse. In part, it was one of the reasons why overlapping windows were added to Microsoft Windows 2.0. TopView was later overtaken by DesqView, OS/2, and Windows. For more information, see the Topview 1.00 Software Spotlight.

• 1.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.

• 2.x
• 3.x (Magic Desk)

Tree86 (1990) 1 Utility DOS

Tree86, from The Aldridge Company, is an easy to use tree-based file manager for DOS.

• 3.x

Trend Micro Chip Away (1993) 2 Utility DOS

Released in the early 90s by the Japanese company Trend Micro Devices, Inc (later just Trend Micro), Chip Away Viruses is a DOS based virus scanner that is intended to run from a hardware product built in to a PC motherboard before the system boots. It includes a custom embeddable DOS (called X-DOS), but it can be run from regular DOS. Trend Micro also produced the products PC Rx (A regular software virus scanner), and PC-cillin (a hardware/software combo that keeps critical boot information in a special device). Users sometimes misinterpreted the name "ChipAway Virus" as being a virus itself.

• 2.x

Turbo Lightning (1986) 1 Utility DOS

Borland's Turbo Lightning is a DOS based TSR spell checker. It can also look up Synonyms.

• 1.x

Type Faces (1983) 0 Utility DOS

Type Faces is a program that can print word processing documents using a number of fancy fonts. The fonts are rendered graphically so you are not dependent on the fonts included with your printer. At the smaller sizes, the fonts are letter quality. Type Faces supports formatting codes that you can insert in to your documents, such as right justify, centering, and underline.

• 1983

Ulead MediaStudio (1996) 3 Graphics Video Audio Windows

MediaStudio is a suite of multimedia editing tools. It includes a video editor, video capture tool, image editor, sound editor, and morphing tool. Also supports video conversion, batch mode operation, and overlays.

• 2.0

UniForm (1984) 1 Utility CPM

UniForm is a utility that provides seamless file access to a wide variety of system-specific CP/M and DOS disk formats, enabling easy transfer of files between otherwise incompatible system.

• 1984

V-Print (1984) 0 Utility DOS

V-Print, from CompuView, is a printing product designed to accompany VEDIT.

• 2.x

V-Spell (1985) 1 Utility DOS

V-Spell, from CompuView, is a spell checking product designed to accompany VEDIT. VEDIT was a powerful, customizable, and portable editor designed for programmers and power users.

• 1.x

ViaVoice (1997) 2 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

Video Tape File System (1991) 0 Utility Reference DOS

Video Tape File System is a database program that you can use to organize your VHS video tapes. You can sort by title, actor, or category, print labels, and print a complete reference. It includes a top 100 movie reviews, can retrieve movie review information from Prodigy, and it includes 50 colored labels to get you started. There were version for Apple II and IBM PC.

• Plus

Virex (1998) 1 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)

ViruSafe (1991) 0 Utility DOS

ViruSafe is a fast, comprehensive yet easy to use virus scanner produced by the makers of XTree. It can find known viruses and monitor files for any kind of unwanted changes. It features the ability to schedule scans, and can create a "recovery" boot disk to deal with boot sector viruses.

• 4.5

VoiceType (1997) 4 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

Voyetra Sequencer (1991) 2 Audio DOS

Voyetra Sequencer is a popular, powerful, and professional MIDI music recording and editing program. It was often bundled with Sound Blaster sound cards.

• 4.x

Wang Freestyle (1990) 4 Utility Publishing DOS

Wang Freestyle is an "annotation" program that operates by making screen shots of DOS applications, to which the user may then add hand-written notes using a stylus or add a voice recording with a telephone-like handset. It features a Macintosh-like desktop that displays the annotated documents graphically on a proprietary high resolution monitor, and integrates a form of mail and fax.

• 1.x

Ways 2 (1992) 1 Utility Windows

Ways is a smart dictionary, thesaurus and database multitool that works with any Windows 3.1 application. It once had been part of the Witchpen word processing suite for DOS. When certain word processors began to dominate the market, Swiss developer Hannes Keller decided to separate and enhance the dictionary. In Germany, Ways was widespread thanks to being bundled with every Highscreen brand computer in the early 1990s.

• 2.x