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Microsoft Office (1991)

214 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.

PageMaker (1987)

66 Publishing Windows OS2 MacOS

Aldus PageMaker, later Adobe PageMaker, is a desktop publishing program for Mac and Windows. First released in 1985, PageMaker was the first desktop publishing program for the Macintosh. It was followed over a year later with the release of 1.0 for the IBM PC. The PC version was a notable application as it was one of the few rare applications which would run under Windows 1.x. PC PageMaker 1.0 bundled a runtime version of Windows. This enabled MS-DOS users who had not decided to buy Windows to run PageMaker. Aldus skipped version 2.0 on the PC to bring version number in sync with the 3.0 Mac product.

CorelDraw! (1989)

57 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.

Lotus SmartSuite (1992)

51 Word Processor Spreadsheet Presentations PIM Database Windows OS2

IBM/Lotus SmartSuite is an office suite from Lotus software for Windows and OS/2. SmartSuite includes SmartCenter, 1-2-3, Word Pro, Freelance Graphics, Approach, Organizer, and ScreenCam.

Adobe Acrobat (1993)

51 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.

Instant Artist / Print Artist (1992)

28 Graphics Publishing Novelty DOS 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.

Microsoft FrontPage (1995)

18 Publishing Windows

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

Sidekick (1984)

15 Utility PIM DOS OS2 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.

The Print Shop (1984)

12 Publishing DOS 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.

FreeHand (1988)

12 Graphics Publishing MacOS Windows

FreeHand is a vector based drawing program used to create illustrations. It is similar to CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator. Initially it offered more features and flexibility than illustrator. It was created by Altsys, sold through Aldus, then sold to Macromedia, and then finally was assimilated by Adobe. Later versions repositioned itself as a content creation system for the web through Flash. The final version was Freehand MX (version 11) in 2003.

FrameMaker (1990)

10 Publishing Unix MacOS Other Windows

FrameMaker, originally from Frame Technology Corporation and later Adobe, is a professional document system for creating large, complex documents with highly structured layout. It was often accompanied by FrameReader.

BannerMania (1989)

8 Graphics Publishing DOS

Banner Mania is a banner making program for IBM PC compatible computers, enabling the user to create banners, posters, signs and logos. It can create and print multi-page banners, with 19 different fonts and effects in 16 colors.

1.0

Microsoft Publisher (1991)

7 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.

FormWorx (1990)

7 Publishing DOS Windows

FormWorx is a tool for quickly and easily creating high quality printed forms with your personal computer. It comes with a large library of customizable pre-made standard forms. With "Fill & File" you may enter data in to fields or populate multiple forms from a database. Earlier versions were available for DOS.

Micrografx Designer (1988)

6 Graphics Publishing Windows OS2

Micrografx Designer, originally released as IN-A-VISON for Windows 1.x, is a vector based drawing and design program. It features ease of use, multiple layers, and dimensioning. Micrografx also sold large libraries of clip art. It competed against Corel Draw.

QuarkXPress (1986)

6 Publishing MacOS DOS 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.

Lotus Organizer (1992)

6 PIM Windows

A personal information manager from Lotus for Windows. Organizer was a Windows-based replacement for the DOS-based Lotus Agenda. Lotus Organizer was the most popular PIM during the mid 1990s.

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2.x

Ventura Publisher (1986)

6 Publishing DOS MacOS Windows

Ventura Publisher, originally from Xerox, is a professional desktop publishing program for the GEM graphical environment and later Windows. It has the distinction of being the first popular publishing program for the IBM PC platform. It competed with Aldus PageMaker, which initially was more popular on the Mac platform. There are also versions for Mac and OS/2.

PFS:WindowWorks (1991)

6 Word Processor Spreadsheet Presentations Communications PIM Database Windows

PFS WindowWorks, from Spinnaker Software and Ancier Technologies, is an integrated all-in-one office application that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, chart editor, telecommunications, database, label maker and address book. Supposedly it was the first of such office suites for Windows 3.0, but soon competed with Microsoft Works for Windows. for Windows"](/product/better-working-eight).

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2.x

PFS First Publisher (1988)

5 Publishing DOS

First Publisher, from Software Publishing Corporation, is a WYSIWYG desktop publisher for DOS that excels at producing extremely high quality text and graphics print even using dot-matrix printers. This program originated as T/Maker Clickart. In 1991 Software Publishing Corp sold their PFS series to Spinnaker Software, where it became Easy Working Desktop Publisher.

GoldMine (1998)

5 PIM Windows

GoldMine is a desktop based customer relationship management (CRM) program. GoldMine automates every aspect of your business, including contact and calendar management lead tracking, sales forecasting, and marketing via the Internet. With Remote Synchronization, GoldMine gives you access to the most current contact information while you're working in the field. GoldMine helps you turn your contacts into gold. Its features enable you to view your calendars by day, week, month, or year, schedule meetings, calls and to-dos, use pop-up alarms for important events, stay in touch with anyone, from anywhere at anytime, know who makes decisions at your accounts, track your customer contact histories, forecast and analyze your sales, profile accounts with Opportunity Manager, and Execute marketing strategies with Automated Processes.

4.0

Micrografx Picture Publisher (1990)

4 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.

HiJaak (1991)

4 Graphics Publishing DOS 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.

Adobe InDesign (1999)

4 Publishing Windows

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

ACT! (1987)

3 PIM DOS Windows

ACT!, or "Activity Control Technology", originally from Conductor Software, and later Contact Software and then Symantec, is an easy to use business relationship management system targeted at traveling sales professionals. It can track things like billable time and expenses.