Expert Personal Publisher (1988) 0 Publishing DOS

Expert Software's Personal Publisher is a rudimentary (crude), desktop publishing program. It does not use a graphical user interface, more closely resembling a document processing program. It was sold as a cheap low-end "budget" title - the sort of thing one might find on the shelf at a department store.

• 2.x

EZ-DOS-IT (1986) 0 Utility DOS

EZ-DOS-IT was a very low-cost low-resource multitasking program for DOS on the IBM PC and compatibles. It claimed compatibility with most popular software of the time. However, the initial 1.0 release had serious bugs, was copy protected, and was not compatible enough for many people. Although these issues were quickly fixed and copy protection removed, it earned them bad reviews.

• 4.x

FastBack (1986) 2 Utility DOS

Fastback, by Fifth Generation Systems, Inc, is a backup utility for DOS. Its key feature is that it can read and write both a floppy disk and hard disk at the same time by making use of dual-channel DMA. Combined with speedy data compression, it can make a very fast backup.

• 5.x
• Plus 1.x
• Plus 2.x

FastTrax (1987) 1 Utility DOS

FastTrax is a disk optimization program for MS-DOS on IBM PC computers. It rearranges and defragments files to make file access faster.

• 3.x

FileCommand (1983) 0 Utility DOS

FileCommand is an alternate DOS shell from IBM. The user interface is based on the IBM 3081/3084 mainframe VM/CMS Fulist/Filelist tool. It provides an on-screen file list, and a command area, but uses its own command set. Although advertised as friendlier DOS shell for general PC users, most users would likely find it confusing unless they had prior experience with Fulist.

• 1.00
• II

FinalWord (1983) 0 Word Processor DOS

FinalWord is a powerful word processor that started off as an adaptation of EMACS. It is a complicated program that uses manually embedded format codes, but it was targeted at professional writers where typesetting detail is important. Its strength is the ability to work with very long and complex documents. It supports headers, footers, table contents generation, index creation, footnotes, typestyle changes, outlining, tables and charts, multiple column layout. Final Word II adds support for Postscript and user-customizable print formatting commands. machines. There were versions for CP/M and the Atari ST.

• 1.x
• 2.x

Flu-Shot Plus (1988) 0 Utility DOS

Flu-Shot Plus (usually written Flu-Shot+) is a tiny tool that prevents unwanted reading and writing to boot sectors and specified files on a hard disk or floppy disk. The package flaunts its ability to block virus spreading, but despite this, it is not a virus scanner, and can not detect or remove viruses.

• 1x

Fontrix (1984) 0 Publishing DOS

Fontrix is a crude single-page typesetting program for the IBM PC that prints high quality custom fonts on a dot-matrix printer. It includes a font editor, and number of font packs were available for it.

• 2.x

Fontware (1988) 0 Publishing DOS Windows

Bitstream Fontware is a tool that converts commercial vectored fonts in to formats for use with applications such as Aldus Pagemaker running under Microsoft Windows 2. The program itself is DOS-based but the fonts it generates are for Windows.

• 2.0

Framework (1984) 3 Word Processor Spreadsheet Graphics Communications Database DOS

Originally created by Forefront Corporation for Ashton-Tate and first released in 1984, Framework was an early integrated office suite for DOS. It has a built in word processor, spreadsheet, database, outliner, graphing, and telecommunications.

• 1.0
• Premier 1.x
• II
• III

FreeHand (1988) 6 Graphics Publishing MacOS

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.

• 1.0
• 2.0

Friday! (1983) 1 PIM Database DOS

Friday! is an early simplified database filing system, sometimes considered a personal information manager, built on top of dBase II. It is easily customizable, completely menu driven, simple, and easy to use. It was targeted at new computer users, and lacks advanced functionally. There were versions for both DOS and CP/M.

• 1.x
• 2.x

FullWrite (1988) 0 Word Processor MacOS

Originally developed by Ann Arbor Softworks and Aquired by Ashton-Tate, FullWrite is a full-featured word processor, targeted at professional writers, that includes both powerful editing capabilities, as well as advanced WYSIWYG layout abilities. Supports styles, revision highlighting, table of contents, indexes, footnotes, hyphenation, spellchecker, and thesaurus. It also includes a graphics editor, and import/export functionality.

• 1.0

GEM 1st Word Plus (1988) 1 Word Processor DOS

Gem 1st Word Plus is a word processor sold by Digital Research alongside their GEM operating environment. It supports text formatting, embedded images, multiple windows, mail merge, and includes a spell checker.

• 2.00

GEM Desktop Publisher (1988) 0 Publishing DOS

GEM Desktop Publisher, from Digital Research, is a GEM 3.x based Desktop publishing program. It is not as sophisticated as Ventura Publisher. It uses a VMM (Virtual Memory Manager) in place of EMS/XMS, and requires a hard disk. It can be used with GEM Artline to provide illustrations.

• 2.x

GEM Write (1985) 2 Word Processor DOS

GEM Write, from Digital Research, is a simple document editor. It supports embedded images as well as bold, italic, and underline fonts, but only monospaced. It requires GEM Desktop

• 1.0

Get Organized (1984) 0 Word Processor Communications PIM DOS

Get Organized is a bare-bones integrated tool that includes a word processor, address book, index card file, notepad, calculator, calendar, and simplistic telecommunications. It was targeted at high end home users and low end business users.

• 1.x

GOfer (1987) 0 Utility Document DOS

GOfer is a desktop search tool capable of searching many document formats. It loads as a TSR and can be called while other programs are running. It support multiple word search, operators, and inexact searches. It does not use an index, that makes it slower but requires no additional disk space.

• 1.0

Grammatik (1988) 0 Utility DOS

Grammatik is a standalone grammar checker, and was possibly the first grammar checker for personal computers. Later versions were built in to Word Perfect. It competed against RightWriter.

• II
• III
• IV

GraphPlan (1983) 0 Spreadsheet Presentations Graphics CPM

GraphPlan, from Chang Labs, is an integrated spreadsheet/business graphics package that turns numbers into presentation-quality graphics - instantly. Historically important as being among the early "integrated" spreadsheet/graphing packages, and it uses Digital Research's GSX, a core graphics system that evolved in to GEM.

• 1.0

Halo DPE (1987) 0 Graphics Publishing DOS

Halo DPE (Desktop Publishing Editor) was an attempt by Media Cybernetics to enter the desktop publishing market by shoehorning additional text processing abilities in to their Dr. Halo II product.

• 1.x

Hayden Ensemble (1985) 0 Word Processor Spreadsheet Presentations Database MacOS

Ensemble, created by Controle X and published by Hayden Software, is an integrated office suite that includes Spreadsheet, Graphing, Word Processing, and Database functionality. It was notable as claiming to be the first integrated suite on the Macintosh, before Lotus Jazz or Microsoft Works as well as its ability to run on both the Mac 512k and the original Mac 128k.

• 1.0

hDC MicroApps 0 Utility Windows

hDC's MicroApps are small desktop accessories invoked through a "MicroApp Manager". The MicroApp Manager adds an extra menu to each application window's system box. The additional menu contains a list of all available "MicroApps". This is essentially a stripped down version of the Windows 2-based hDC Windows Manager.

• IBM Academic Edition

hDC Windows Express (1989) 0 Utility Windows

hDC Windows Express is a "Complete Menu System" shell for Microsoft Windows. The earliest version went under the name"hDC ClickStart", and was for Windows 1.x (Wanted!).

• 2.x

hDC Windows Manager (1989) 0 Utility DOS

hDC Windows Manager is a set of small desktop utilities that enhance the way the Windows 2 GUI works. It includes an alarm clock, auto save automator, a screen saver, font viewer, memory usage viewer, automatic window cascading/tiling, it can set a mono bitmap as a desktop background, and it can store "sets" of applications to open all at once. menu shell, and hDC Color, a tool that lets Windows 2 VGA use all 16 colors instead of just 8.

• 1.0