Microsoft Plus! (1995) 77 Utility Novelty Windows

Microsoft Plus! was an add-on package to Windows that added desktop themes, screen savers, sound effects, power-toys, and other assorted goodies for the home user. Plus! 95 also included Internet Explorer 1.0, which was not included in all Windows 95 distributions.

• 95
• 98

Ulead iPhoto (1991) 57 Graphics Windows

iPhoto is a Microsoft Windows based image editor bundled with scanners. It features the ability to adjust scanned photographs in many ways, convert to different color depths, and export to a number of different file formats.

• 3.x
• 1.x Plus
• 4.x Plus

Instant Artist / Print Artist (1992) 42 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.

• 1.0 (DOS)
• 1.0
• 2.0
• 3.0
• 4.0
• 6.0
• 8.0

PartitionMagic (1995) 42 Utility DOS Windows

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.

• 2.x
• 3.x
• 4.x
• 5.x
• 6.0
• 7.x

Paint Shop Pro (1990) 39 Graphics Windows

JASC Paint Shop Pro is a simple and easy to use bit-mapped graphics editor. It supports a wide variety of file formats, and photo manipulation functions that were comparable to PhotoShop. It has good support for editing 256 color palletized images that made it ideal for editing web graphics. It was first released in 1990 for Windows 3.0 as just "Paint Shop", and early versions gained popularity through the distribution of shareware releases. It lost popularity in 2003 when 8.0 was introduced with a redesigned UI and in 2004, JASC was acquired by Corel.

• 1.x
• 3.x
• 4.x
• 5.x
• 6.x
• 7.x

Photoshop (1988) 28 Graphics MacOS Windows

Photoshop is a powerful drawing and photo manipulation program for both Mac and Windows. The Macintosh version was released by Adobe in 1990, although a very small number were bundled with Barneyscan slide scanners prior to that. Photoshop contained many advanced features including layered images, advanced color control, and plug-ins. Prior to its release, many of its features were only found in high end dedicated photo pre-processing systems.

• 0.x (beta)
• 1.x
• 2.x
• 3.x
• 4.x
• 5.x
• 6.x

PC Tools (1985) 24 Utility DOS Windows

PC Tools, from Central Point Software, is a system and disk utility suite similar to the Norton Utilities. Central Point also produced a similar set of tools for the Apple Macintosh known as MacTools. Central Point Backup, bundled as part of PC-Tools, was also offered as a standalone product.

• 1.x
• 2.x
• 3.x
• 4.x
• 5.x
• 6.x
• 7.x
• 8.x
• 1.0 for Windows
• 9.x
• 2.0 for Windows

Oracle Forms and Reports (1997) 19 Database Windows

Oracle Forms and Reports is a GUI application builder. It is similar to Visual Basic, but uses the PL/SQL language and integrates heavily with Oracle Server databases.

• 4.5 (Developer 2000)
• 6i

SpinRite (1988) 15 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.

• 1.x
• II
• 3.x
• 4.x
• 5.0

PKZip (1990) 10 Utility DOS 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.

• 1.x
• 2.0x
• 2.5 for Windows

WinZip (1997) 8 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

KeyCAD Complete (1993) 8 Graphics DOS Windows

KeyCad Complete, from Softkey, is a low-end computer aided design and drawing tool.

• 6.0 (DOS)
• 1.0 for Windows
• 3.0 for Windows

Picture It! (1996) 8 Graphics Windows

Picture It!, from Microsoft, is a photo image adjustment tool for novice users. It includes a number of standard touch-up functions such as red-eye adjustment, resizing, brightness, contrast, and cropping. It can make direct use of scanners and digital cameras. All functions are presented as a dumbed down step-by step series of tabs and menus. Picture-It competed against Adobe Photodeluxe.

• 1.0
• 2.0
• 99

Norton Desktop (1991) 7 Utility Windows DOS

Norton Desktop is a powerful desktop shell and file manager bundled with many additional tools. There are versions for both DOS and Microsoft Windows.

• 1.0 for Windows
• 2.0 for Windows
• 1.0 for DOS
• 2.2 for Windows
• 3.0 for Windows

PowerPoint (1987) 6 Presentations MacOS Windows

Microsoft PowerPoint is a graphical presentation tool that is today part of Microsoft Office. Prior to its acquisition by Microsoft, it was known as "Presenter" from Forethought Inc. These are the standalone versions. For the Office bundled versions, see Microsoft Office.

• 1.0
• 2.0
• 3.x
• 4.x
• 95 (7.0)
• 97/98

Harvard Graphics (1986) 6 Graphics DOS Windows

Harvard Graphics, from Software Publishing Corporation and initially called Harvard Presentation Graphics, is a graphing/plotting/presentation creation application for DOS. It was extremely popular in the late 1980s. At release, it competed against many graphing products such as PFS:Graph (AKA IBM Graphing Assistant ), Microsoft Chart, ChartMaster, and Cricket Graph, just to name a small few. A Windows port was released in 1991, but it lost out to Microsoft Powerpoint.

• A.00
• A.01
• 2.x
• 3.x
• 1.0 for Windows
• 2.0 for Windows
• 3.0 for Windows
• 4.0 for Windows

DeluxePaint (1988) 6 Graphics DOS

DeluxePaint, from Electronic Arts, is a bitmap pixel graphics editor that was ported to DOS from the Amiga.

• 1.x
• 2.x

PerfectOffice (1995) 6 Word Processor Spreadsheet Presentations Graphics Database Windows

PerfectOffice is a bundle of office applications that competed head on with Microsoft Office.It bundles WordPerfect and a number of other office applications. This bundle started out as "Borland Office", was briefly known as "Novell PerfectOffice", then "Corel Office", and under Corel it later became "WordPerfect Office". (Not to be confused with the unrelated ~1990 groupware program, also called "WordPerfect Office")

• 3.0

Corel Photo-Paint (1995) 5 Graphics Windows

Corel Photo Paint is a bit-mapped graphics editor optimized for photo manipulation. It competed against Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, and was often a companion product to the vector based CorelDRAW. It includes a large number of special effects, a color management system, brushes, layers, and scanner support.

• 5.0

IBM Lotus Symphony (2006) 5 Word Processor Spreadsheet Presentations PIM Windows

IBM Lotus Symphony is a suite of applications for creating, editing, and sharing text, spreadsheet, presentations and other documents and browsing the world wide web. IBM Lotus Symphony is virtually unrelated to the original Lotus Symphony.

• .7x
• .8x

Autodesk Animator Pro (1993) 5 Graphics DOS

First released in 1989, AutoDesk Animator was a DOS-based professional animation tool. It could create full motion animations using VGA 320*200 256 color resolutions. It supports a number of animation techniques, and includes a freely redistributable animation player. It saves animations to the .FLI or "QuickFlick" format. This format was extremely popular during the very early 90s, and was one of the few that could do 256 colors, including pallet manipulation.

• 1.x

Apple PlainTalk (1994) 5 Utility MacOS

PlainTalk is the collective name for several speech synthesis (MacinTalk) and speech recognition technologies developed by Apple Inc. In 1990, Apple invested a lot of work and money in speech recognition technology, hiring many researchers in the field. The result was "PlainTalk", released with the AV models in the Macintosh Quadra series from 1993. It was made a standard system component in System 7.1.2, and has since been shipped on all PowerPC and some other 68K Macintoshes.

• 1.x

Microsoft Paintbrush (1987) 4 Graphics DOS

Microsoft Paintbrush is Microsoft's OEM version of Zsoft PC/Publisher's Paintbrush for MS-DOS. It was commonly bundled with Microsoft mice in the late 80s and early 90s.

• 2.0
• 4.0

PhotoDeluxe (1996) 4 Graphics Windows MacOS

Adobe PhotoDeluxe is a simplified photo manipulation tool targeted at novice users. It performs a variety of tasks, including red-eye removal, shadow dropping, smudging, and cloning and can produce "projects" such as cards and calendars. It is designed to integrate with scanners and digital cameras. It competed against Microsoft Picture-It

• 1.0
• 2.0
• 3.x
• 4.x

VPIC (1991) 4 Graphics DOS

VPIC was a popular shareware image viewer for DOS. It supports a wide range of graphics file formats, and supports the proprietary resolutions of almost every video card ever made.

• 4.x