Switcher (1985) 2 Utility MacOS

Switcher is an add on utility program written by Andy Hertzfield and released by Apple that adds the ability to load multiple programs and quickly switch between them - something that MacOS lacked at this point.

• 4.x

System Commander (1996) 36 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)

The 10 Best Fortune Teller (1991) 3 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) 3 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) 1 Utility DOS

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

• 1989

TopView (1985) 9 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) 1 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) 3 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) 1 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

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

V-Spell (1985) 2 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) 28 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) 1 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

Wang Freestyle (1990) 2 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

Whereabouts Deluxe (1991) 0 Novelty DOS

Whereabouts Deluxe flashes a fun, animated, and colorful messages on your PC that tells people your whereabouts. Choose one of 11 bright messages from each volume or create your own custom message.

• 1.x

WINCheckIt (1994) 4 Utility Windows

WINCheckIt, from TouchStone Software Corporation, was a popular diagnostics and system cleaning utility for Microsoft Windows 3.1. It diagnoses issues with CMOS/BIOS setup, finds IRQ problems, tests I/O devices and memory, benchmarks system performance, removes unused application files, and fixes system files. WinCheckIt is the successor to their earlier DOS based CheckIt diagnostics.

• 2.0
• 4.0

WinDelete (1994) 2 Utility Windows

WinDelete, from IMSI, is a Windows 3.1 tool for uninstalling unwanted software and cleaning the system.

• 1.0a
• 3.0

Windows Resource Kit (1991) 16 Utility Windows

The Microsoft Windows Resource kit is a set of supplementary tools for managing and deploying Microsoft Windows. The first Windows Resource kit was released in 1991 for Windows 3.0. Most, but not all, Windows versions after that had corresponding Resource Kits. These were often freely downloadable from Microsoft.

• 3.x
• 95
• NT 4.0
• 98
• 2000

WinImage (1996) 14 Utility Windows

A tool used for reading, writing, and editing disk images. Most of the disk images (.IMG or .IMA) on this site can be written with this tool. This is a SHAREWARE product, but is posted here for your convenience.

• 3.0
• 6.1

WINProbe (1995) 1 Utility Windows

WINProbe is a commercial system information and diagnostic program from Landmark International, maker of benchmark and diagnostic programs. criticized as being rather buggy. Landmark also produced the separate Sysinfo product for DOS.

• 3.1

Wired for Sound (1992) 3 Novelty Windows

Wired For Sound, from Aristosoft, is a tool that assigns silly sounds to various Windows events. It also includes a set of backgrounds, alternate icons, and alternate cursors, and a talking clock. There were different editions of WFS Pro with different sound sets.

• 2.x
• 3.x

WordPerfect Library (1998) 1 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