Apple PlainTalk (1994) 3 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

BackMaster (1995) 0 Utility OS2

BackMaster is a backup program for IBM OS/2 that features support for a large number of tape drives. It offers an easy-to-use graphical user interface, and enables a variety of backup configurations including unattended backup. It supports full system restore by creating a set of disaster recovery boot disks.

• 2.x

Bookshelf (1987) 10 Reference MacOS

Microsoft Bookshelf is a CD-ROM based multimedia reference tool from Microsoft, including a dictionary, thesaurus, quotations, atlas, and other types of references. Some versions were included and integrated with Microsoft Office, albeit sometimes stripped down.

• 96-97

Deskman/2 (1995) 1 Utility OS2

DevTech's Deskman/2 is a set of desktop and system management tools for OS/2. It contains data compression tools, networking tools, performance monitoring tools, and desktop management tools.

• 1995

DiskDoubler (1990) 1 Utility Archive MacOS

DiskDoubler is an automated file compression program for the Apple Macintosh. It does not compress the entire drive, but rather specified files. It automatically compresses and recompresses files as you use them.

• 3.x

Grammatik (1988) 6 Utility MacOS

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.

• Mac 2.0

Norton SystemWorks (1998) 5 Utility MacOS

Norton SystemWorks was a utility software suite by Symantec Corp. It integrates three of Symantec's most popular products – Norton Utilities, Norton CrashGuard and Norton AntiVirus – into one program designed to simplify solving common PC issues. Backup software was added later to high-end editions. SystemWorks was innovative in that it combined several applications into an all-in-one software for managing computer health, thus saving significant costs and time often spent on using different unrelated programs.

• 1.x

Sidekick (1984) 13 Utility PIM OS2

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.

• 1.0 for OS/2

Stacker (1991) 10 Utility Archive OS2

Stacker, from Stack Electronics, was a hard drive compression tool. It was wildly popular until Microsoft virtually eliminated the third party market for this by including their own drive compression tool with MS-DOS 6. and Expandz! Plus.

• 1.0 (OS/2)
• 4.0 (OS/2)

Stardock Object Desktop (1996) 0 Utility OS2

Object Desktop is a set of utilities for OS/2 power users. It provides a number of visual enhancements, define hotkeys, an improved editor, desktop configuration backup, archive management, system help advisors, and system backup.

• 1.5.x