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OriginalGriff wrote: Lotus Word Pro? (The best word processor ever created)
Sorry OG but even from it's first day Word has been better than Lotus' crap.
The Beer Prayer - Our lager, which art in barrels, hallowed be thy drink. Thy will be drunk, I will be drunk, at home as it is in the tavern. Give us this day our foamy head, and forgive us our spillage as we forgive those who spill against us. And lead us not to incarceration, but deliver us from hangovers. For thine is the beer, the bitter and the lager, for ever and ever. Barmen.
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Like some others I started in DOS, so nothing really would have survived to now. I also used Brief and really liked it, and of course for a long time afterwards any editor would have good Brief emulation. But eventually it faded away and I had to get used to the more common Windows schemes.
I started with C (Turbo C? Can't remember) and assembler. I remember going to the store and buying the IBM assembler package and being really excited, and get the BIOS manual with all of the BIOS code. Talk about spaghetti, I think they might have reused single bytes via jump sometimes. But 8K ain't a lot to work with.
I'm guessing I also used Turbo Pascal some as well.
I remember when I moved to OS/2. It used to drive me freaking crazy that the hard drive would start moving on its own. In DOS unless your program told the hard drive to do something it didn't do anything. I was constantly jerking around at the sound of the hard drive (and they were't quiet in those days) suddenly grinding on its own and having a moment of fear that something bad was happening.
Explorans limites defectum
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Dean Roddey wrote: the sound of the hard drive (and they were't quiet in those days) suddenly grinding on its own and having a moment of fear that something bad was happening
That's a nightmare I lived a couple of years ago, awakened in the middle of the night by a strange tick-tick-ticking sound coming from the home/office server.  It was then that I realized it had been months since I did a complete backup. Lesson learned.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I am really surprised that nobody mentions Total Commander (a.k.a. Windows Commander 1993)!
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
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As my first work in computers was writing Excel macros (converting Lotus 123) I can safely claim Excel as a tool I still use.
I still have the installation disks (2 x 3.25") for SuperBase, no drive of course. What a magic program that was, 1 disk for the database, another for the application and you had a solution to deliver. Even made 9600 baud viable.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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Still use NE (Norton editor) for assembler stuff, mostly within DOS emulators.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Still use Xtree Pro - it does one particular thing well that nothing else does as easily or efficiently, so I use it for that: it allows you to compare two directory trees containing identically named files that may vary in size only and find all the larger, smaller or identical ones and manipulate the results en-mass.
Directory Opus is the nearest Windows UI equivalent I can find ( and I use that all the time ) - this is, of course, a port of the excellent Amiga program!
I have a friend who still uses Xtree Pro as his primary file manager (on Windows 10) every day.
I still use (and much prefer) Wordperfect as a word processor (first used Version 4.2 under DOS). (Word, despite millions of man years of development and billions of dollars of investment, is still an abomination of the worst kind for anything more complex than very simple documents; compared with Excel which has - with one or two blips - steadily improved over the years and is probably the most useful and used MS product I possess other than the OSs themselves.)
Although I still have a working copy of Brief, I mainly use Jetbrains products now for software dev: a great shame no one has done a Brief keyboard emulation for it though as I can still remember the keystrokes!
And of course, under linux, I still use the many of the same utilities that I started with under Microport Unix - things I learnt then still work today.
Sure I could come up with some more if I thought hard enough...
8)
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Totally agree with you on both Word and Excel - Excel is just such a brilliant spreadsheet it's hard to think of improvements (apart from replacing the damn ribbon with a working UI ... but that goes without saying).
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Commander Keen was with me back then and he still is now 
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Brief for sure. I loved the keystroke minimalism. I added Brief key mapping to my IDE's for a long time. Never felt as comfortable, though.
I also liked 4DOS and (don't laugh!) REXX by Mansfield Software Group for complex scripting.
Hard to imagine but I once thought a 20mb HDD was such a bounty! Now, it wouldn't hold one RAW-format picture.
Cheers,
Mike Fidler
"I intend to live forever - so far, so good." Steven Wright
"I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met." Also Steven Wright
"I'm addicted to placebos. I could quit, but it wouldn't matter." Steven Wright yet again.
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Heck, 20MB wouldn't run a modern app at all!
I remember when Doom came out - that was what, 4 floppies? And we thought that was a lot! 
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I started REXX on a mainframe running VM. I became a Rexxpert and ended up writing Rexx interpreters built in to a couple of different products over time.
I used the PC implementation with OS/2 and then Windows. I miss it now.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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I started with CLIST on TSO. REXX was the replacement. I wrote a program to
build and submit JCL in order to more easily extract hardware diagnostic
information for mainframes and peripherals.
I later wrote a program in REXX on VM called the Interactive Questionnaire Facility (IQF)
when I worked at the IBM Education Centre on Don Mills Rd in Toronto. It helped
Instructors to compose, administer, and report on Instructor and course evaluations.
Thanks for evoking those memories of fun times. 
Cheers,
Mike Fidler
"I intend to live forever - so far, so good." Steven Wright
"I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met." Also Steven Wright
"I'm addicted to placebos. I could quit, but it wouldn't matter." Steven Wright yet again.
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On VM there was a great editor called XEDIT.
You could write macros for this in REXX.
I wrote a full-blown hex editor (for some colleagues working on TPF) using this combo.
I also wrote a bulletin board system.
I miss XEDIT and REXX!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Still in use
* grep
* sed
Things that I started with that have disappeared that I do not miss:
Thin wire Ethernet
Token ring networks
tiny monitors! EGA anyone?
Paper only documentation.
Floppy drives
(Mostly hardware, I see)
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Brief, jeez, I knew that editor at the cellular level in my fingers.
And, Norton Commander as well
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The oldest software that I still use today... probably vi. Although now it's vim, of course... And my first use of it was on a Sun3/180 running SunOS 3, not a PC...
Apart from that, probably Office is the single piece of software that has the longest unbroken lineage from when I first used it. I started working life on VAX/VMS, and DOS pretty much passed me by - straight into the joys of Windows 95 (which sucked in comparison to VMS!).
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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Modern day Norton Commader reincarnations - Midnight Commander and FAR Manager - on daily basis.
Ah yes of course, the whole bunch of unix tools - grep, awk, sed, and so on. This is something that is standing above all times.
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Notepad was a killer app - seriously. In the original release of Windows NT 3.1 if you pressed Alt-F4 to exit Notepad you actually exited Windows to a nice blue screen.
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Vedit was one of the first full featured editors I used with CP/M and then when I built my first IBM AT clone it also became available for DOS although I do not use it now it was one of the best programming editors of the day, the company is still around (surprise)
Greenview Data Company Overview[^]
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dBase III+(Ashton-Tate) => SQL server
Clipper(Nantucket Corp) => Visual Studio
LANtastic => Windows 3.11 and now Active Directory
Sad they're gone but a lot of programmers like me learned to develop database programs in a network environment with all the locks control that now is almost unnecessary.
Good days...
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I still use Visual SlickEdit - in Brief emulation mode. - Good macro handling, or at least one that my fingers still remember.
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DOS (now COMMAND). LOL.
Progress has killed it, but you are confusing KILLER APP with SPECIFIC APP...
BRIEF => most features available in most editors nowadays (port of emacs, LOL).
Lots 123= Spreadsheet (Still have one)
Oracle = Database = Still have 3..4
But the world has moved a LOT since these tools were created. They were valuable in their time.
Currently I use ActionOutline a thousand times a day. It's windows based, and I am looking to create a web based alternative so I can access it from my phone and other devices.
Does this decrease the Value of an indispensable tool, NO! will I stop using AA at some point. Yep.
But I will replace it with a Cloud Based tool where my data is backed up and stored, and potentially secured in even better ways. Potentially making some aspects shareable with other people, which simply cannot happen the way it works today.
So, of all of those tools you had, if you look back at the tool itself, not the BRAND... Did it just get absorbed into the life and times of other tools?
I used to write batch files. I prefer Python now.
I used to write quick and dirty EXE Files. I can do much in a Javascript window.
We move on, our tools change...
I also had corded drills, and 12V cordless drills. My dad has a crank (hand drill). Things have improved...
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Hm, that would be tough. My first computer with an OS (CP/M) was prePC. I eventually got WordStar on it and to this day, all my IDE's/editors/word processors all use WordStar control sequences for editing. I wrote an AutoHotKey script to translate the WordStar control sequences to the particular editors sequences.
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