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How many of the "killer applications" that I started my PC life with - the really original, useful, amazing ones - do I still use?
None.
Remember "Brief - the Programmers Editor"? Gone.
Xtree? (XTree Gold, Pro, Gold Pro, Gold Pro Ultimate Wonder CuresBaldnessAndScurvy Edition included)? You couldn't live without it, but ... despite a couple of (pretty poor) Windows versions it died a death.
1-2-3? Nope.
Wordstar? Dead.
Samna Word / Ami Pro / Lotus Word Pro? (The best word processor ever created) It lost out to the MS Office juggernaut: Roadkill.
Got anything you started off with still in regular use?
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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No, not any.
Plenty of Windows adaptations of far older UNIX tools, though.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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I also used Brief - I miss it now and then - XTree, Wordstar and I still have a floppy disk of Norton Utilities - even though my main machines no longer have a floppy disk device!
I tried Norton Commander for a while but didn't really like it.
Ghost - I think it was called that; for low level disky things - gone now.
I wrote some utilities myself for various things, floppy disk backups, disk hex editors, early messaging and a sort of email over TCP/IP (before internet, just on the office network) - all gone now; I can't even find the floppy with the source code!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Ghost is still around although I don't think they've updated any of the code.
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at least two for me:
Visual C++ => Visual Studio
Netscape => Firefox
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I remember buying Visual C++ V1.0 myself, with my own money! Two foot thick shelf of books and a similar pile of pound notes ... 
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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The one we had came on CDROM and we had to scramble to find someone with a portable CDROM drive. Install took freaking forever (the joys of 2x CDROMs)
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Mine was CD as well - I'd got heartily sick of "Insert disk 27 in Drive A: and press any key"*
* - Normally followed by "General error reading Drive A:" and copious swearing.
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 bought a Creative sound card back in 90's and the drivers were on a CD. We had a guy in school which was much richer than us and he had a PC with CD-ROM. I beg him for copying the drivers to a 3.5" diskette 
Behzad
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Same over here … VC++ 1.51, now using Visual Studio 2017
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Some trivia for you - but in VC 1.51 math.
The math function tan() flip the values between -180 and 180 degrees of the y axis. I found this during unit testing of my existing graphing library using the latest compiler/IDE from MS.
INTP
"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." - Edsger Dijkstra
"I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks. " - Daniel Boone
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I think there is/was a tan2 function that correctly dealt with the signs of the two arguments, x and y.
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None of them in use, because they where DOS when I started.
E.g. ashton tate framework iii. RIP 
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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For me it was Borland Turbo Pascal & C++, learn to code on those two. Still have the installer floppies (but no floppy drive!,  well a USB but...)
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I used Turbo Pascal, then Turbo Prolog. Loved Brief back then. Used dBase ][, its successors and then Paradox. It's too bad that Corel stopped supporting Paradox. For many applications it was superior to Access and certainly faster. Paradox's developers were geniuses at making important small things work -- for example, you could could copy/paste a comma-formatted number into a number field and Paradox would clean up the string and convert it to a number without choking. You could enter today's date in a date field by pressing the space bar 3x. Nice!
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Norton Commander was ok, now most of that functionality is in FAR Manager, I use it all the time.
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To be fair, nothing you've named ever got a Windows version (?), so given that nobody these days works with DOS...it's only fair they'd no longer be used.
I'm looking at my "old utils" folder (which is in OneDrive, so it gets synched automatically across all my systems)...there's plenty of utilities that go back to my DOS days, but I've probably not fired up any of them in years, even once.
The oldest file is ARJ.EXE (1993), followed by AMCAP100.EXE (1998). I actually use that one every once in a while, to test whether a webcam's drivers work. But it looks like I have none of the DOS utilities from the 80s anymore.
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Samna / AmiPro / Lotus Word Pro was originally Win 3.0, it was one of the first wysiwyg word processors, sadly squashed by the Office behemoth.
XTree had several Windows versions, including a patch which made it work on Win95, but was bought by Symantec and buried (while still just about alive).
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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QuickC - made the switch-over from FORTRAN quite pleasant.
A bunch of .COM files I created - and for that matter, all the stuff that used the ROM BIOS went belly up.
Well, the versions change, but at least you can still get ROGUE !
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Dito - I was wondering if someone would mention it. I created a complete DOS windowing system using QuickC.
INTP
"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." - Edsger Dijkstra
"I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks. " - Daniel Boone
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Command Prompt 
“The palest ink is better than the best memory.” - Chinese Proverb
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Ah!! I was gonna say that!
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
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The closest I can come to is an in-house debugging tool I wrote originally back in 2000. It's still going strong, and is in the process of getting some enhancements even today.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Good question!  I've been at this 20 years and have a few unpopular apps:
0: VB6 (I still maintain quite a few legacy applications that I started over 20 years ago)
1: MS Access (lite versions of our software still use Jet 4.0)
2: MS Photo Editor
3: Many of my own utility apps that I use every day have roots back to the early days
While I'll certainly get thrashed for still using VB6 and Access, let me just say that I can't even begin to calculate the ROI I've gotten on the $180 VS6 suite I bought at uni back in '98! There are plans to migrate it all in the next year or so when my business partner and I can reach an agreement on the target environment. I'm pushing for desktop, she is insisting on web...so probably doing web. 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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