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Favorite programs?

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geoffm3

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I was just wondering... what's everyone's list of must-have PC programs? Back in the day, for me these included:

MS-DOS 5.0
Quicken
Word Perfect
Telix terminal program (or, if you sprang for it, Procomm Plus)
GEnie Aladdin
Spinrite ;)
Stacker
I also had some sort of FIDOnet mail reader, but I can't recall the name of it.

Oh yeah... forgot... actually preferred DR-DOS 5.0, not MS-DOS. And Geoworks Ensemble was awesome.
 
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DOS 3.30 (for XTs), DOS 5.0 (for 286s)
Norton Commander (and/or some clone, eg. Volkov Commander - faster than NC 3.0, and has some nice additional features)
Norton Utilities
CheckIt 3.0
Turbo Pascal 5.5
Turbo C 2.01
WordPerfect is nice indeed, but I usually preferred great Polish word processor named TAG
 
QEMM for memory
Norton Commander
MS Works until I got hold of Geoworks
I think I used Telemate for BBS
 
DM.COM - 8k reads and sorts all file types
WHEREIS.EXE - 1k finds anything
TED.COM - 3k editor with fast interface
Q.EXE - 48k best multi-file editor
LIST.COM - 27k best lister ever
LYNC.EXE - 37k best comm prog
ATTRIB.COM - 6k a more functional "dir"
EDC.EXE - 37k change dir w/o path (fast)

I have little need for a word processor since I mostly use text, but I have to say that WordPerfect 5.1 was probably the all-time best and on a (now free) pentium class machine it works instantly. To me a fully functional suite of programs always fits on a 1.44 floppy with lots of room to spare.
 
shawn510 said:
QEMM for memory
Norton Commander
MS Works until I got hold of Geoworks
I think I used Telemate for BBS
Click to expand...

I also used Telemate for BBSing. I remember a few other's I also used starting with PC-TALK on my PCjr.
I remember we needed a special patched version of PC-Talk to work with the PCjr , something about the lack of DMA
on the machine would cause errors when the machine tried to write to the diskette while data was coming over the serial port.
I had a 300 Baud modem , and it would take 45 minutes to download a 60k file :-(

I also used Qmodem, Procomm , and Pibterm for BBSing. Still have copies of those somewhere on my diskette stash.
 
offensive_Jerk said:
Not to stray the topic, but was QEMM better than Memmaker.exe in Dos6.22?
Click to expand...

QEMM was the best in my opinion. It included several utilities
to help optimize your config.sys and autoexec.bat. It would reboot
your machine a few times and analyze/reorganize the drivers figuring out
which ones could safely be loaded into high memory. It usually succeeded
in squeezing the max amount of memory for almost 640K free :)
 
offensive_Jerk said:
Not to stray the topic, but was QEMM better than Memmaker.exe in Dos6.22?
Click to expand...
I'll bite. :) I haven't tried QEMM, but I can tell you from much experience that Memmaker should not be used for it's advertised purpose. You will not get an optimized memory setup and you will often get a faulty one. It is actually quite easy to set up your memory usage by hand if you pay attention to what order your programs load in and the spaces available. Right now (with MS-DOS6.22) msdos and command is taking up just under 25k and the rest (710k) is free for programs to use. I'm a firm believer in writing the config.sys and autoexec.bat by hand as a specification for the computer. That way you'll get the best performance every time. :) /OT

Regarding commprogs: I've sometimes used telix. That's the king of them all in my mind. The problem I found is that I really had no need for the versatility. That's why I always used lync.exe which is small and quite similar to Procomm. When my kid was little, I used to get him to talk his friends into putting modems in their (or their parent's) computers - I'd give them one if necessary. (VBG) Any kid who came in contact with our house learnt a lot about computers - and they can all type now! Host mode was the social networking of the 80's.
 
QEMM is great until you try the stealth modes which give you extra 640K RAM and a somewhat unstable setup most of the time.

Memmaker on a simple setup is fine, too many TSR and optimizing gets funky.

Other utilities I like are:

Xtree gold DOS and Windows
Norton Desktop 3 for Windows
Norton utilities for DOS
Telix, when I actually used a modem.
Partitionmagic is nice here and there.
old versions of Timbuktu to control different machines over TCP/IP
 
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