Norton utilities 2.0 and
Mace Utilities
Central Point PCTools, I think was No. 2 behind Norton--or perhaps was tied with it for #1. In particular, Central Point Backup--although I used Sytos most of that time. Fastback was another popular floppy-based backup package.
Wordperfect for dos (always perfered wordperfect over word/works)
I used Wordstar 2000 much of time--don't underestimate how many people used Wordstar, particularly if they migrated from a CP/M system.
Aurora v3.0 for a light text editor, beats ms-edit, more features then PE OR maybe
Wordstar v 1.x
Never heard of Aurora--there were several very good text editors, say, SEMEdit and many "programmer's editors" as well as the editor that came with the utility packages, such as Norton. There were versions of emacs for the PC as well. The first Wordstar for DOS was 3.3; pretty much the CP/M version translated. I have both WordStar 4.0 for DOS and CP/M--there's very little difference.
Ventura and Corel
PC and Publishers Paintbrush
Never heard of Publisher's Paintbrush. PC graphcs support at the time of the AT wasn't very good. At the time, my wife was working with Framemaker on a Sun and it dwarfed just about anything VP could do. If you were serious, you probably used a workstation or a Mac.
Windows 2.x
You usually didn't use MS Windows unless you were forced to. If you used Ventura, you had GEM. Many other programs had their own graphics system (e.g. OrCAD for example). Windows 2 was terrible--Windows didn't gain much momentum until 3--and in particular, 3.1.
Borland dbase if a database was needed
dBase was Ashton-Tate until 1991, long after the AT timeframe.
Turbo Pascal and Turbo C
If you were developing for a Microsoft platform professionally, you tended to use Microsoft C. It was simply prudent.
File Maven v3.5a or Laplink for xfer of files
Laplink, Carbon Copy or a host of other utilities, some bundled for free. Never heard of File Maven at the time.
Kermit and maybe
Telix for Terminal progs
Kermit wasn't very popular outside of the academic sphere. Procomm Plus was far and away more popular. There were also many programs to llink up with mainframes that supported SDLC/HDLC etc.
One thing that you have to remember is that the environment was very different. We work in a connect web- and net-centric environment today. Back then, it was almost all dialup with few wired networks outside of the corporate environment (where Novell pretty much held sway). So the nature of the work was different. You might do your editing on a PC, but you compiled and ran on a mainframe much of the time. We forget that during the 5150 - 5170 timeframe, a lot of organizations treated PCs as smart terminals or at best, thin clients.
