

Ask HN: Your favourite (oldschool) software? - froo

Personally, mine used to be XTree gold for dos back in the day (it was the bees knees!)<p>How about you?
======
hga
Stuff I'm still using:

Windows Eudora (nothing I've found has the features from it that I really
want).

All the rest are from the '70s:

UNIX and cygwin. Specific utilities I started using in 1978 include dd, du,
dc, ed/ex (death before vi!), tar, ls and ps.

EMACS, of course ^_^.

Scheme.

A bit later, command line FTP and dbx, the first unix debugger with source
line correspondence (mid-80s, and it was a godsend).

Stuff I've stopped using for whatever reason, although I might get back to it:
nroff, Scribe and TeX (before LaTeX). ITS and it's COMSAT equivalent to
sendmail. Multics. Lisp Machines. Chaosnet, with its named ports (not
numeric). UUCP email. Lex and yacc ... as long as I can rope someone else into
writing their inputs ^_^.

Adventure, first generation Zork and Peter's Langston's 3D porthole spacewar
and empire. Xtrek, the maze games on the graphics machines attached to MIT-DM
and the Alto version. Rogue, rogueamatic (sp?) and nethack. The Artic Fox
Amiga game.

------
nathanb
Definitely +1 for LapLink. Sure it required a null modem cable, but at least
it beat sneakernet!

QBASIC that came with DOS. The built-in context-sensitive help is how I taught
myself how to "program".

Also, Norton Commander and Norton Disk Doctor. In the bad old DOS days of no
tab-complete and dodgy floppy disks, Peter Norton was a hero.

------
bootload
_"... Your favourite (oldschool) software? ..."_

    
    
      > You are in a twisty maze of passageways, all alike...
    

Advent ~ <http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/> The first bit of software I
really used & liked. Still marveling at ths source code now ~
<http://www.wurb.com/if/game/1>

------
jacquesm
The dos xcopy command. Command line globbing seems like a great idea until you
find out the hard way that command lines have a maximum length.

------
MattF
+1 for XTree Gold, I was stoked when I got my hands on that.

Stacker was magic too.

------
noonespecial
Laplink, baby! Copy that 200meg hard disk over your LPT port in just 40 hours!

------
smackfu
My dad still uses DOS Quicken. At heart it's the same as the current program,
just without all the bells and whistles. Plus it was a very mature DOS
program: think his is version 11.

------
nfnaaron
Gopher. Usenet (whatever client). Stacker. HP made some replacement desktop
for Windows that I really liked, not New Wave.

Tapcis addon for Compuserve.

------
peter_severin
Norton Commander and its derivatives. DOS Navigator was very nice but slow.
Then Windows/Total Commander later.

------
RevRal
I used to like working with MathCad, but I haven't needed it since ~1995.

------
MaysonL
Spacewar

also - the eve editor on Vax/Vms

------
johngalt
This old sysop enjoyed Wildcat v4.0 BBS

------
revorad
Not that old school but I miss Winamp.

~~~
gdee
Why do you miss it? Older versions are surely available for download somewhere
if the new ones annoy you, and even the new ones can be custom installed to
filter most unneeded things.

~~~
revorad
I don't use Windows any more.

------
protomyth
PFE - I dearly miss that editor

------
alanthonyc
Anything by Beagle Bros.

------
joshu
vi!

