
Ask HN: What were your favorite MS-DOS productivity programs? - wkoszek
Some of the MS-DOS stuff was a productivity heaven. Norton Commander comes to mind. Then Turbo Vision apps, including Turbo Pascal editor. Any else you remember?
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helph67
NewKey for storing/recall of keyboard macros. Lots of people raved about
SideKick which loaded as (one of the first?) T.S.R utilities.

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photawe
Norton Commander was insanely awesome.

Borland C++ was really cool (even back then, I favored C++ over Pascal :D).

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ObsoleteNerd
Xtree blew my mind when I first found it and it was then THE first thing I
installed on every new DOS computer I built/got.

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qefx
If you still use Windows, ZTreeWin is awesome!

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pwason
Tornado - which ended up being the IMHO insanely overpriced and now almost
unusable InfoSelect. I once wrote an inventory app using Tornado, batch
scripts, and a barcode interface... Was insanely fast.

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wkoszek
Can you link which firm/company/product Tornado is?

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qefx
Lotus Metro I preferred it over Borland Sidekick

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leejoramo
Borland Sidekick

QuarterDeck Desqview

Borland Reflex

Microsoft Word

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osullivj
GrandView: a note taking outliner.

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kazinator
SemWare's QEdit

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lproven
Lots, many of which have been mentioned, but there is one whole category of
app that didn't really make the leap to Windows (or Mac OS X over in Apple-
land) and is basically dead now:

Outliners --
[http://outliners.scripting.com/](http://outliners.scripting.com/)

The seminal PC Outline was shareware and it's still out there:
[https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2200/0/pc-
outl...](https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2200/0/pc-outline)

But it evolved into Grandview:
[https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/grandview...](https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/grandview/)

As for the others... well, there were lots! Back in the boom days of MS-DOS
(DOS 3.x, mainly, and before) it didn't include a decent text editor,
directory navigator, file manager, memory manager, program launcher, task-
switcher, inter-computer file-transfer tool, file or disk compression and lots
of other things, so there were many 3rd party replacements.

Some still have fans.

DOS 4 started to fix some of that, including a pretty good file
manager/program launcher called DOSShell, but otherwise it was bloated: it was
buggy and took a lot of RAM, a scarce resource under DOS.

DR responded with DR-DOS 5, which was leaner, meaner, gave you more free RAM
than even MS-DOS 3.3, but gave you big (>32MB) partitions, a graphical shell,
a full-screen editor and lots more.

MS responded with MS-DOS 5, the first ever retail version, which included all
this and more.

There was a brief "arms race" \-- DR-DOS 6, then MS-DOS 6, 6.2, 6.21, 6.22,
DR-DOS 7. I've blogged about this: [https://liam-on-
linux.livejournal.com/58013.html](https://liam-on-
linux.livejournal.com/58013.html)

Then Windows 95 integrated DOS and that ended the battle.

DR-DOS got acquired by Novell, then spun off with Caldera, then went FOSS. I
am working on some updates: [https://liam-on-
linux.livejournal.com/58013.html](https://liam-on-
linux.livejournal.com/58013.html)

IBM continued with PC DOS 7 and the little-known PC DOS 7.1, which fixes a
load of bugs, adds FAT32 support, LBA disk access, support for modern >8GB
disks, and more. It's a free download if you know where to look:
[https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/59703.html](https://liam-on-
linux.livejournal.com/59703.html)

These later versions of DOS -- DR-DOS 5, 6 & 7, MS-DOS 5 & 6, and PC-DOS 6, 7
& 7.1 -- included replacements for most of the 3rd party utilities. 32-bit
Windows then made most of them irrelevant. A lot of the companies went under.

Most of the office-type apps made the jump to Windows: WordPerfect ended up a
good word-processor. Borland's DOS apps got bundled with it. IBM bought Lotus,
Samna and others and made SmartSuite.

There's no burning reason to favour the ancient DOS versions now.

But outliners never really made that leap and so there's now a choice of MS
Word or run ancient DOS stuff. The FOSS world has never embraced outliners:
LibreOffice doesn't include one. There are some FOSS 2-pane outliners -- what
Wikipedia calls "extrinsic" outliners -- but they are a totally separate,
different type of app, and personally I have no use for them.

So I run an ancient version of MS Word, Word 97, just for Outline mode. It
runs perfectly under WINE on Ubuntu and other distros.

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formerchamp
edit.com

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bediger4000
xenix

~~~
wkoszek
You mean MS Xenix aka UNIX variant, or was there some CLI tool with the same
name?

