Ask HN: Your favourite (oldschool) software?

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.

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.

"... 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

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.

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

Stacker was magic too.

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

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.

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

Tapcis addon for Compuserve.

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

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

Spacewar

also - the eve editor on Vax/Vms

This old sysop enjoyed Wildcat v4.0 BBS

Not that old school but I miss Winamp.

PFE - I dearly miss that editor

Anything by Beagle Bros.

vi!