That encarta95 segment brought tears out of my eyes. I was one of those strange kids that prefered an encyclopedia rather than playing outside, so when my father bought a pc with a cdrom and encarta was included, i spent months in front of the monitor amazed by the multimedia content. A good encyclopedia is the best gift you can give to an introvert kid.
I loved playing the Mind Maze in Encarta. In an abstract way, it always reminded me of the Minotaur's maze in Kings Quest 6 (sans Minotaur and with the education!)
I'm kind of amazed you aren't comparing or contrasting this to Wikipedia. Now we have an encyclopedia on any platform with an internet connection, that anyone can actually help contribute to. Also, I grew up with a physical book encyclopedia. By '95 I was too involved with things like paying my mortgage to enjoy it. And the Encarta package in particular seemed to have little of the tactile pleasures of a physical text, nor of the internet available, update-able and user editable Wikipedia. In other words I'm not at all surprised about geeky nostalgia POV, but I'm surprised because Encarta represented to me a greedy monopolistic American corporation desperately trying to grab respectability by buying a so-called "educational" publication. I hated Encarta quite thoroughly and call it a negative reason now to buy any "encyclopedia" product that can't connect to the internet! But, you and EC go ahead and enjoy whatever you're enjoying.
@@bobbyfried7478 I sort of think it looks 1000 times better than Windows 10. Same with Netscape compared to new Firefox. Still hate the "new" interface and that you can't switch it back
Me too, we got the Encarta 94 version. So I could a day clicked randomly around and reading many articles and animators plus videos. Was so amazing at this time.
Yes... 👍 One a bit a bit hidden, but extremely useful function, was the ability to connect two computers over a serial-cable and copy files directly... I'm still using 'Midnight Commander' for working on remote Linux machines over SSH.
Turbo Pascal (6 I think, for DOS) was my first experience of a compiled language and it blew my mind, the possibilities were endless. Then DJGPP being a free way to access extended memory from C programs was a game changer.
Thanks for a trip down Memory Lane. For a number of years I used Lotus 1-2-3 for statistical and scientific calculations and plotting. Being able to see results quickly and to do iterations with a single keypush made a great tool even when mainframes and mini-computers were available. Cheers from Wisconsin.
BASIC / Fortran. It's always fun to go back to your past and see how far things have changed. My kids (my reference, they are in their 30's) are amazed at the archaic way we had to code "in the old days". Even ACAD was command driven and pixel based and they say they are so happy that they were born after fire and the wheel were invented.
Remember the CD-ROM version of Windows 95 came with two music videos, Buddy Holly by Weezer and Good Times by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians. That really blew out my mind.
Wow, that's the most yellow Amiga I've seen to date! Used to love Deluxe Paint on the Amiga. In a way it's still unrivalled in its marriage of power and simplicity.
A couple of random lines inside a sloppy shape, use contour gradient fill, and _bang_ your fantasy map is done (except the water). And animation with colour cycles!
@@brucefay5126 So did I. Although I never bothered with the (hidden) test function to run up a high score; I did it the classic way: start a game, and play it all the way through.
Thank you for the blast from the past. I started using DOS 3.0 on a 286-16 IBM clone. Back then, there was no-one to teach you how to use a computer. I learned by reading the DOS manual and figuring it out. Hardware was difficult to purchase because of incompatibilities and lack of driver support. You couldn't just jump on the internet and download new drivers. This was the beginning of the IBM clone years. I remember some of the office programs you were showing were $400.00, a small fortune back then. Pirating of software was rampant. You could go to a computer store and browse through software. A game was generally around $40 to $50 dollars and there was a good chance it would not run properly. You would end up getting on the dial up modem and trying to find a patch for the software. I started using PC-Link as my dial up provider and it opened a whole new world of connectivity and information. Those were exciting years.
Enjoyed this very much. I got paid for some of the Deluxe Paint work I did on the Amiga 1000. Loved Sculpt 3D on the Amiga also. Good times. Thanks for another great video.
Caligari trueSpace! One of the first 3D apps I ever used, along with POV-ray and 3D Studio (before it was MAX). I see there's an old version of Cinema4D on the desktop as well. Many years later I'm now working at Maxon :)
Brilliant selection! We remember too, that these great programs were also optimized to run on limited and costly RAM and hard disk. Another program well ahead of its time was Borland's Quattro Pro.
Xtree was a great file manager. WordStar was my goto Word Processor (it helped that it came bundled with my Kaypro 4). Also, lets not forget dBase II, and its offspring...III, IV, Clipper, etc.
At 4:13 "... And if we run it up, we can see what a browser used to look like, before Google Chrome was even invented, and before anybody in their right mind ran Internet Explorer". This channel is a treasure, and that piece of script is one of its many hidden gems. Brilliant content as always!!
15:00 Reveal Codes I really like this feature which was retained in later releases. Especially handy for fixing OCR errors, because the codes were used in programmable operations.. Ulead Photo Express ver. 1 was a simple image editor that had very nifty functions but easy to use, unlike the mind-numbing complexity of today's photo editors.
Other great things about WP were its macro language and expanded descriptive name functions. The programmable macro language was very effective to automate routine and repetitive tasks. The descriptive names were great for differentiating closely named documents, since DOS limited file names to eight alphanumeric characters only.
From the early days I remember using Norton Commander to transfer data over serial, Borland Pascal to create early windowed applications, Quattro Pro spreadsheet and honorable mention goes to our polish TAG graphical text editor for DOS.
I almost forgot to mention Geoworks Ensemble for PC. That was way ahead of windows and gave Dos a beautiful motif graphical interface. It came with its own writer, database, graphics program etc.
XTree Gold was one of my favourites. It was very good at finding files and folders (and quickly). It was also good for changing attributes, even lots simultaneously. The tree structure clearly showed where things are. Windows, on the other hand, fails to find things, denies permissions and hides things.
Same here. Awesome game over the Network. I was in Dept of Environment (IT) at the time and we used to challenge the guys upstairs in DTi (Trade and Industry) to matches over the Lan
Lotus Symphony for me. I used it when I worked on a 286 PC in an office in Germany in 1986 and was the first to introduce computers in the office. Brilliant program that never let me down and was very flexible.
I remember transitioning from typing papers to word processing using MS Word for DOS, which made my undergraduate life much easier. As a grad student, Mac Paint enabled me to draw chemical structures and embed them into word processed document. ChemDraw emerged in the late 80’s and made structure drawing much better and enabled me to produce figures for my dissertation and defense. I remember the excitement around many of the apps you mention and many others. I’ve always loved exploring the potential of these new apps to improve the quality of the work I was doing at the time of their release.
As a kid in the late 80s / early 90s I remember my father using something called Jack2 on the 8088. It was an "integrated package" containing a word processor and a few other office applications on a floppy disk, and used its own disk format for saving the files (not readable from MSDOS!). Wish I could get hold of a copy of it to remember the days. A bit later he moved on to Wordperfect, which I still sometimes miss, and would use if only I could remember any of the key combinations!
Although I used WordPerfect my favourite word processor at the time was Chiwriter 4. I also made significant use of QB45 and Borland Pascal 4 and 5. Xtree Pro Gold was my go-to disk manager. For graphics I used Lotus Freehand and Ventura Publisher for DTP.
Netscape was my favorite browser of all time. You really brought back some memories, like the excitement of purchasing the software at the store then hurrying home to install and use it.
For a really young person in 95, Encarta was mind-blowing. I didn't had the occasion to see any other of those retro-application except the Netscape browser.
To me Encarta was icing on the cake, the 'encyclopedia with embedded video features' WOW moment came in '93 when my Creative Labs CD-ROM kit (2x player, SB16 card and some CDs) included Groliers Multi-media Encyclopedia. So of Microsoft Home series I'll add Cinemania 95, and the CD+G disks on Mozart and other composers.
In 1995 I was the kid who spent his lunch break in the school media center using Encarta and playing Tetris on a Power Macintosh. Somehow even skipping lunch I was still fat. Not anymore, but still.
@@vcv6560I heard of encarta 1995 but I never had it. The Packard bell I had included grolier 1995 multimedia encyclopedia. I used it to help me with reports in middle school. It made it easier. 🙂
Good times. Im 65 and started in the IT field in 75 as a mainframe operator. The company I worked for in the late 80s had a app I had to maintain written in lotus 123. What a pain that was. Before that I worked for company that had us using WordPerfect. I remember the manager would get very upset when someone didnt use the spell checker feature. We had to swap out the 5 1/2 disk to use spell checker unless you were lucky enough to have 2 disk drives. And I made some very nice "paintings" using DeluxePaint. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Holy cow, this was a fun trip down memory lane. Thanks! The only way it would have better would have been to show the whole boot up sequence of the computer in all its noisy glory.
Loved this it was great to see those programs again and have the retrospective of how really advanced they were on those old 286 and 386 processors. The Encarta was truly the internet on a CD for me especially at that time the sound coming off those CD's was incredible on my Creative Labs stereo speakers.
Brilliant memories there! We've come a long way in a short time. I've been pretty good with Excel and macros for about 20 years but only found out about F4 cycling through the $ options about 2 years ago. I had no idea it dated back to Lotus 123.
Thank you for the memories from the golden age of personal computers. I have fond memories of pre-PC contributions such as PL/1, PL/M, CP/M, life simulation, and let us not forget mainframe contributions like IBM JCL which made us think of the possibilities the personal computers represented. Best wishes.
very nice, my additions would be: 1) Aldus PageMaker which brought typography and page layout to the ordinary business and then person, 2) LocoScript on the Amstrad PCW which had a superb custom spellchecker, 3) WordStar which had a powerful dot script for automation
A couple of printing add-ins to 1-2-3 were Funk Software company's Sideways and Allways. With Sideways and Allways installed, dot matrix printers could produce some impressive results. Sideways printed spreadsheets on dot matrix printers in landscape orientation (clockwise 90 degrees) continuously on a tractor fed paper roll. Since the DOS version of 1-2-3 did not natively support WYSIWYG viewing, Allways allowed viewing of the final appearance of the printed spreadsheets with better fonts and styles on dot matrix and other printers.
NAILED IT! When I saw the title I began thinking of my top retro applications. Yeah, I go back that far, when retro was new. When Number One came up and "wp" was entered I actually shouted out. Word Perfect was the first really good, functional, sensible word processing app on the market. There were a lot of others, but they had more problems than I care to enumerate at the moment. But one dog that sticks out in my mind is DisplayWrite, IBM's miserable attempt to enter the market. It was supposed to be a PC implementation of their stand alone DisplayWriter machine which, if I recall correctly, cost about $10,000. (That's 1985 dollars.) Both the software and machine were universally despised by users. But the company I worked for required all computing to be IBM, regardless. (IT was run by former IBM people.) DisplayWrite/Displaywriters died a miserable, painful death. My second favorite was DESQView, ca. 1990. It was a real multi-tasking pc "operating environment" running on top of DOS, able to run simultaneous processing of DOS based programs on 386 processors. Programs ran in DOS windows which could be moved, sized, etc. and you could see them actually running at the same time. That was about the time that Windows 3.1 came along. Users were mesmerized by all the fancy graphics, corporate IT was mesmerized by Microsoft's presence, so DV sadly faded away. A true pioneering product of the times.
Aaaah, WordPerfect ... one of my first 8088 assembler adventures was a TSR program that allowed German umlauts for writing in WP and printing to the IBM ProPrinter ... those were the days :-)
@@new-lviv That wasn't a hack, it was just a supplemental piece of additional software, so don't get too impressed :-) ... and it might have been WordStar instead of WordPerfect. Impossible to say from today's point of view, 38-39 years later. I had to adapt both programs. "Internationalization" wasn't even a word back then for most software producers.
I did lots of stuff in Quick Basic. The problem was, the stuff I wrote was only relevant to ME for the most part. Very little of it had anything to do with the 'outside world'.
@@xaenon Well, not my case. I did a lot of programming in Quick BASIC 4.5, PDS 7.x, VB-DOS and Visual Basic for third parties. Now, I only develop applications for myself, some of them based on challenges of RosettaCode.
@@xaenon Me either! I made a lot of Quick Basic programs that solved MY problems only. Today I continue to solve my problems with a combination of VBA in Excel and Word and with Javascript.
WOW! Talk about a trip down memory lane! My first PC clone ran Netscape because it came with all those diskettes to get on AOL! I stuck with it ever since, never going to Microsoft IE! I am now running ubuntu 20.04 with Firefox! I also used Word Perfect, starting with DOS version 6, then going to windows and beyond! It then changed hands and got to be to expensive to upgrade! Today I use Libre Office for everything! Thanks for the trip!
Norton Commander, Professional Write (PW) and a program called CASSLBL (Cassete Label), used for labelling Audio Cassetes. Thanks for another great video!
I remember Encarta 95. It came with our Packard Bell Legend that my mom brought home in 1995. I never used it, but remember seeing the case in the desk drawer next to the System Shock floppies. We used Netscape at school, but at home we used AOL. When I got my first PC in 99, we were already coming into the IE era so I used that. Used Firefox through college and switched to Brave a few months back, but occasionally I still go back and use SeaMonkey for that classic Netscape feel.
I liked it very much it is the sort of thing are used to do in the old days I am 54 now and have had a career in IT and school since 1976 so I’ve worked all the way through different applications and it was nice to see all the old style applications Lotus 1-2-3 was one of my favourites thank you Chris for entertaining us and showing as all the old programs
Your enthusiasm is contagious! I found myself more engaged with this content than I thought I would. So glad to see Deluxe Paint on your list! I spent a lot of time with this on my Amiga500+ On the Windows side of things, I can’t believe that Johnny Castaway didn’t make the cut for this list.
Thanks for this very enjoyable trip down memory lane! Excellent video. I’m sure the younger crowd is looking at these programs and thinking “How Primitive”. For me, this was state of the art at the time. I thoroughly enjoyed using Encarta. I used to browse through the contents for hours on end. I was in awe of all of the multimedia objects included. I was saddened when MS discontinued it. I also loved Lotus 1-2-3. I preferred Multi-Mate over word perfect. There was also a DOS menu program that we used in the office on our IBM PS/2 computers with dual 3 1/2 floppy drives. I copied that program and ran it on my home computer. The menu could be easily configured to include whatever software you wanted to run, so instead of typing commands at the DOS prompt you just typed the number corresponding to the software you wanted to run. When you were done with the program running, it would return back to the menu program. You could configure to run the program automatically when you started your PC. I wish I could remember the name of that software. Another favorite of mine was “Print Shop Deluxe”.
In the late 80's I used dBase III Plus and WordStar pretty extensively for work, so these two would definitely be in my Top 5 list. Also used Lotus 123 and Symphony quite a bit. Lastly, I would probably add Visual Basic 1.0 from around 1992.
In my case I spent so much time as a student for my assignments using word perfect lotus 123, dbase3, basic coding, c, pascal. Thanks for this video, it certainly brings back many memories.
I remember getting napster in 1999 and the first time I used Winzip was so confusing lol Encarta was amazing, it was mind blowing to have a full encyclopedia with videos and animations with voice guides and explanations, I remember watching the solar system animations, back when Pluto was still a planet!
@@ExplainingComputers I get your point on Pluto, but I also see why they did the reclassification. Encarta was a blast from the past... my school never really got to grips with what it really was!
I used to support WP users for Ford in the UK for a while, I was always very impressed with it. As a software engineer though, I used to carry around a floppy disk with Wordstar on it, so I could take notes. Wordstar was small and would run from the floppy disk, so I used it as a "portable app" as they would say these days, I could put my floppy in any PC and make notes or write a letter that I could print out and send when I got home. I used this technique right up to when I got my Psion 3mx and that took on the role of portable note taking. A lot of old DOS based programs were very good at what they did, and still work well to this day.
In 1993 I bought an external SCSI CD-ROM drive and plugged it into my Mac LC III. The drive came with 10 CDs! One of those was the "New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia" and it was by far the best CD of the bunch. I think it had about 300 videos, that were maybe 240p. It was fantastic. I remember in awe at watching the Hindenburg disaster footage along with speeches from former presidents and people like Dr. King. In 1993, this was a big deal to have all of these various clips that you could simply click on and watch. In addition to the videos it had many pictures and photographs and of course thousands of articles from the Encyclopedia. The interface was top-notch and very intuitive. It was way ahead of it's time.
I built a consulting and training business on Lotus 123. My best trick was writing macros that were self-modifying. The first version of 123 had no string handling capability. I wrote macros that would copy values out of lookup tables to perform string manipulation. In essence, it was like writing assembly language in that code and data all occupied whatever space you wanted and could be changed from one to another at will. Fun!
Good list. A few additions from my younger days.. - dBase III, early database - Hardware Graphics, early business graphics - Lotus Symphoney, early integrated package - Framework, early integrated package - Quattro, Lotus 123 clone
I think you mean Harvard Graphics? And Lotus Symphony doesn't really belong in that list as it was just IBM releasing a rebranded OpenOffice for a little while and as such it is way more modern that any of the other applications in your list.
Crikey! I've just done my Top 5 in another post and you've just reminded me about Directory Opus on the Amiga - that was an absolutely amazing file manager.
Or Spinwrite in a time in which HD's couldn't do a 1:1 interleave. Or the various disc copy and formatting utilities. It is one of those lists in which you could add and add the more you think about it and really does get down to top 5 per year/phase of the desktop from DOS era, early HD's, then RAM utilities. One thing for sure, software got more complicated with the advent of GUI's and excess CPU cycles that allow for sloppy programming to the stage that if it works, that's fine - not the fact it could work 100x faster with better programming.
Hello Mr Barnatt. We grew up on different sides of the pond but traveled in similar technologies. While you were into Computer Sciences, I was born and raised in Silicon Valley before it became Silicon Valley. My last job was as an AMT. Advanced Manufacturing Technologist. Simply put, I was at the beginning of the manufacturing boom of the 70s. I am now retired but the brain doesn't stop. I found you about 2 months ago and am so glad that I did. I am waiting on my first SBC that is arriving today. I cannot tell you how educational your videos are. I would have appreciated having you as a teacher back in the day. But I think we would have been friends because of our current ages :) Thank you so much for expertise. All of the old time software my children grew up with, along with my wife and I. I will say one thing about Software... I hated Wordstar Maybe on your next step back into the past, if you still have a copy of Wordstar, you can show everyone how miserable that software was. Thank you for all your help and support. Kindest Regards Robert
The first time I saw video on a computer was 1991, at a computer show in Toronto. It was on a 486 and was low res and grainy. Love your channel. Cheers. I taught 123 and Wordperfect back in the early 90's. I miss the simple essence and ease of WP. Maybe I need to install it on and older computer.
First time for me was a demo PC running in a retail store. It was playing a Queen music video-CD if I remember correctly. I was suitably impressed at the time
Spreadsheet program way back in 1965 that was my introduction to computer applications was OmniTab. It ran on a mainframe, was written by a team at National Burrow of Standards, NBS, used punch cards for input and line printer for output. VERY sophisticated! :)
I have and used and sometimes miss all of these sans DPaint, which I never used. Good memories of software that was much simpler and easier to use out of the box. I did at one time write a database from scratch in BASIC on the Apple IIe. Very fun stuff indeed. Another Sunday morning is now complete.
Watching this a few days late, but had to comment on Lotus 1-2-3. I vividly remember visiting my grandfather's work as a child in the early 90's, not long after the company had "upgraded" (some at the company disagreed, being OS/2 fans!) to Windows 3.11 For Workgroups. I was rather good at reading and typing for such a young child, so sometimes he'd let me get on the computer and "help" him in 1-2-3 or he'd let me check Lotus Notes and read/reply to emails (which I thought was the greatest thing on Earth at the time, haha) At my last job, I supported a legacy VM with Server 2008r2 on it, which I found Lotus 1-2-3 on. I had a good laugh and spoke to my boss about it, who said for certain things, he never wanted to move to Excel or etc, so he kept 1-2-3 around on a VM just for those particular cases. It was neat to see the program once more.
Great selection! If I could suggest an addition, it woud be 3D Studio release 4. It was prohibitively expensive at the time, but I had the chance to play around with it a fair bit. It ignited my love for all things 3D. Oh, and also VistaPro 3, a really fun landscape generator/renderer.
Lotus123 opened up a new world to me in my late 20s. It revolutizioned the business, engineering, and scientific worlds. I have attorney friends and former clients who were using WordPerfect less than 20 years ago. What memories!
I saw that you have iomega tools. I remember that I bought a (blue?) iomega drive but I think I hardly used it. Meanwhile I'm a Linux aficionado and believe it or not I already sat in the 60's in front of a terminal and held some punch cards in my little hands (I was very little at that time)
Not so much an application, but GEM on the atari ST was something to behold. Aldus Pagemaker (pre-Adobe). Any program carefully copied from magazines line by line... their use was often negligible but they were priceless to a kid.
For me it would be SuperCalc which I used for my work. I resisted Excel for sometime as I found Supercalc faster and more flexible compared with investing time learning something new and quite different. Printouts were formatted using print codes which did not give the quality of Excel but did all that I needed for the job. Needless to say, Excel eventually won over but I still have fond memories of SuperCalc.
Absolutely superb video and a massive hit of nostalgi!. I remember trying to create a WP document in the mid 90s with lots of graphs and having to split it into multiple linked documents because the PC would run out of memory. It was so painful and crashed repeatedly. Happy days. You also reminded me that they did the graphics for Monkey Island in DPaint and it saves brushes using a .brush extension ...hence guy.brush which lead to the name Guybrush Threepwood!
@@onlinedrifter The moment I watched this video, I remembered why I liked XTree Gold so much - I'd completely forgotten about it: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oHfj_XH0vrk.html
In the late 80’s, I was part of a small team that was charged with selecting standard business applications for our 200 or so DOS PCs. This was pre-Windows. And the winners were: Lotus 123, MS Word, Harvard Graphics, and for data base users: Alpha Four. Great apps that managed to work together somewhat.
dBase III+/Clipper (don't get me wrong - I like SQL). WordPerfect was powerful, but sometimes I preferred the simplicity of WordStar. I did like the simplicity of DOS also. Many people made it much more complicated than it really was. That was also true of many command line applications. There was a learning curve, but once things were set in a batch file it was easy.
I typed in Speedscript from Compute! magazine on my C64. Hours of typing data statements to build it. I used that word processor for quite a while and it did everything I needed.
A few years ago, I stumbled across my dad's old pirated copy of Office 97. I was able to take the executable straight off the disc and (since I use Linux) run it using Wine. It was so lightweight, compared to every modern standard; it started instantaneously and felt more responsive than LibreOffice Writer, running natively. Fortunately, however, I only use plain text, so I have no need for any of the various bloatware word processors. Still a fun experience and made me think about WordPerfect. Anyone who prefers WordPerfect's keyboard-centric approach should learn to use Vim. Not exactly the same, but once you learn it, it's very efficient.
I am 47. When I was like 15-16 I had the opportunity to attend a computer seminar like where they showed us programs like lotus etc. I remember to used them good and learned but I was not focused on the impact computers will have on our future. Then eventually after high school, when I started to work for a distribuidor by 1991 everything was computer based, data entry systems. Old laptops, vpn, as400 etc, and I saw my first power point presentation. I fell in love with the beautiful way to present ideas and business and started to gain real interest on them again, office programs, game emulators, and so on. I just can’t imagine if I dedicated or focused my time learning more on that time maybe I will be programming. After all I graduated college on 2008 on computer information systems. I really enjoy having above average knowledge, All I learned there and in the way is a incredible voyage. Really nostalgic video, bring me memories and really assess what I learned. Than you.
I always enjoyed using Professional Page 4 on my A1200. I even wrote some AREXX macros for it, learning from the ones that came with PP4. It was the first piece of software that made me want a faster computer.
I loved Encarta because it felt like scifi becoming reality. A small silver disc that could relace multiple heavy encyclopedia books. It even had videos ... I spent endless hours with that thing.
I've always been a huge fan of either MS Streets and Trips or MS MapPoint software. It was my first experience with using a GPS on a laptop (external dongle) and also being able to print a report of a batch of trips to turn in as an expense report was absolute marvelous.
