All those nifty windows utilities that just didn't make it...

[Sirotnikov]

I wanted to make a tribute thread to all the great windows utilities that never made it to the wide public. Don't get me wrong - they were indeed distributed with windows. It's just that... well... no one ever used them!


Just remind yourself of a few bright ideas:

- The Windows 95 Phone Dialer = it allowed you to press buttons instead of numbers and then you could pick up your phone and talk...


- The Windows 95 Card Index = You could use it for all sorts of things! A list of your contacts... A list of favourite (short) recipes. A tasks and to do list...


- The Microsoft Office Binder = You could take several documents and "bind" them into one document which presented them all... kinda like zip, but not really. It was more a "logical" binding...


- The Briefcase - so you could update your documents when you take them with you on a trip.


- Write = all the people who didn't want to or couldn't afford word. See how word can be turned into notepad.

- Hyper Terminal. Now I admit that in the first days I used it alot. But as the internet grew on, the hyper terminal has practically let his fainl breath. Only people using it are "elite haxorz" trying to break into old 80s type bank servers ....

[Az]

Hyper Terminal

used it a lot.

[Buck Birdseed]

I actually used The Briefcase for its intended purpose once.

[sabrewolf]

Re: All those nifty windows utilities that just didn't make it...

Originally posted by Sirotnikov
- The Windows 95 Phone Dialer = it allowed you to press buttons instead of numbers and then you could pick up your phone and talk...

who today uses the phone net to dial in

- The Windows 95 Card Index = You could use it for all sorts of things! A list of your contacts... A list of favourite (short) recipes. A tasks and to do list...

another thing packed into that crappy program with proprietary formatting... what's it's name? ...lookout? ... ah, no, outlook! ;(

- The Microsoft Office Binder = You could take several documents and "bind" them into one document which presented them all... kinda like zip, but not really. It was more a "logical" binding...

i think you can still do that, now all office products also feature activeX/ADO-containers and objects. so you can fit word files into excel and excel files into word...
but mainly useful for stuffing stuff into powerpoint or having visio- or msproject-flowcharts in word/PP

- Write = all the people who didn't want to or couldn't afford word. See how word can be turned into notepad.

still exists. it's called wordpad now (no, i don't mean NOTEpad, my favorite editor )... at least it's in win2k

- Hyper Terminal. Now I admit that in the first days I used it alot. But as the internet grew on, the hyper terminal has practically let his fainl breath. Only people using it are "elite haxorz" trying to break into old 80s type bank servers ....

something like telnet?


but you're right... the newer the version, the less you can do. keyboard navigation in the start menu isn't that easy anymore... it's all set up for mice. and those thick title bars? ever tried looking at windows XP in 640x480? ... it title bar, menu bar, some other bar, then a few pixel of content and then again the status bar. below that the task bar...

[Chemical Ollie]

I used the Binder to assemble meeting minutes with Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentation, but the other people had problems to open the file. I never used it again.

[uh Clem]

PC Tools Deluxe for Windows 3.11

More than just a collection of utilities. It replaced Program Manager. It allowed long file names. It had multiple desktops! In Windows! In 1994!

When Windows 95 came out, I couldn't believe what a step back it was compared to Win 3.11 + PCTD.

Symantec bought the company (Quaterdeck IIRC), to kill off this threat to Norton Utilities. I've hated Symantec ever since.

[Sirotnikov]

uh Clem, I was more pointing at silly and useless tools, rather than good tools.

Notice how I didn't make fun of office or solitair


Anyone remembers "hover craft"? or something of that sort... It was a cvery crappy and odd game that came with win 95 and was supposed to be "fun". It used crappy windows GDI to paint itself, and therefore looked like... I do use the word crap alot in this passage, eh?



How about that "Windows PLUS" thing?

It updated your start screen ("logo.sys" secretly being logo.bmp) to say either "windows PLUS+" or "Windows 97" which sounded waaay cool back then.

It allowed you to change your desktop to even more hideous colors, have even more, more annoying sounds to interrupt your work and.... oh my god those screen savers!!!

They all looked alike and were just s**tty "slideshow" screensavers. The most original one was the "mystery" theme screensaver which was terrifying...

[JCG]

As a side note, Compaq systems usually had a ton of severaly underused utilities too.

[alva]

Office assistant

[Zero]

Hey I used that card program in 3.11!

[History Guy]

I also shed a tear for that friendly little paper-clip who haunted by Word Documents in '98. Alas, no more doth he breath.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by uh Clem
Symantec bought the company (Quaterdeck IIRC), to kill off this threat to Norton Utilities. I've hated Symantec ever since.

That's Central Point. I had always prefered PC Tools over Norton Utilities for DOS. Esp. with version 3, that you could fit on a diskette and carry it around with you.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov
How about that "Windows PLUS" thing?

It updated your start screen ("logo.sys" secretly being logo.bmp) to say either "windows PLUS+" or "Windows 97" which sounded waaay cool back then.

It allowed you to change your desktop to even more hideous colors, have even more, more annoying sounds to interrupt your work and.... oh my god those screen savers!!!

They all looked alike and were just s**tty "slideshow" screensavers. The most original one was the "mystery" theme screensaver which was terrifying...

Plus gave you a number of desktop themes for W9x. They were better than the ones came with Windows.