For simple addition or knowing the square root of a number, the Calculator within Windows has always sufficed. Once you want to do something more complex requiring a surface plot or the use of vectors, you need something a bit more specialised. Some may attempt using Excel, or pull out their graphing calculator. Alternatively there’s Mathcad.
Month: September 2019
eBay Purchase #24 – Maxis SimCity 2000 Special Edition
eBay Purchase Price: $31 AUD
Country of Origin: Australia
Condition: Excellent
For the most part my software collection comprises of mostly operating systems and productivity applications. Games are a bit of an afterthought for me but I guess to some people more desirable. Let’s face it, most with an interest in retro computing would rather an original copy of DOOM, than Microsoft SNA Server.
eBay Purchase #23 – Micrografx Designer 4.0
eBay Purchase Price: $19 AUD
Country of Origin: Australia
Condition: Excellent
When it comes to illustration and vector graphics, Adobe Illustrator and perhaps to a lesser extent CorelDRAW spring to mind as the main contenders in this segment. Much like other software from the 1980s and 90s, there were other commercial offerings out there though over time were succumbed to corporate acquisitions. Micrografx was one such vendor.
eBay Purchase #22 – XTree Pro Gold 1.3
eBay Purchase Price: $3.30 AUD
Country of Origin: United States
Condition: Good
When it came to managing your files, many were in one of two camps – XTree or Norton Commander. I was in the XTree camp; probably from someone purchasing a used computer and creating backups of whatever happened to be on it. Early DOS users only had the command prompt to navigate through files, which had been fine when PCs were still sold with only floppy disk drives. The introduction of hard disk drives despite being meagre by today’s standards brought about a desire to view and manage the contents of such drives in a better way.
Macintosh Files in a Windows World: MacOpener 2.0
Prior to the turn of the century, it was generally considered an outright nuisance sharing files between Macintosh systems and well everything else. Apple provided Apple File Exchange and later PC Exchange in the early 1990s, system utilities that allowed PC-formatted floppy disks to be used initially with System 7.0. Whilst having the annoying habit of creating hidden files, it was good enough for moving around Office documents and JPEG images between platforms.
Users of DOS, Windows, and OS/2 were left neglected in the ability to read Macintosh-formatted disks, and consequently if you were frequently moving across files between platforms it was best to leave them formatted for PC. If you were determined to read Macintosh disks directly on your PC, you were left with no choice but to purchase a third-party utility. Whilst not the only option, this is where MacOpener comes into play.
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