>WordImperfect 6.0 was a pig.
>
>Yeah, I forgot about that one. WP 5.0 was a nice application, but yes, 6.0 meant "more is less".
>
>On the subject of WP....I heard a story about the initial thesaurus for WP5.0. If you searched for synonyms for "man", you got results like "gentleman, human, mankind, etc." If you searched for synonyms for "woman", you got words like "dowager, prostitute, etc." (Come to think of it, I think I had this discussion with someone years ago on the UT, but I forget who it was). I believe WP got pressure (rightly so) and changed it.
>
>My favorite applications of all time were Turbo C 1.0 (July 1987) and FoxPro 1.0 (Oct 1989). I thought I was in heaven when I used them.
>

Now this is a nicer way to look at it -- programs we loved. I am undoubtedly forgetting some but here are a few.

Turbo Pascal, first version, whatever exactly it was called. The sucker was just so fast and so accessible. I vividly remember those screens of black and yellow text making my little programming heart thrum in a way I still can't adequately explain. I also liked the outlaw style of the early Borland. They were a refreshing antidote to the fledgling PC establishment. In those early days the industry was dominated by IBM, whose motto should have been "Dullness is a virtue", and those young upstarts from Microsoft. (This was so long ago MS really was an upstart. The early versions of Word and the MS C compiler were second tier contenders, part of huge packs rather than separated from the pack. Their ace in the hole was MS-DOS, and then Windows, not their apps). Back to Borland and Turbo Pascal, it was like an upraised finger to release a kickass $49 compiler (with integrated editing and debugging) into a market dominated by $500-700 products with few frills. It was like tossing a grenade over the wall. Borland went badly wrong later, after they became one of the Powers That Be, but in their enfant terrible stage they were a really exciting company with exciting products. Sidekick was another Borland program I used on a daily basis back in the day. Just the concept of a TSR program (that's "terminate and stay resident" for the younguns) was truly radical at the time. The prevailing concept was a carryover from mainframes, which were being supplanted by PCs even though they didn't realize it yet: "My program owns this machine." A program that could be summoned up at a moment's notice with a keypress, over the top of the running program, was pretty radical.

I just rattled on for so long about Turbo Pascal I am going to forego rattling on about other personal faves. (You're welcome). If this branch of the discussion, the branch about programs we have loved, takes off I may check back in later with some more of mine. Off the cuff, no elaboration, two that gave me that same thrummy feeling were early Macintosh products: Jazz and Word.