This is what we found:
A bit of commentary, left to right, top to bottom:
- Microsoft Windows
- Heathen with good eyes can tell that’s disk 1 for Windows 3.1, which was the first really modern version. It still shocks me that the move from 3.0 to 3.1 didn’t inspire a major-number release, but whatever.
- AOL
- “Why Chief Heathen, what are you doing with this?” Well, kids, everyone needs coasters.
- Lotus Agenda
- Sadly, it’s just the print disk, which is a story in and of itself (back before Windows, every program needed its own printer driver, kids; imagine what a delightful world THAT was!). Agenda was seriously groundbreaking and awesome, so of course few folks could figure out how to use it. It was soon replaced by the bone-stupid Lotus Organizer, whose tacky faux-leather presentation was sadly resurrected for OSX Lion’s Address Book and Calendar.
- Microsoft Word
- 5.0 for DOS. The last good version of Word.
- Visual Basic
- There was NEVER a good version of Visual Basic.
- PFS Professional Write
- Broken on the rocks of the Word-WordPerfect duopoly in the late 80s, PFS was nevertheless the first PC word processor I really used. Then I found Word (supra). I know it may be hard to grasp for you youngsters, but MS Word really did win its market by being better — as opposed to winning by default, which is what Windows networking did, or winning because the opponent was stupid, which is what Excel did.
Naturally, I have no device in my home that will read any of these disks.
You really don’t have anything to read those disks? I find that hard to believe. Even I still have my old PowerBook G3 with a floppy drive.
Seriously. I haven’t bought a computer with a floppy drive in a decade or more, so the drives have all aged out.
Actually, the last one I had with a floppy was an IBM Thinkpad. I’ve never bought a Mac with one. Come to think of it, the floppy for that IBM might be in the garage, but it’s a false lead, since it won’t plug into anything but the IBM it came with. It’s not like it was USB.