Distr. Review of useful programs, late for 16 years

Information technology is an industry Ivanov, not remembering kinship. About once every five years, the set of hardware and programs changes dramatically, and former favorites go to the dustbin of history. Now, in the era of cloud systems, software, services and data just fall into nowhere. If you do not believe, try launching an old smartphone with an eight-year Android 2.3 and installing at least something useful from the app store. Developers with a broad gesture shut off millions of devices that cannot really function without a network of devices, users lose passwords from cloud beads, businessmen are preparing to make a new bid, either for dip-ringing or blockchain, and they don’t remember what they said only yesterday.

This was not always the case. In the early 2000s, when the Internet was modem and the hard drives were small, I had a habit of dumping documents and software on a disc — one of those that are not needed right now, but may come in handy later, and download again and look for them expensive and costly. Not all of these archives survived to the new time, but one remained.

Such artifacts begin to have at least some value many years later. Not only interesting software with outdated ideas about design and user-friendliness is interesting. The software allows you to fully recreate a bygone era, but it can be found on the net. An interesting principle is the selection of programs, allowing you to remember what happened in your life 16 years ago. Today's topic is only indirectly devoted to the old gland, it pursues nostalgic goals and struggles with it, like its ...

UPD: In the comments holivar FAR vs. Total Commander vs. Conductor. It seems to be eternal values!

The CD disc, which I simply called Distr, was recorded in 2002. Volume - 550 megabytes, which is uncharacteristic. In those days, I tried to finish the disk up to a full volume of 700 megabytes, and I could also squeeze a couple of megabytes from above if it fit.

Historical context

My home computer is a Pentium III, I don’t remember the amount of memory and hard disk. I only remember that six months after the purchase I found that I didn’t have PIII, and even Celeron. Already half a year has been released as Windows XP, but it works rather slowly on a false PIII, some optimization attempts are constantly taking place, and Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Linux in general are almost always used in parallel. Video card - Nvidia Riva TNT2, monitor - 17 inch Sony Trinitron. Shortly before burning a pig, I purchased a Compaq LTE Elite laptop with a 486th processor for 100 conventional units. Because of this, there is a slight bias in the archive in the direction of drivers and utilities for transferring files. A little later, for several reasons, I will remain without a computer, and for a few weeks this (even then) ancient laptop will become my only working tool.


If you do not go into details, then my scenario of owning a computer is no different from today. I go to the Internet, I earn a set of letters: I am a hard worker of the Word and a collector of screenshots. Movies are not yet downloading from the network, too long, but they are bought very cheaply in a stall at the metro station, not yet a DVD, but Video-CD (undesirable) or Mpeg4 (preferably). Music is extracted from rudimentary peer-to-peer networks, Napster is already dead, but KaZaa and eDonkey are alive.

The Internet is delivered via modem at speeds from 14 to 36 kilobits per second, as lucky: My telephone exchange is old. In the same year, the excavator cuts the telephone cable and the whole area remains without a telephone for several weeks. I am interrupting early GPRS, connecting the Motorola Timeport 260 to the COM port. The MTS operator has a progressive (27 kilobits per second in good weather) mobile Internet has been operating since 2000 (I found a press release ). It works so-so, but completely free. There are few games, mostly old dosovsky ones, they also get into the archive set.

For reconstruction, I use the Thinkpad T22 of 2001, which corresponds to the era, but at that time it was completely inaccessible: I was young, my salaries were small. All the software works without problems that under Windows 98, that under XP, not counting a couple of specialized utilities downloaded in an unsuccessful attempt to optimize the latter. The post will be further divided into headers by the name of the folders on the disk, with screenshots of the programs and associated balalaikas.

DOCUMENTS

There are no programs here, rather personal artifacts, still not worthy of a post on Giktatimes (I'll check it in another twenty years). There is something for setting the right environment. The image of an audio CD recorded from MP3 (only the index, without the files themselves, but this is fixable). We put:


There is also a program schedule, downloaded from the Internet, for January 10, 2002. It seems that in this respect nothing has changed:


Of most interest is the archive of negotiations lying there in ICQ for about a year, but honestly, I never watched it for more than a couple of minutes: the hand on the face interfered with the review. And it is unclear whether you were then so bad, or even worse now, or years take their toll ... In short, you shouldn’t go into this topic.

There is also a clip about the clip from Microsoft Office:



CONNECT

It consists of utilities assembled in an attempt to establish a connection between a Compaq laptop without a network card and a large computer, after I tried to install Windows 95 using the only diskette found in the bins. This is LapLink (it still exists, the problem of data migration between devices has not been resolved) and Symantec PC Anywhere (development stopped, in 2012 there was a massive source leak with a serious risk to users). The latter provides several features familiar to the modern user: copying files over the network, global and local, via a direct cable, remote desktop, sharing network access.


With it, I tried to connect to another laptop, older, which does not have a cdrom, and I do not have a single floppy disk, no cables and network PC-cards (there are all these, but 32-bit, and 16 are needed). To do this, you can use the non-obvious, but universal infrared port in older laptops. Alas, it does not work very quickly, but with PCAnywhere on top it is also not very reliable. You still have to buy a cable, in this case, parallel is best suited. To find more.


DISK

In the middle of a handful of ASPI drivers (what is it? Why?) There is a driver for the IOmega ZIP drive for Windows 2000. Why for 2000? Did I have such a drive? I do not remember anything. Enivey, here is an interesting program for copying audio CDs Easy CD-DA 4.6.9. There is today , supports Windows 10.



But for a long time now, if I use a separate program, then this is a free Exact Audio Copy . There's also a utility Nero CD Speed. It seems she could use, including, to limit the maximum speed of the drive, so as not to hum . To limit the speed used by another program - Nero Drive Speed. CD Speed ​​is a benchmark of drive performance and, at the same time, an audio disc tester (perhaps not only “audio”) for correct reading. If my memory serves me, Drive Speed ​​screenshots were once used by digital audiophiles to assess the quality of discs from different manufacturers.


There is also a big Nero Burning Rom, an epic multimedia harvester, which, in version 5.5.7.8, also kept to the bounds of decency. 11 years ago, they still joked about him at the bashorg. The program still exists, and still can do a lot, as well as burn discs.


I started using Partition Magic after starting to experiment with Linux. The installers at that time were not very independent, so the program was needed, move sections to and fro in the name of free software.


Old Windows Commander versus new Total Commander or find ten differences. The only program I know of modern, working in Windows 98, up to the latest version. Ten years ago, I did pay for it, so in the screenshot above, pirate rega is smeared, and my own below.

GAMES
The standard set of Command and Conquer and King is diluted with preference. Rate the subtle grocery placement:


And, of course, an outdated game in three versions. I played a little game then. It was once, all the time reinstalling Windows.


Graphic

Photoshop and FineRider - this is understandable. It is much more interesting to look at the ancient interface of the ACDSee program:


Ahhh! Background! ACDSee now competes with Adobe Lightroom and is worth quite a lot of money. It was already added to the disk for a tick, it “suddenly comes in handy”: it performed basic functions for viewing pictures, and still performs IrfanView. Of the announced ACDSee bonuses: support for as many as five digital cameras, including the Kodak dc265 .

INTERNET

We select to the most interesting. ICQ 2000b installer! Alas, no longer able to connect to anything.



There is also a "cracker": removes banners and does other useful things. Surprisingly, the anti-virus scanner found in the dump only one weighted AdWare program, and not a single Trojan.


Reget Deluxe. An extremely useful utility in the modem era, and my first licensed program. The design of version 2.1 was made by the studio of Artemy Lebedev. Now it does not exist, on reget.com there is a redirect to RBC. In 2016, the site was still available almost in its original form.

The Bat ( alive and well ) and the easy Miranda messenger ( lives , but the version numbering stopped at 0.10 with regular updates transformed into a regularly updated project Miranda-ng ) is not particularly interesting, but Opera 6 is worth seeing.


Welcome to the world of paid browsers! Let us turn to the frustration. The Real One media player in those days was a necessary evil, much like Apple’s Quick Time Player. The latter was often needed for media content in games, Real One was required for streaming radio and later video. The installer immediately ordered me to know my place:


Argh. Okay, let's move the system clock back to 2001. But no!


Registration in "your personal account" for "access to new exciting content" is required, without it, the program can only be run three times.


Just a triumph of interface design. Real Networks rushed like a rage to both users and content producers, trying to embrace both of them with barbed wire in proprietary format on the go. In the mid-2000s, inevitably suffered in this case failure. I wanted to finish the fact that the player was buried under the bodies of effective managers, but no. Both the company and the player are alive . Incredible!

SOUND

Here is the CoolEdit music editor, which later evolved into Adobe Audition, a bundle of music file converters and WinAMP. Not only the second, as in the screenshot above, but also the third: an almost stillborn and quickly curtailed attempt to hang three tons of ribbons on a cute and comfortable music player.


In 2003, a good Winamp 5 was released, but for the old hardware, the second version is enough for me. True, there are problems with tags in Unicode. Player for many years trying to revive, but it seems in vain. The latest update from the developer is dated October 2016. He writes that almost here already. "Release is inevitable."

TOOLS

Here the logic of building the program archive is finally lost. In this folder, the most interesting is the metro map without new stations:


And a map of Moscow without a dozen multi-lane highways:


VIDEO

There are a lot of interesting things in the folder with programs for playing video (I didn’t think about processing at the time), including several versions of the codec and DivX player (now it lives in the form of a mobile application not related to the original) and several different individual players. On the laptop, I rewrote a couple of movies in a digestible for old computers like “700 MB DVD rip in Mpeg4). I tried to lose them, but something went wrong.


The built-in Windows media player went to the Internet for codecs, and I still remember that this does not end with anything good. Zoom Player ( live ) and the forgotten Sasami2k player did not help (dead, on the site they advertise apartments in the American countryside). And BS Player ( alive ) did not help:


In general, it is clear why I have more than 15 names of software and drivers in this folder. Why later became popular "packs codecs" (and some seem to use them until now). Let us rejoice that the IT industry has decided this pressing problem, in contrast to the reliable method of transferring all data from an old computer to a new one.


The final find on this disc. A utility for transferring data from a computer to a Timex Ironman Triathlon watch. Yes, I have owned a smart watch since 1998, 17 years before Apple Watch. No, they do not know how to communicate with a smartphone. Even with a computer, communication is one-way, and only for the transfer of a telephone book of 30 numbers, setting alarms and time zones. The nuance is that the photocell built into the watch was used to copy the data, and the transfer was based on the features of CRT monitors. It will not work with LCD screens. So there is a program, the clock is also alive, and for work you need to buy either an old TV or a special adapter.

So it goes. Thanks to everyone who has crammed the post to the end. I'm going to try to still remember what such destinies in that playlist my group was Spice Girls ...