Free-Shareware-Commercial Software Links

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Free Agent

The best off-line news reader for your ISP (or even old-line service, like AOL). Connect up to UseNet, browse article headers in a newsgroup, download the articles you want – easy. Automatic encoding and decoding of large binary files (cause the internet only handles pure text transmissions; all programs, photos, &c have to be encoded into simple text format). Called "Free" Agent cause it's freeware – if put to non-commercial use. But they do pitch their retail version, with the extra features.

Eudora Light

The best e-mail program for your ISP – once you get over their jargon of 'nicknames', and the like. Auto encodes and decodes all binary attachments. Essentially a turn-key, push one button operation. Easy to use. Like Free Agent, also free for personal use – though they do pitch Eudora Pro to you.

WS-FTP

Probably the most popular FTP app, used to get pages up to the server, among other things. But it became popular mostly because it was free.

Cute FTP

Thought this was pretty neat a while back in Win 3.1, when all I had for a browser was Mosaic. It's a shareware and limited-period evaluation FTP applet. Also useful for getting those pages onto the server.

Irfan View

Pretty much a web standard, now. Everyone knows about this program. Neat little freeware picture viewer, that handles not just .jpg and .gif, but up to class-4 .tiff, as well; and can do simple manipulations, and save out as various graphics file types - useful little file converter/viewer, for just a host of files. Also is former Adobe Filter Factory compatible.

Powerful program. And it's still freeware. This is a program everybody downloads.

Gif Animator

I pulled this from the list when Microsoft pulled it from their server and bundled it with Image Composer. But it seems Windows Magazine still has the original download available. It's a neat little freeware program, for Win95, that can be used to assemble (create) and/or examine any animated .GIF 89a. It's the one I still use.

WinZip

Shareware program that has become the standard Windows front end to .zip type coding and decoding. Everybody uses it. Frankly, a must have.

PK-Zip

The other Windows shareware .zip program, from the company that popularized this back in the DOS days. Does a lot that WinZip does, and may even have decoding for compression schemes not supported by WinZip (and this might also be useful if WinZip or PK-Zip come up short in certain situations).

Stuffit Expander

Freeware adjunct, perhaps, to WinZip. Handy to have, especially for Mac-encoded .SIT files. Otherwise not quite the match of WinZip.

UltraEdit

Shareware Notepad-like text processor, that can switch over the hex/binary view, easily; edit binary file headers, and so on. And like Wordpad/Write, but unlike Notepad, no limit on file size, find/replace in files, regular expressions, much more. A very powerful text/hex processor. Used to craft the pages on this site. Except for memos and a Framemaker substitute, you'll never use Word again.

Programmer's File Editor

Freeware simple text editor, no file size limits, with some interesting features as it was designed to be something of an old style program editor. Includes a handy line number column on the left.

HEX Workshop

HEX editor, with full text editing, but geared more toward saving and modifying HD boot sector records. Haven't tried, myself, but looks very useful.

Somar Clock

Little shareware dial-up applet that gets the time from the National Standards Institute - automatically resets the PC's clock to the right time.

CSE 3310

Now just called HTML Validator, a shareware HTML validator/checker/linter, which really does a job checking out your HTML pages for correctness, because it's extensible. This inability to modify the other and older true validators made them very annoying as they could never recognize unique HTML tags or attributes specific to NN and IE.

Web Marks

A little freeware applet that does the job of the bookmark menu in NN or IE. Centralizes bookmarks in one place, so you can use the same for either NN or IE. Plus it uses a directory structure, making it a little more convenient than NN or IE, and it allows for some notes and annotations to accompany each bookmark.

Inctrl3

From PC Magazine/Ziff-Davis, a little freeware thing used to track various changes to directories and, importantly, to the registry, when installing a new program in Win95. Makes it so you might not have to rely on unreliable uninstall programs, but just use the info this program generates and edit out those nasty registry entries by hand.

Now replaced by Inctrl5.

Link Sleuth

Freeware link checker, from Xenu. Generates reports when done, showing not just broken links, but redirected pages as well. Easy to store result and retry just the previously broken links whenever you wish. The one I use for this site.

Terragen

Free landscape renderer. Various assorted helper apps are useful. And much else is explained on my page dedicated to 'terragening'. You'll be amazed at how easy it is to produce interesting looking scenes from your very first try.