44 Free Programs

When I saw the title, I expected either a game collection or some software hacking pack. Reality was stranger. Year 1989, MS-DOS, and forty-four programs stuffed in. Not games — programs. It was like buying legal software legally, which at the turn of the eighties and nineties wasn't at all taken for granted.

The contents were a mix of everything possible. Calculators, text editors, simple utility programs, a small educational game, notepads. Nothing special, but everything free — hence the name. Packaged on diskettes, sometimes bundled as shareware or freeware, whenever someone created it and decided to make it available. Hard to find any line or concept in it. More like someone grabbed everything they had in their drawer and threw it out into the world.

Actually, you can't really play it. You can more or less look at it — you run a program, learn to use it in five minutes, and then you know what it's worth. You don't even have to. The calculator calculates correctly, the editor edits, and that's the whole thing. It's not educational except in the sense that you see what applications looked like when they were simple and written in ASM.

For those of us who had limited access to software and even a simple office suite cost money, such a collection was more valuable than it is today. It's not software that would give you something unforgettable, but it's a window into a time when people were happy just to have something. Those forty-four programs — that was property back then.

Today, playing it in DOSBox isn't worth your time. It's not that it's bad — it's simply pure historical testimony. If you're curious what programmers were up to thirty years ago and what homemade software looked like when it was still homemade, that's the recipe. For someone who wants to play or experience something, it's dead weight.