Retro PC: PowerMenu & Zedit

Retro-PC:

The retro PC is actually not that retro, it's an old workplace Dell i5 that is now running FreeDos / MS-DOS 6.22 (dual boot). It has a serial cable to a Raspberry Pi Zero-W for connectivity (mostly Kermit), and I've been burning CDs of old magazine floppies and loading stuff from old compilation CDs and archive CDs from my old DOS/Windows machines, including my very first computer, a 486 DX2/66 with 16MB RAM and a 102MB HDD.

PowerMenu

I have a lot of fond memories of MS-DOS (and PC-DOS) from the early to mid 90s, and one of them is a piece of software from Brown Bag called PowerMenu.

Spot the Y2K problem in the top-left.

The interface is pretty clean and internally consistent, but it pre-dates the IBM CUA standard that gave us cut/copy/paste shortcuts and a consistent menu key layout. It uses insert as its general edit mode entry point.

It is very customizable, and had multi-user support, even for a single-user operating system. There were basic features like password protection and access control.

Zedit

Zedit was included with the XtreeGold file manager and was my favourite edior for most of the 90s. Its shortcut keys resembled WordStar. It had customizable colors, multi-window support and a bunch of other useful programming features.