• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Worst Software you remember?

nickdalzell

Extreme Android User
Jun 17, 2011
6,600
2,098
Owensboro, KY
old memories of past computing mistakes we all can look back upon and laugh. here's the Not Top Three from my experience:

Bonzi_buddy.jpg


BonziBuddy, that little purple gorilla that harbored a nasty little Trojan horse and changed your search provider, told bad jokes, and reminded everyone of another failing, Microsoft Office 97's Clippy the Office Assistant, both which used Microsoft Agent (Actor in older builds). remnants of Microsoft Bob resurfacing as well as failing again

bob_programs.jpg


Microsoft Bob, a nice try with making a simple yet dumbed down user interface for days when folks were shy about using a computer (my how times have changed!). if you look closely, Fido, the little dog Assistant in this screencap looks an awful lot like the little search companion in Windows XP. also a very old preview of another future annoyance found in Office 97

aol.jpg


America Online, or should I say OFF line, or AOHell, as this became our de-facto service when Prodigy went belly up. although it was my first foray into chat and IM online, then a cool feature, the service got so bogged down that for at least a year, every user got busy signals or disconnected after a few minutes. cancelling was a royal PITA, and I am not sure how much environmental damage was caused by their often discarded discs sent in almost any mailing.
 
Heh.. I remember Bonzi Buddy..LOL.

th

Another one is Gator....I remember seeing this on quite a few PCs. Was usually included with P2P software, like Kazaa.
Claria Corporation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sony's Sonic Stage, probably the worse, clunkiest, most unreliable music management software ever created. And if you bought a Walkman ATRAC PMP, you had to use SS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Stage

Couple more nominanations....
MS-DOS 4.0 and Windows ME...for time wasted trying to get things to work properly.
 
Upvote 0
I don't know, DOS was pretty cool: Wolf3D, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, DOOM..... :tomato:

DOS itself is very cool. Love all those games myself, like Hexen, Monkey Island, Duke Nukem. However it was MS-DOS 4.0, a bloated, buggy, unreliable thing, compared to the very reliable 3.3. 4.1 was OK though. From what I remember in my early days of PCs, MS-DOS 6.0 was rather flaky as well. It's something that made me rather suspicious of x.O(whatever dot ZERO) releases of anything now, I tend to wait for the x.1 release, so to speak.

I could never understand why Windows ME was so bad in my experience and from what I read, unstable, BSODs, etc. It followed Windows 98 and shouldn't have really been much different, apart from improvements and enhancements. BTW Windows ME(Millennium Edition), which is Win 9.x, not to be confused with Windows 2000, which is NT based.
 
Upvote 0
What ever happened to all those AO-hell CDs that someone was collecting and planning on shipping back to AOL?

Didn't like MSN, either. I did use Netscape until Opera came out. I bought that. I liked Eudora, too.

Bob was one of the stupidest ideas. You can add Clippie to that. I also resented the fact that a lot of programs depended on the computer having IE to install. I wound up buying programs that didn't need IE. Adobe didn't. Corel didn't. Macromedia didn't.

I hate any noises the computer makes. I turn off all sound files.

I remember Word in DOS. I also remember WordPerfect in DOS. WordPerfect 6 for DOS had a GUI that was easy to deal with. You could do page layout in it.

Publisher was another joke. Office was trying to set up a web site and the writer was having an awful job with Publisher. It didn't conform to any professional product. I finally asked for Adobe Illustrator and did page layout in that much to the webmaster's delight.

I liked 98SE. You could customize it. Hate the windows splash screen? Mine had a picture of my cat's back end with a rather nasty saying. All MS screens were replaced. Found a program called 98 Lite - it was a shell that canned IE entirely.

I think ME was deemed to be lousy as it was a bridge between 98 and 2000. The same with Vista. Some stuff just didn't work with Vista no matter who patched it.
The same people with the same software weren't as down on 7.

I suppose that if you used the computer the way MS wanted you to, you didn't have a problem. I don't think it dawned on MS that anyone would see things differently.

I had one of the first computer programmable sewing machines in town. The usual question from a tech was "you want to do WHAT with WHAT?" It was a kludgey thing but it did work. Right after that you could program other tools from a computer for home use. Stuff worked in 98 - ME had a problem with these extras. 2K, stuff worked again. Vista had a problem. Vista more so than ME, since more people were using the design type software and complaining very loudly about it not working.





I was told by the tech I had a rather rude computer.
 
Upvote 0
I had a love for dos 6.2 and enjoyed win 9.x until me came out. I didn't much care for Linux in the old days as it was to much work to achieve the same things you could do with windows. Looking back the problem wasn't so much Linux as it was my willingness to learn a new OS. Windows 2000 was great and XP when it first arrived was good but then it stayed forever and got boring. I decided that a learning curve with Linux won't be so bad so I dove into duel booting then started using cross platform programs such as firefox, and vlc. Vista finally arrived and what a POS that was. Of course I was using more cross platform programs and less of windows. Then windows 7 came to the rescue for MS but really it was all to late for me. I enjoyed that it was more stable than its foundation of Windows Vista but it wasn't enough. I finally had enough of MS and their BS Software. I got tired of paying for this and for that just to use my computer. I would need anti-virus, anti-spyware, malware, and lot's of maintenance to keep the system running smoothly. I finally took the plunge and went Windowless and man has it been the best decision I have made. With all the bugs and all the anti-this and that and then the other money grubbing software's that you forked your hard earned cash into just makes the whole Windows experience bad for me. While I learned a lot about computing from Windows my real lesson came when I started learning Linux. Windows is great for the occasional user but for the more Power Hungry users then Linux is the way to go.

So Worse software ever hands down Windows.
 
Upvote 0
Be careful knocking Netscape since it used the Mozilla engine like our beloved Firefox is built upon!

Windows ME was sold as an upgrade when in reality it was just a reskinned Windows 98 with stuff removed to make it boot faster which caused more problems than it was worth. It also included buggy beta versions of what Windows XP later got right (system restore, automatic updates, etc)

Apple's older system software with the lacking memory protection ahh! Everytime it crashed you were forced to reboot no matter what. No wonder they give it away free now

Another nomination is SoftRAM95
 
Upvote 0
America Online, or should I say OFF line, or AOHell, as this became our de-facto service when Prodigy went belly up. although it was my first foray into chat and IM online, then a cool feature, the service got so bogged down that for at least a year, every user got busy signals or disconnected after a few minutes. cancelling was a royal PITA, and I am not sure how much environmental damage was caused by their often discarded discs sent in almost any mailing.

LOL . . . to clarify, there was a program called AOLHell. AOL hates this program because you could use it to raise hell on AOL. You could, for example, IM Bomb others, kick people off AOL, bust into chat rooms, text scroll naughty things and spoof other users.

just sayin'
 
  • Like
Reactions: 9to5cynic
Upvote 0
LOL . . . to clarify, there was a program called AOLHell. AOL hates this program because you could use it to raise hell on AOL. You could, for example, IM Bomb others, kick people off AOL, bust into chat rooms, text scroll naughty things and spoof other users.

just sayin'

So that was you! :p
I actually know that program quite well, err, from reading about it. Yeah that's my story and I'm sticking with it. :D
 
Upvote 0
Novell Netware, back in the day this was pretty much the only way of networking. Their own buggy, crippled, proprietary version of DOS as a bootloader. It could easily take an hour to network two PC's, imagine 200. About the only market leader that I thank Micro$oft for killing. :rolleyes:

In 1998 my last year of high school their library digitized their card catalog with ancient monochrome 8088 XT machines running a dumb terminal client from the 'Intranet' (localized cloud off a server so it network booted, no hard drive) and they told us NEVER UNPLUG THE TOKEN RING as it would bring the entire network down and take hours to bring it back up again. Needless to say we had fun unplugging that cable from the card catalog computer often; for hours all youd see would be endless scrolling Novell Netware gibberish
 
Upvote 0
I got disgusted when MS said you only "rented XP" and they had the right to control.

That's when it went offline. What MS can't find, they can't mess with. I had a tech do any service packs. I skipped updates after I saw that most of them patched IE, Office, etc. I refused to use any of MS other stuff. I got totally annoyed at IE when it was version 4 and haven't run it since.

Now Ubuntu wants to integrate Amazon into everything. I simply don't want anything integrated. At least you can get rid of it.

The worst piece of Software in my book is Quicktime. That damn program used to grab every photo, video, and sound file as default. If I'm using Photoshop, why do I want Quicktime as the default? We had professional sound editing software at work and I had to go back and reassociate all the sound files back to Soundforge Pro.

BTW - Novell had Wordperfect at one time then sold it to Corel. Around 8 Corel put out a Linux edition.
 
Upvote 0

BEST TECH IN 2023

We've been tracking upcoming products and ranking the best tech since 2007. Thanks for trusting our opinion: we get rewarded through affiliate links that earn us a commission and we invite you to learn more about us.

Smartphones