Daring Fireball: Thirty Years of Fetch

Jim Matthews:

Fetch’s longevity has been a continual surprise to me. Most application software has the life expectancy of a field mouse. Of the thousands of other Mac apps on the market on September 1, 1989 I can only think of four (Panorama, Word, Excel, and Photoshop) that are still sold today. Fetch 1.0 was released into a world with leaded gasoline and a Berlin Wall; DVD players and Windows 95 were still in the future. The Fetch icon is a dog with a floppy disc in its mouth; at this point it might as well be a stone tablet.

I can think of at least one other Mac app from 1989 still around today: Illustrator (remember Illustrator 88?). But it is without question a very short list.

Update: A few more:

Nisus Writer (1989)
Mathematica (1988)
QuarkXPress (1987) — this one makes me laugh because I still think of Quark as the young upstart to PageMaker, which debuted in 1985 but went belly-up in 2001
FileMaker (1985) — and apparently started life as a DOS application
EndNote (1988)
Fontographer (1988) — but while it still runs today, it has been end-of-lifed in favor of FontLab
Comic Strip Factory (1986)
4th Dimension (4D) (1987)
Glider, John Calhoun’s classic game, is available for just $2 in the App Store (1988)
Strata 3D (1988)
Omnis (1986)

And if we count apps from Apple included with the system, there’s the Finder and Calculator. If anyone thinks of any more, I’ll update this list.

This Macworld article by Glenn Fleishman pegs the debuts of BBEdit, PCalc, and Graphic Converter in 1992 — all in active development today, but none quite old enough for this list. And speaking of Macworld, the December 1988 edition cited in several instances above was so chockablock with ads that it ran 324 pages.

★ Tuesday, 3 September 2019