Key Project Manager

It took me a little while to get the idea of this straight. Having been familiar with Primavera scheduling packages, this was a new approach.
These days we'd call it a task manager, and at that it seems to touch a point that is omitted by the very popular task manager category today: tasks have durations. We estimate these, then can give 'actuals'. Tracking both against a type category system would allow one to calibrate one's performance at estimating and get better at it.
It also fails to link tasks in a dependency relationship. I wouldn't want anything like P6 here, but to keep track of the mountain of tasks in a live work system (with serious volume) it is essential. Linking to document would also be important.
Those crits made, I like the interface and concept, although, naturally it is nowhere near as elegant or cross-platform/cloud useful like my current tool Pagico.

AskSam

This seems to have a single window interface, and relies on its search capability to find entries. It has a type of card file metaphor, but far less useful than Zoot, for example.

RFF

RF Flow: a flow charting package that just dipped its toe into the Windows world. I used it quite a lot for work process maps.

Zephyr

Another of Ward Mundy's great database packages. This was menu driven and could build applications from the menu.

I've only got a demo version...must write to Ward for an unlock so I can further experiment.

InfoSelect

This had to be my favourite package in the late 80s early 90s. It ran as a 'TSR', terminate and stay resident application, so it could be 'popped up' over a foreground program for intermittent use. I've mentioned it before, but here are some screen shots. Note the quirky menu item names.

DataPerfect

An innovative RDMS from WordPerfect. It started life as a data management system for legal practices, I understand.
It has some quite nice ideas.

Wampum

One of the great shareware databases produced by Ward Mundy (who I recently exhanged e-mails with...I must ask for unlock keys for Wampum so I can play with it a little more).

Surefire

Before MS Word had classy things like fields, an obscure shareware package had them. It may have been inspired by Q&A, an 80s data management-word processor.

Some screens from Surefire:

ZoomRacks

My first piece of non-linear PIM software. ZoomRacks. It came from Atari, I think, and was designed with a card file metaphor in a text-based system. So nothing looked like a card. It has some hypertext functionality. So here we are, from the mid 1980s.

My Assistant

I was IT manager for a large consulting firm in the late 1980s and after implementing a production IT system, was looking around for a local user organising tool. This was before the days of MS Outlook, or other more sophisticated PIMs that brought notes, diary and do-lists together.

My Assistant was reviewed in a newspaper article; the developer was in North Sydney, near my office, so I dropped in to visit. He demonstrated the software, which he had developed for a politician friend of his.

It looked great, but the board of my company was less impressed, being keen pen and paper users.

Here's a screen from it.