Borland SideKick

A suite of TSR utilities that could be classified as a Personal Information Manager, initially released in 1984 for DOS and became a surprise hit for Danish software publisher Borland, who sold over a million copies of the first release. Although software was developed for Sidekick in it's original DOS version, there was for a time something resembling and SDK for it available, and there was some scope for development for the later Windows versions of the software, the extreme simplicity of the OS/2 PM version of it and the lack of an API meant that it was never used for OS/2 development.

Development of the software was later taken over by Starfish Software who released one version in two variants that ran under WinOS/2 and continued developing the software for the MS Windows platform until 1998.

During 1989 IBM gave a free copy of Sidekick with every copy of OS/2 they sold in certain jurisdictions.

Versions

• Last OS/2 version: Sidekick 2.0

Requires OS/2 1.1 or higher.

• Sidekick 1.0 introduced in 1984 - Version 1.56 the last 1.x release sold on its own, 1.58a was offered to OEM's at a reduced price after 2.0 came out.
• Sidekick 1.0 for Mac was also released in 1984 and was the first Mac product from Borland and one of the first third party products available for the Mac in general.
• Sidekick Plus for DOS introduced in 1987 - Bugfix release 1.0a released in 1988. - Recommended retail price when introduced USD 199.95.
• Sidekick for Windows 1.0, Sidekick for Windows 2.0 and Sidekick Deluxe would run under WinOS/2 and are frankly better than the native OS/2 version.
• Sidekick 95, 97, 98 and 99 only run on 32 bit versions of MS Windows.

Author

• Borland
• Starfish Software