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 Win-OS/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
- 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 released in 1985 as the first Macintosh 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.
- SideKick for PM
- 1988: SideKick 1.0
- 1989: SideKick 1.01
- Last OS/2 version: Sidekick 2.0
- Requires OS/2 1.1 or higher.