FREEHAND, 19

The illustration software has been at death's door for several years, after being acquired by Adobe as part of the Macromedia buyout in 2005.

From its humble beginnings, Altsys (and later Aldus) FreeHand became a standard tool for desktop designers in the 1990s. CNET reports:

Freehand has a long history, at least in personal computing terms. The first version was released in 1988, according to Ian Kelleigh's FreeHand Source Web site. It was a 429KB application that required 750KB of memory to run. The 11th version, MX, was a 10.3MB application that needed 131MB of memory.

The death was announced by John Nack, senior product manager of Adobe's Photoshop software. In lieu of flowers, users are encouraged to buy Adobe Illustrator.