It's a small world after all.

Once upon a time in a refrigerated building far, far away there was an ENIAC. It was friggin' huge. By the time computers became a daily part of my life it was a Zorba “luggable” with a 5.25 floppy disk drive. On a single disk I had my trusted WordStar “word processor”, a series of DOS apps (including a neat speech synthesizer to read text files), a few text adventure games (“What do you want to do now, Hamarabi?”), and a database application. All in less than 320k!

Then came Windows. Word processors hungrily gobbled up mass quantities of space and DOS and CP/m became dinosaurs. By necessity computers needed more power and resources to comply with the new WYSIWYG (pronounced: wiz-ee-wig) empire.

So why am I telling you all this? I am using the portable version of Open Office Writer that is packed with a bunch of other cool tiny software off of the thumb drive that lives on my key chain. I admit I am a geek. But I do not haul a laptop everywhere I go and I never know when I will need that essential piece of software, a resume, or just might want to check my mail with one button click. Mind you, these clever little apps are not limited for use on thumb drives. I have several friends who have cheap “old school” under resourced machines with jut a few gigs of drive space. Portable applications are a great solution for that old Dell you never upgraded.

Let's explore a few of the applications in this cool thumb drive microverse. The flagship Mozilla products: Thunderbird and Firefox come in portable versions. As a bonus, most of their better plug-ins work as well.

Thunderbird is an open source replacement for Outlook that does a better job of managing your personal mail accounts and RSS feeds. The portable version supports the Lightening plug-in which gives multiple calendar support and to-do list functionality. I have all of my e-mail accounts set up on my thumb drive so I can retrieve all my e-mail from any machine connected to the Internet without leaving even the tiniest footprint on the PC I used.

Firefox is my browser of choice and it is nice to have it on my key chain configured with all of my favorite bookmarks the way I would use it at home.

Open Office is hands down the best suite of free office productivity software on the planet. This exceptional office package is mature and capable. It reads and writes all native Microsoft Word, Power Point, Excel (etcetera, etcetera) formats and will even export your hand crafted documents into PDF format if you like. So now you can create professional documents from your key chain without crudding up your registry. Isn't that nice?

Other apps worth mentioning are: Pidgin – a universal Internet Messenger application that lets you use all of your IMs from one client. Texas Hold'em, Minesweeper, Joolbeam, Sudoku, GnuCash- finance manager, KeePass- password management software, and lots more.

As Steve Martin was once famous for saying: “let's get small.” Here is the link: http://www.portableapps.com .