Est. 1972 · On the net since 1991
Fine freeware,
kept plain.
ACME Laboratories is a one-engineer index of small, useful software. No redesign has changed what it does since it went online in 1991.
54
Years making freeware
35
Years on the net
~50
Tools currently indexed
01 — Why plain
A list has no layout to break. Every category we index outlives whatever styling trend is current the year we add it.
We keep one accent, one typeface, one hierarchy: bold marks the top of a category, indentation marks the rest.
The original acme.com runs on a single nested list — no cards, no grid, no icon system — because nesting depth alone carries the taxonomy. This page keeps that discipline and drops only the ornament that never did any work: the table frame, the khaki border, the default browser blue. What's left is the same idea, set at poster scale.
What's catalogued
Selected categories, of roughly fifty-
Unicode characters
Transformations, decoders, and lookup tools for working with Unicode text.
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Unicode transformations
Converters between encodings, scripts, and normalization forms.
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Unicode decoder
Reads raw byte sequences back into readable characters.
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Tutorials and resources
Reference material kept alongside the tools it documents.