Visual Thought is a diagramming and flow chart tool made by Confluent. My first real programming job was at Confluent, and I liked the product a lot. It's simple, straightforward, and powerful.

If you've ever had to use Visio or Rational Rose in a "brainstorming" kind of way you appreciate why. Visual Thought also had the unique position of being cross platform, able to work on either Unix or Windows. Unfortunately, the way it did this was by being written on a cross-platform API called Galaxy. Visix, the company that sold Galaxy went bust, which basically meant Visual Thought was floating down the river with it.

It was also really expensive. Considering Visio cost $50 and Visual Thought cost $950, it wasn't a real surprise why Confluent had trouble selling it.

As such, Visual Thought went the way of Ecco (which is also freeware at Netmanage's FTP site). Confluent got bought out by eTrade, and they decided to release the product as freeware.

Visual Thought has a strange installation process -- you'll need to download the executable, and then install the licenses using the installation.txt instructions. The licenses are good for 10 years or so on an unlimited number of machines.