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Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

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Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#31

Post by zem »

ddingus wrote: post #29
arduinomancer wrote: post #3

Anyone else love the look of DOS GUIs? https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTIyODU3OC83MTY0MTEyLnBuZw==/o... They have such a cozy feel, reminds me of simpler times. It would be cool if there were a CSS framework where you could make webpages like that.

Yes. My favorite was anything done in 80x50. Nice, mostly square characters. Mix in a mouse, and the product was easy to use, clean, fast, productive. That sort of aesthetic, in windows even, would be a lot of fun and quite useful, if a bit of a middle finger to modern sensibilities.

norton commander in 80x50 was beautiful

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#32

Post by rpeden »

tujv wrote: post #19

Related, Free Pascal has a text-mode IDE that's supported on most modern platforms. https://www.freepascal.org

It looks pretty much identical to the Turbo Pascal IDE for anyone that's feeling nostalgic and wants to write some yellow on dark blue code.

Even better - Free Pascal comes with Free Vision, which is mostly compatible with Turbo Vision. Turbo Vision was the toolkit Borland provided that would let you write your own text-mode GUI apps using the same widgets used to build the Turbo Pascal IDE.

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#34

Post by Minor49er »

avidphantasm wrote: post #7

Still don’t quite get the DOS nostalgia. Individual games were good, but the whole ecosystem was finicky and crash-prone by the early- to mid-90s, not to mention deeply ugly (ALL CAPS console, lousy inconsistent GUIs, unnaturally short filenames, etc.). My friends and I couldn’t wait to run Unix, NeXTSTEP, hell even classic MacOS. We only ran DOS/Windows because that’s all we had. Though don’t get me wrong, we still…

There were entire communities based around specific DOS games and applications. Notably: ZZT, MegaZeux, a slew of abandonware games, QBASIC, and so on.

A lot of people discovered just how limited DOS was because they were fascinated by computers, but DOS (and likely Windows on top of it) was the only thing they had at the time. Yet they wanted to push the boundaries and ended up finding the ceiling. At least that's been my experience.

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#35

Post by ddingus »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #22
banana_giraffe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my first jobs involved writing a modern (for the time) GUI app to replace some ancient services that involved logging in a mainframe to use. They needed to updated for a host of technical reasons, but there was also hope that more user-friendly versions would decrease the onboarding time for new employees. The first version was a fairly literal replacement of the workflows. The users were pissed. They demanded…

> The users were pissed. They demanded the checkboxes be replaced with "Y" and "N" options to mimic what they were used to. If you removed my keyboard workflow, I'd be pissed too. Muscle memory means you don't have to think about it; with the mouse, you always have to think about what you're doing, and can't think of other things (e.g. why you're doing it) while you're doing the rote bits. Is there a particular reaso…

Yes. People who interact with those things just blow through them at high speed without even thinking!

That frees them to think about other things. Arguably, more important things.

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#36

Post by csdvrx »

ddingus wrote: post #29
arduinomancer wrote: post #3

Anyone else love the look of DOS GUIs? https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTIyODU3OC83MTY0MTEyLnBuZw==/o... They have such a cozy feel, reminds me of simpler times. It would be cool if there were a CSS framework where you could make webpages like that.

Yes. My favorite was anything done in 80x50. Nice, mostly square characters. Mix in a mouse, and the product was easy to use, clean, fast, productive. That sort of aesthetic, in windows even, would be a lot of fun and quite useful, if a bit of a middle finger to modern sensibilities.

> That sort of aesthetic, in windows even, would be a lot of fun and quite useful

Who's stopping you?

Try jexer:

https://gitlab.com/klamonte/jexer

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#37

Post by squarefoot »

mindcrime wrote: post #28
squarefoot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone else love the look of DOS GUIs? I do. Brings back memories of Turbo-C. > It would be cool if there were a CSS framework where you could make webpages like that. A quick search brought this old project: https://github.com/6112/cursesjs Never tried that, however. Ncurses is what is used under Linux and other UNIX like systems to draw terminal based GUIs, and allows some pretty good graphics. https://en.wikiped…

If you like that old TurboVision look, you'll love https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

Thanks, I recall seeing it some time ago but totally forgot about it.

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#38

Post by banana_giraffe »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #22
banana_giraffe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my first jobs involved writing a modern (for the time) GUI app to replace some ancient services that involved logging in a mainframe to use. They needed to updated for a host of technical reasons, but there was also hope that more user-friendly versions would decrease the onboarding time for new employees. The first version was a fairly literal replacement of the workflows. The users were pissed. They demanded…

> The users were pissed. They demanded the checkboxes be replaced with "Y" and "N" options to mimic what they were used to. If you removed my keyboard workflow, I'd be pissed too. Muscle memory means you don't have to think about it; with the mouse, you always have to think about what you're doing, and can't think of other things (e.g. why you're doing it) while you're doing the rote bits. Is there a particular reaso…

To be clear, we did support keyboard workflows, like Y/N

They were pissed we replaced the Y/N text items with a checkbox. Any deviation, including things like lower case text, were pushed back.

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#39

Post by wenc »

arduinomancer wrote: post #3

Anyone else love the look of DOS GUIs? https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTIyODU3OC83MTY0MTEyLnBuZw==/o... They have such a cozy feel, reminds me of simpler times. It would be cool if there were a CSS framework where you could make webpages like that.

I liked Turbo Vision but I thought Microsoft’s text UI (the one used in products like QuickC, QBasic etc — not sure what it’s called) was actually cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing.

Re: Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

#40

Post by simmons »

avidphantasm wrote: post #7

Still don’t quite get the DOS nostalgia. Individual games were good, but the whole ecosystem was finicky and crash-prone by the early- to mid-90s, not to mention deeply ugly (ALL CAPS console, lousy inconsistent GUIs, unnaturally short filenames, etc.). My friends and I couldn’t wait to run Unix, NeXTSTEP, hell even classic MacOS. We only ran DOS/Windows because that’s all we had. Though don’t get me wrong, we still…

I was a brief DOS user for several months (in between C64 and discovering UNIX) around the early 90's, and my opinions of it from the time mostly align with yours. I think the early 90's was an especially rough period for DOS users, because people were trying to push it way beyond what it was originally meant to be.

However, while I certainly don't have nostalgia for DOS in general, there were some positive things about the platform and ecosystem. Some subset of applications had TUI interfaces that were very nice (e.g. Borland C++), and while I'm a die-hard Linux terminal user, I find myself occasionally missing some of the tightness of those interfaces. (I think the UNIX terminal heritage, such as the "alt" key translating to ESC+key, no key-down/key-up events, etc., can limit our modern TUI interfaces.)

I sometimes tinker with some 8086 emulator code for fun, which can lead me to diving into the internals of DOS. Looking at its API (and how the API evolved through the 80's), I can appreciate the simplicity that was necessary to run on machines with as little as 64KB of memory. So I may not have nostalgia for it -- there was certainly plenty of pain -- but it can still be very interesting to explore from an objective historical perspective. There may even be a few things we can learn from it.

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