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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

#41

Post by kristopolous »

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…

It's just a hobby and that's really it.

The irrelevancy is the appeal. It's become something mostly disconnected from everything else.

A world of computing that's not focused around networking or communications where the relationship is between the user and the machine as opposed to the machine being a vessel for a relationship with others.

It is inherently a different kind of computing with a different kind of performance expected between the participants. It's like how people who restore classic cars don't do so because they need a way to get groceries and drive to the office. Anyone with their head on straight would admit modern cars are cheaper to maintain, safer, and have better fuel economy. Doesn't matter, it's not the point.

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

#42

Post by torgoguys »

pengaru wrote: post #27
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.

Eh, the Borland Grahics Interface (BGI) style TUIs were kind of awful. I hated the Borland Turbo C IDE in no small part because of that style TUI. It just wasted so much precious character space on TUI frames and other decorations. More of my fond TUI memories from that era were the bespoke ones in the demo/art/music/bbs scenes. Those in many cases were still character based but seemed to make better use of the scree…

I love all things text mode.

For anyone searching for the Borland style text interface, it was actually called TurboVision, not BGI (which was a generic graphics library). TurboVision (and many GUIs of the time) largely followed the Common User Interface (CUI) spec by IBM for its interactions in text mode.

It is fair to say there was a lot of screen space devoted to borders and such, especially in 80x25 mode, but that helped make everything super clear and usable.

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

#43

Post by ddingus »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #38
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe that has to do with things like documents workflows, other meta information related to the applications.

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

#44

Post by Lammy »

pengaru wrote: post #27
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.

Eh, the Borland Grahics Interface (BGI) style TUIs were kind of awful. I hated the Borland Turbo C IDE in no small part because of that style TUI. It just wasted so much precious character space on TUI frames and other decorations. More of my fond TUI memories from that era were the bespoke ones in the demo/art/music/bbs scenes. Those in many cases were still character based but seemed to make better use of the scree…

Even cooler when viewed in motion https://youtu.be/XRawUKO2Qy8?t=5848

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

#45

Post by pengaru »

torgoguys wrote: post #42
pengaru wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, the Borland Grahics Interface (BGI) style TUIs were kind of awful. I hated the Borland Turbo C IDE in no small part because of that style TUI. It just wasted so much precious character space on TUI frames and other decorations. More of my fond TUI memories from that era were the bespoke ones in the demo/art/music/bbs scenes. Those in many cases were still character based but seemed to make better use of the scree…

I love all things text mode. For anyone searching for the Borland style text interface, it was actually called TurboVision, not BGI (which was a generic graphics library). TurboVision (and many GUIs of the time) largely followed the Common User Interface (CUI) spec by IBM for its interactions in text mode. It is fair to say there was a lot of screen space devoted to borders and such, especially in 80x25 mode, but tha…

Ah my bad re: BGI vs. TurboVision, my memory from those days is quite fuzzy!

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

#46

Post by allenu »

pengaru wrote: post #27
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.

Eh, the Borland Grahics Interface (BGI) style TUIs were kind of awful. I hated the Borland Turbo C IDE in no small part because of that style TUI. It just wasted so much precious character space on TUI frames and other decorations. More of my fond TUI memories from that era were the bespoke ones in the demo/art/music/bbs scenes. Those in many cases were still character based but seemed to make better use of the scree…

I remember back then my editor of choice in DOS was QEdit. I think it used up less space with its menus, although it's funny to think I enjoy using vim today whereas back then in my youth it may have been too much for me.

I do miss the simple UI offered by some BBSes (as well as their message editors, like in Renegade BBS). A lot of that is just nostalgia, of course.

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

#48

Post by Delk »

anyfoo wrote: post #24
ngcc_hk wrote: post #21

Strange to see the macOS and linux option in some details but the author never tested it. Should he asked … and linux is free …

Installing Linux and seeing if it even starts is already a lot of effort, and then you've only "seen if it starts" and are very far from anything considered "tested".

Eh. Sure it's takes a bit of effort but installing a Linux distro in a virtual machine and pulling and compiling some C code isn't exactly a massive project. It would have been a much bigger deal before the widespread use of virtual machines. Or, I guess, if you don't have experience with building things on Linux.

I completely understand that if someone doesn't use a platform themselves, there might be little motivation to test things on it. No hard feelings if someone doesn't care to do that. But it's not that much effort.

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

#49

Post by ubermonkey »

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.

OH GOD NO. Man, I hated all that stuff at the time. If you're stuck in text mode, just be text. Don't try to mimic a GUI; it just looks weird and generally works poorly.

A web site that imposed this sort of interface would be a site I visited ONCE.

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

#50

Post by ubermonkey »

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 feel like most of the folks on the DOS nostalgia train are people who didn't actually live through that era trying to make all those things work. As you note, it was finicky, crash prone, and very very annoying to work with.

We did have fun, but we would've had more fun on a more capable, less slapdash OS. Which is why so many of us abandoned Win/DOS at our first opportunity -- either on (likely university-owned) Unix or BSD hardware, or on early Linux, or for some to the Mac or Amiga or even Atari, all of which were empirically better platforms than DOS/Windows at the time EXCEPT for gaming.

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