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Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

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Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember one place I worked where we ripped out all of the dumb terminals on a UNIX system and replaced them with Windows 3.1 PC's with terminal emulation. Productivity was noticeably down after the change.

> Productivity was noticeably down after the change. Can't play much Solitaire or Minesweeper on a UNIX dumb terminal... The most fun you can have is flying around in a 3D-rendered filesystem.

"It's a UNIX system! I know this!"

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#54

Btw those text based interfaces are better than most gui/web interfaces of today.

Definitely not as good as the web, if only for zero accessibility. With the web you have a DOM of semantic elements that are all carefully marked up by hand to describe the intent and meaning of everything. With turbo vision and TUIs you have a buffer of bytes with text, graphics, background, etc. all using the same character set. Good luck if you're a screen reader trying to make sense of it.

But you can have TUI style on the web, this tui.css project is absolutely amazing IMHO: https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 95 was the peak of good UX, like the ancient Greek was the peak of statue crafting. Some things were better in the past.

Windows 95 was unreliable, NT Workstation 4.0 was better.

Pre-internet windows 95 was fine, as long as your hardware was good. A lot of folks had off-brand CPUs with bad cooling, off-brand RAM with problems, etc. which lead to a lot of instability. But on a plain old Intel pentium with good RAM Windows 95 would run forever.

It was a hermetically sealed little environment--there were no updates or changes unless you popped a floppy disk in and made them. If you didn't do anything different it would boot up the next day just like it did the days prior. It wasn't until we started getting those machines on the internet regularly and started running a lot more background tasks, services, new software, etc. that they really started to degrade.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#57
post #45

I've already asked the question, but is there a way to embed this in a regular app ? I mean, if I want to have a "retro" like GUI but I don't want to bother my users with opening a terminal/console, can I embed this ? The thing I'm thinking about would be to extract the alacritty render code and make it a library... But that's sure not easy to do...

IMHO I would pop a web view and load an HTML page with tui.css. It's seriously impressive looking and much easier to integrate in a modern gui system, electron app, etc.: https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#58
post #10

Turbo Vision is odd. It's a backport of a graphical UI (Windows 3.0) to text mode. It was exceptionally well done in both end user and developer ease of use and caught on. But I doubt it's the optimum for a text based UI, at least for most applications. Keep evolving!

You're not wrong, I remember a lot of turbo vision apps loved to use the MDI, multiple document interface, paradigm where each application was like a mini OS with unique windows you could resize and place as you please. This was fine when you were in DOS and could only run one application at a time, entirely fullscreen. But nowadays MDI on a multitasking OS with multiple things running at once is a weird anachronism, like you're running an OS inside an OS. It's confusing and not good.

You can use turbo vision for good interfaces though. Just have to be careful not to fall into the tropes of 30 year old pre-multitasking OS application design.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#59
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man I hope you are wrong.. because I was literally planning to build an IDE for Algorand/Python/PyTEAL with this (I know, mentioning Algorand is an automatic downvote, oh well). You might be right.. but I am not sure. Could Borland really sue you or something, many years they release the full source code "as is", "provided gratuitously", "no support", "no updates"? I mean it doesn't explicitly say "public domain", bu…

I hope I am wrong. But I don't see anywhere in the text of this license any explicit permission to use it for any purpose, it's basically only a warranty disclaimer, unless some bits were omitted by accident.

Right. The question is, if I made a program, and for some reason they wanted to extract a fee or make me delete it or something, would a court take their side?

Because otherwise what is the utility of releasing the source code of a programming library for free? Could they argue that it was only for educational purposes or something?

Again, seems like a trap if it's supposed to be interpreted otherwise. In which case why should such a trap be legal.

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