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Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

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Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#71

Post by digisign »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #58
sdfjkl wrote: 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,…

This is usually handled by tabs today... not sure that has been ported back to libs like turbo vision yet. I don't think so.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#72

Post by digisign »

zozbot234 wrote: post #29
sdfjkl wrote: 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!

There were text mode UIs well before Windows 3.0 - Microsoft had their own TUIs, similar to Turbo Vision but with a subtly different style. They even supported a "monochrome mode" option that wouldn't look out of place on a VT-100 terminal.

Also reminded of the Norton DOS tools, which were interesting in themselves.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#73

Post by digisign »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #55
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 any…

We downloaded the 95 betas from the internet to test them before rolling them out.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#74

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #66
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

49.7 days are forever ?

Before the internet was on 24/7 with broadband connections everywhere people didn't run their PC all the time. It's not like you had a local wifi network to serve data, etc. to your other devices. You turned the PC on, played a game, did some spreadsheets, dialed in to AOL, and then turned it off. Those PCs pulled 300+ watts of power at idle too and were huge power hogs. Running your windows 95 PC nonstop for days an…

Maybe, maybe not. At the times W95 was usual, I mostly ran NetBSD and later some Gentoo and Debian on my assorted systems. Furthermore, most systems had PSUs rated at 200 to 250 Watt, which they didn't even burn if one used operating systems which knew what to do with the CPUs HLT instruction during idle, or less load, also spinning down disks was a thing.

BTW, there was software which made W95/98 use HLT too. Rain, Waterfall, CPUidle, or something like that. Which became obsolete with W2000 which did that by itself.

Shrug.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#76

Post by toast0 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #47
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #43

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.

80x24 is plenty of room for solitaire, and an ok minesweeper (bigger is nice though)

If you've got a graphical terminal, like you'd need for your filesystem viewer, then you can do all sorts of stuff, of course.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#77

Post by zozbot234 »

digisign wrote: post #71
qbasic_forever wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

This is usually handled by tabs today... not sure that has been ported back to libs like turbo vision yet. I don't think so.

Tab bars are not very TUI friendly though, since the typical TUI has too little space to display a list of usable tab names at all times. Instead there's simply a hotkey which pops up a "window list" for the user to switch to. (There are exceptions when space is genuinely abundant and a side list of "views" or "tabs" to switch to can be kept permanently visible, but they are exceptions.)

Here the TUI designer profits from being able to assume that the user can navigate using the keyboard, as opposed to implementing "keyboard shortcuts" as a purely additional feature. (The GUI on the other hand can use design 'tweaks' to minimize the wasted space and perhaps distraction that would normally result from showing an always-visible tab list.)

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#78

Post by bonzini »

wiz21c wrote: 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...

You can use the vte library to embed a terminal in a GTK+ program. QEMU does it for example.
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