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Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

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Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#31

Post by dugmartin »

dual_dingo wrote: post #13
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!

IIRC both Windows and TV where modeled after the IBM Common User Access ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access ) interface style, which was a somewhat big theme in the late 80s and early 90s.

Its fun seeing some of the vestigial CUA key bindings in modern apps. The one I probably use the most is F5 in the browser to refresh the page. That is listed in your Wikipedia page:

> If applicable to the page/screen in question F5 provides a refresh function;

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#35

Post by andrewshadura »

dvdkon wrote: post #22
andrewshadura wrote: post #16

Unfortunately, I'm afraid, since this is based on the actual source code of Turbo Vision, it's non-free, so it's unusable for open source projects.

Wikipedia says there was an official Borland public domain release of the source code, which this is probably based on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

Yes, you're right.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#36

Post by andrewshadura »

andrewshadura wrote: post #16

Unfortunately, I'm afraid, since this is based on the actual source code of Turbo Vision, it's non-free, so it's unusable for open source projects.

I stand corrected, but the license statement should be updated to clearly state the actual license, as it currently only includes the warranty disclaimer.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#37

Post by protomyth »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #21

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

The accountants where I work felt all the GUI interfaces sucked compared to their terminal. This led us to buy a new iSeries. It will probably last the same 15 years as the last one.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#39

Post by tssva »

dugmartin wrote: post #28

Turbo Vision was very fun to use and I made a good bit of money contracting on small projects in grad school in the early 90s using it. It made writing text mode guis a breeze. Borland's later Object Windows Library (OWL) was, in my opinion, much clunkier but it was done in C++ compared to Turbo Vision's Pascal. Probably the most interesting app I did was a small quality control/stats app for this book: "Quality Cont…

There were Pascal and C++ versions of Turbo Vision. This version is based upon the C++ version Borland released into the public domain in 1997.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#40

Post by rahoulb »

miohtama wrote: post #23
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #21

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

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.

Personally I'd say MacOS 9 was the peak (ignoring its instability).

Things like:

* the filesystem root being the desktop - so you started navigation from the first thing you saw when you switched the computer on

* the way the finder remembered the exact layout of your folder windows (if you've not experienced it, it's hard to explain why it's better - but Windows Explorer and the current Mac Finder are both file browsers, whereas the old Mac Finder *was* your desktop in whatever state you left it)

* kernel extensions being switched on and off by dragging them in and out of the extensions folder

These things made the GUI match the actual underlying system - whereas I always felt that Windows 95 onwards (and now OSX/macOS) hide the workings under pretty layers).

Having said that I also used Turbo Vision in the olden days and it was fantastic.

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