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Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

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Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#61

Post by a_e_k »

sdfjkl wrote: post #11
the-dude wrote: post #6

I bought a mouse specifically for this. It was a Genius and came with a holder which you could stick to the side of your monitor or to a wall. So you could store your mouse when not in use. I am not making this up.

It also had a ball that you had to remove every third day or so and then clean the friction rollers inside the mouse which the ball was turning. All the dust the ball picked up transferred onto those rollers and coagulated into dense felt around them until they stopped turning. Mine had three buttons though!

My standard kit still includes a pair of fine-point forceps from my dad's lab that he gave to me for cleaning mice when I went off to college. It's been a long time since I used them for mice, but they're now really handy for charging ports.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#63

Post by zozbot234 »

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,…

MDI is completely optional in TUI apps. It only enters the picture if you have multiple documents open within the same terminal/app session, otherwise you simply get the single document view. This applies to Emacs "windows" as much as any TUI in DOS.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#64

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

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…

49.7 days are forever?

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#65

Post by jeffreygoesto »

the-dude wrote: post #20
dual_dingo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genius GM6000? I had that one and still use the cutting side of the combined mousepad/cutting mat that came with it.

Green. Outstanding quality.

Can confirm. Mine was resting in a drawer for some years, but seven i found it, I immediately started using it again. Great mousepad since 1989.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#66

Post by qbasic_forever »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #64
qbasic_forever wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 and months at a time was not common at all.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#69

Post by digisign »

This looks awesome, but not packaged yet?

For a decade or two I waited for a good CUA editor on Unix. One that took advantage of 1990s PC hardware. Like DOS Edit, but better. Built my own striped-down SET/RHIDE editor in the early 2000s, then hobbled along with "ne" from ~2010, but that niche was fully taken by micro a few years ago. Would love a friendly tvision-like competitor with real menus and dialogs.

But what about the color palette? I see one screenshot with an extended palette, but the main shots that are using the original eight-color palette. Maybe nostalgia shots, ok. Was acceptable to have saturated dark blue and dark green backgrounds in ~1990 I suppose, that's all there was. But no longer. A micro/sublime-like dark grey color theme of at least 256 colors would attract new folks more effectively. Backgrounds should have a low-saturation imho.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#70

Post by digisign »

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.

Also influenced by the original Mac UI, which influenced Motif, which influenced later toolkits. It was a great time for standard interfaces, which has gotten worse since, imho.
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