11 ms·

Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents

129 points by danso 8y ago

cwyers 8y ago
> But the most glaringly obvious drawback to MS-DOS stared you in the face every time you turned on the computer and were greeted with that blinking, cryptic “C:\>” prompt. Hackers might have loved the command line, but it was a nightmare for a secretary or an executive who saw the computer only as an appliance. MS-DOS contrived to make everything more difficult through its sheer primitive minimalism. Man, that wasn't minimalism, _the computers really were small._
- smallnamespace 8y ago
  So much of modern UI design is driven by just how different I/O is now compared to 20 years ago and how familiar users are with computers. Like, 'cascading' windows (e.g. in Program Manager) made sense in a world where a 12-14" 640x480 monitor was normal, users still wanted to ability to multitask, and skeuomorphic design (everything is a 'window') was the most intuitive analogy for users. Nowadays you would just tile your two main windows on your widescreen monitor.
  - taeric 8y ago
    I'm not so sure of that. Tiling is something that I do think is superior in many ways. However, I would be lying if I said I like it better than just dragging to the center of the screen the main app I'm working with. Rarely do I really need/want two windows. Worse, since most of what I do is data entry, copying out of a browser is not something I will do by transcribing text, which means I'm likely reaching for the mouse. Which means I don't really care about the wins of a tiling window. Granted, I do tend to side towards training of a more tiling like experience is far superior to just diving through. However, I no longer subscribe to the idea that knowing the shortcuts and other fancy management tricks of advanced window managers is necessary. I do it nowdays solely because it makes me happy. And this is perhaps why I find the phone so non-compelling of a platform to use.
- danso 8y ago
  Yeah, I was just wondering what the alternative was, before Visi On, and then 1984's Macintosh? Didn't Apple ][ just boot right into BASIC (or Oregon Trail, as per my elementary school memories)?
  - michrassena 8y ago
    If there was no hard drive controller installed, the Apple II booted into ROM BASIC almost instantly. From that prompt, you could write programs, or even read them from the integrated cassette port (basically a microphone jack).
  - korethr 8y ago
    I envy that you had BASIC; I never did. I don't recall if all of the instances from my elementary school career didn't have BASIC installed in the ROM, or if I simply never got the change to discover the world that existed beyond the approved set of educational programs (like Oregon Trail) that the computers existed to run. I sometimes wonder if I'd have gotten into programming sooner had I had exposure more than just Oregon Trail or Number Munchers.
    - bitwize 8y ago
      BASIC could be entered with a magic keystroke or by booting without a disk. If you knew enough to try these things and get to the BASIC prompt on your own, your teacher would have considered you a genius and called you over when the damn thing didn't work.
      - ryandrake 8y ago
        Nowadays if you figured something like that out as a kid in school, you’d be expelled at best, arrested for hacking at worst.
    - phaedrus 8y ago
      Number munchers is one of my earliest memories of using a computer.
- topspin 8y ago
  > Man, that wasn't minimalism, _the computers really were small._ Yes, they were. But it was more than that. The machines were very diverse. Several very different video card options were all in wide use and to make them work efficiently meant low level frame buffer work. Pointers were rare and weird, and again, diverse; bus mice, serial mice and other stuff. Writing a GUI compatible with all the permutations of PC hardware while being simultaneously efficient enough to run from floppies was possible with difficulty, but what value would it have provided? These were 16 bit machines with either no or extremely limited (286) MMUs; just how many processes were you going to be multitasking with your 512K of MMU-less RAM? DOS was just a program loader, and being just a program loader it was perfectly suited to the PC market. You bought a system with the 'adapter' cards you needed, booted DOS and let some program take over the system, be that Word Perfect, Paradox, Lotus 123 or whatever. That was the real, day to day use case for the PC. An advanced user with a 'fast' disk could bounce between programs in a few seconds and that was entirely sufficient for the vast bulk of PC users. It's also not dissimilar to the contemporary phone/tablet use case. And I don't remember anyone getting too hung up on the C:> prompt. They either acquired the clues needed to run a few commands or had someone make a .BAT file to kick off their program. There were certainly contemporaries with compelling UIs, but they invariably cost more and had a vastly smaller catalog of software.
  - icedchai 8y ago
    Cost more? Not really. The Amiga and Atari ST cost much less and were more capable than contemporary late 80's PCs. Less software is definitely true.
    - topspin 8y ago
      Yes really. The clone market made PCs very cheap. Certainly a lot cheaper than anything 'Amiga.' Atari ST had poor expansion; you could get a clone PC with 8 expansion slots for the same price, plug in whatever you needed, leave out whatever you didn't. The market spoke.
      - icedchai 8y ago
- valeg 8y ago
  GEOS was released in 1986 and featured a graphical user interface for small 8-bit computer. Talk about lost opportunities...
  - simmons 8y ago
    GEOS really pushed the limits of the hardware with a great deal of cleverness. It's amazing to compare something like GEOS with the primitive software that was available for the exact same hardware several years before. Using it on a C64 without RAM expansion required a great deal of patience, though.
korethr 8y ago
> Already in February of 1984, PC Magazine could point to at least four other GUIs of one sort or another in the works from other third-party developers: Concurrent CP/M with Windows by Digital Research, VisuALL by Trillian Computer Corporation, DesqView by Quarterdeck Office Systems, and WindowMaster by Structured Systems I've at least heard of the latter two, unlike the former ones, or VisiOn. IIRC,they were mentioned in the documentation of some program or game or another I had found and tried to run on my assembled-or-modified-from-scrap computers back in the mid-90s. I assume they had achieved some measure of success and presence in the marketplace (however small or brief that may have been), had they managed to be worth mention in an old DOS or Windows application's documentation. I'm curious if they'll be covered in subsequent articles in this series.
- kryptiskt 8y ago
  DesqView was big in the 80's for multitasking DOS programs. It wasn't a graphical window system, but ran in text mode.
  - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
    DESQview (as its maker styled it) was a great program for those of us who weren't convinced yet by Windows. While you're right that it started out as text-only (although IIRC later versions supported mice, and you could drag windows around and resize them that way), one of Quarterdeck's last products was DESQview/X, which was basically an X11 server running under DOS. It could run 16-bit Windows applications, DOS applications, and X applications.
  - gscott 8y ago
    DesqView 386 let me run multiple bbs lines my PC didn't have good enough specs to run Windows with multiple dos programs running at the same time.... Good times I feel bbs's were still mostly better then the web today.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    I loved DESQview/X. Better than any of the initial Windows releases. Also Quarterdeck's QEMM, which provided access to needed RAM. Also bizarre HDDs on cards, for some purpose I can't even remember. It wasn't until Windows NT that I had something I liked better than DesqView.
Koshkin 8y ago
I think RiscOS (which you can run on a RPi) is the modern example of a simple system that can satisfy most needs of a desktop user. I wish DOS/Windows followed the same path.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  IIRC RiscOS is still cooperative multitasking though, which is pretty sad. Other than that it has a lot going for it. It's fast and light-weight, all menus are context menus, and applications are just folders as God intended.
pnathan 8y ago
Oh, DOS. It's always sad to read histories of computing during the 80s. It was a lost decade in many ways. Much more powerful and competent paradigms were alive and vital at the start, but by the end, they were all collapsing. A few different choices, a little bit better business sense, and we'd have a computer world profoundly alien to the one we have now. It's still possible, of course. But it'd be wearing the hair shirt and being a lone hacker as you built up your system. I refer, of course, to both Lisp and Unix machines, along with the various developments in parallel architectures. The Unix machines as sources of power and use lay quiescent for many years, until maybe the early 00s, and IMO the Lisp machines path has never been genuinely walked. There's an elegy to be written for the loss of the operator of the computer being turned into a consumer rather than a producer (unix) or symbiont (lisp). Maybe rpg will write it one day.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  Well, DOS (by which I really mean the IBM PC) was arguably more "powerful" than Unix minicomputers of the time, in that there was never any OS sitting between you and the hardware. Compared to say, an iPad, it was a very developer-friendly machine. Turbo Pascal, in particular, more or less introduced an entire generation to programming, especially since it had no copy protection.
  - bollockitis 8y ago
    I owe my entire career to GWBASIC, QBasic, and Turbo Pascal, all of which was done from an IBM PC. When I first discovered UNIX by way of Red Hat Linux I was utterly confused: all of those absurdly named directories in my root! And where were the executables? I remember pecking out some C in nano, compiling it, and then wondering how the hell you turn a.out into a.exe.
    - the_af 8y ago
      Yes. My first line of code was written in that primitive BASIC that came with the Commodore 64. But my first real program which did something useful -- a game, what else -- was written in GWBASIC. I owe everything to DOS and GWBASIC.
gerdesj 8y ago
Printers. Oh $DEITY. You boot your 80286 with 1MB RAM and a 20MB (RLL) HDD. This was my second PC and I'd forked out over £100 to get a 287 Maths Co-pro. so I could run a dodgy copy of AutoCAD. I had it all on this box: WordPerfect with the multi colour cardboard Fn key strip. Harvard Graphics and Super Calc and a flirtation with WordStar (I still prefer joe for a terminal editor). GW BASIC and some other games rounded out the collection. Printing was a right laugh because each app, including your own, had its own printing system. Getting our Epsom RX80 working with all of the above was a major feat and my efforts with C (Borland? Can't remember) nearly drove me mad. Ahhh, I can still see the faded (partial) Mandelbrot set crossing over the perfs. on the tractor fed paper because I'd screwed up my co-ordinate transformations.
- badsectoracula 8y ago
  I remember when i was a kid i had an (ancient by that time) Star LC-20 printer and the manual came with control codes to print stuff. At the time i made a small spreadsheet program (i had just learned how to parse expressions from a book i had on Turbo Pascal and making a spreadsheet program sounded the most logical application for that) that my father ended up using for a couple of years or so in the 286 he had at his shop (i used an XT clone). Obviously i also wanted to make sure that it had a manual since all professional programs have a manual. Months before that, the owner of a local computer shop had given me some stacks of old continuous paper that was around A6 in size (although it was squareish, so not really A6) that he was about to throw away, so i decided to use that since it had a nice "booklet" feeling. To write the actual manual, i wrote a program in Turbo Pascal that allowed me to write the text in a quasi-WYSIWYG way: i was editing each page in a full screen view (the paper could hold around 40x20 or so characters with the normal font) and each character could be "styled" with bold, underline, italic and big flags (this used a double sized font, i had to take into account the letter size) which was displayed as different colors. The program was thedefinition of being purpose built: it only supported that particular printer (well, that particular printer line, i also got an LC-10 at some point and it worked there too) and only that particular paper size. One of the most interesting bits i remember was that the printer didn't really had a concept of paper sizes (it was a continuous paper printer only) and the paper size i used wasn't fitting exactly the (default font) line height, so after printing every page, i was sending commands to change the line heights and move the paper back and forward with different line heights to reposition the header at the same spot for each page. After printing the pages i had to cut the perforated sides and since i didn't had a big stapler to hold all of them together, i opened the holes where the staple would be with a needle and put and bent a staple with a screwdriver (or something like that, i do not remember exactly) and then putting some tape over the side. That process wasn't as fun as writing the software and printing it, which ensured i only made a single copy of the manual which i gave to my father. He eventually gave it back to me some years later when he upgraded the computer he used at his shop, but that was almost 20 years ago and since then we moved a few times and i moved a few times myself and it was either lost or hidden in some long forgotten corner of my attic here (where the few things i still have from my childhood/teen days are stored). I do not remember printing stuff being particularly hard though, but i might have been lucky and ended up with a very simple printer.
walshemj 8y ago
It was CPM/86 not CPM I have actually used a IBM compatible pc to run it which probably make me one of a fairly small group I think it was a DEC rainbow. I also usued a grey import IBM Pc before it was sold in the UK we had out electronics shop build a custom 240-110 v power supply
tomc1985 8y ago
Yay... another "technology safari" post that loves to point and laugh at how dated old technology (read: old to the author) was. Why can't people accept things the way they were without constantly disparaging them?
- danso 8y ago
  The theme of the author's blog is the history of gaming, and he spends a lot of his time explaining and often glorifying old games and systems. Perhaps to some, he isn't paying enough respect to MSDOS in this instance. But he is someone who does thorough research about old tech and software: https://www.filfre.net/hall-of-fame/ https://www.filfre.net/hall-of-fame/
rwallace 8y ago
> The user interfaces for the Lisa and the Macintosh made almost all the right choices right from the beginning No, they did not. Off the top of my head: - No cursor keys. You had to reach for the mouse every time you wanted to move the cursor. Rectified later, yes, but not the right choice from the beginning. - Menus across the top of the screen, inherited from Xerox Alto whose portrait format monitor made vertical space most plentiful, did not make so much sense on the Macintosh landscape monitor, still less so on today's letterbox monitors. - One-button mouse leading to a workaround where to perform the most common operation of running a program or opening a file required clicking twice in rapid succession. Windows fixed the first problem immediately, but the second problem only years later. - Copy-pasted text bringing attributes from the source document where it should take them from the destination document. This problem still has not been fixed to this day. Like other artifacts, the Lisa and Macintosh had their good points and their bad points. Let's not let appreciation of one blind us to the other.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  I don't get the mouse one. Double clicking is like a safety. The number of times I accidentally clicked on stuff with my overly relaxed surfing hand. And how did windows fix it? Maybe I'm too young to remember. I've always been double clicking.
  - wvenable 8y ago
    People cannot reliably double-click. It's both a hidden interface and one that requires careful timing -- it's hard to imagine a worse user-interface action. That being said, as a power-user I have no problem with double clicking and find that it works pretty well for me.
  - jccalhoun 8y ago
    I'm also curious as to how Windows fixed it.
    - rwallace 8y ago
      Windows can be set to only require a single click... I think that's actually since 95, but I'm not sure; it's definitely at least since XP. Did the default get fixed at any time, or does Windows 10 still default to require double click?
apo 8y ago
This article skips over one of the most interesting stories in modern business: how Gary Kildall lost IBM to Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall#IBM_dealings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall#IBM_dealings
- djur 8y ago
  He covered that in a previous series of articles about the origins and development of the IBM PC, starting here: https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-1/ https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-1/
  - apo 8y ago
    Yes, there's a detailed account here: https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-2/ https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-2/
- Apaec 8y ago
  That's just because Billy's mommy had ties with IBM CEO John Opel http://prospectingprofessor.blogs.com/prospecting_professor/2005/12/bills_billions_.html http://prospectingprofessor.blogs.com/prospecting_professor/....
olliej 8y ago
This article is astonishing in its depth, I thoroughly enjoyed as much as I have read so far. It just keeps going.
sys101 8y ago
1) I came from 370 BAL. The sense of freedom from rules was outstanding in DOS. 2) x-windows. 3) print.com true multi-tasking in Ms/pc/Dr DOS. 4) LIM and emm386
- JdeBP 8y ago
  At the time, print spooling with PRINT.COM was not really regarded as "true multitasking". We knew what true multitasking was, from knowledge of operating systems as diverse as Sinclair QDOS, AmigaDOS, and MP/M, and that was not it. (-:
voltagex_ 8y ago
>but it was a nightmare for a secretary or an executive who saw the computer only as an appliance. MS-DOS contrived to make everything more difficult through its sheer primitive minimalism I don't know about that - people have adapted to the GUI because it's the most dominant thing. Microsoft shipped Solitaire to get people used to the mouse and I'm sure I've heard of people who were extremely reluctant to give up TUI or DOS programs that they were extremely efficient in.
- yoz-y 8y ago
  People adapted to GUIs because they were simpler to grok. Text commands are useful and more powerful if you already know them, in a GUI you can actually see all of the buttons you can press. In the end, both are very useful.
  - JdeBP 8y ago
    What the headlined article is talking about is not a TUI-GUI split. It is talking about a command-line interface versus other forms of TUIs. As mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, there were plenty of ways of end users interacting with MS/PC/DR-DOS without having to use the command-line.
badsectoracula 8y ago
The book mentioned at the bottom "The Making of Microsoft: How Bill Gates and His Team Created the World’s Most Successful Software Company" is a very interesting one. It was actually the first book i read on computing history many years ago and i got hooked to it since then. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Microsoft's early history - and i'd like to find something similar that covers their 90s history to a similar extent (the book only covers up to 1992, but the majority of it is on 80s stuff).
- accidentalrebel 8y ago
  If you haven't read it yet try "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy. He covers a big chunk of computing history from the hardware hackers at MIT to the game development revolution that spawned from micro computers.
  - badsectoracula 8y ago
    Yes, i have :-). It was also very interesting to see the "evolution" of Brøderbund from its early stages in Levy's book to a big slow moving company in Jordan Mechner's Karateka and Prince of Persia diaries (and i'd be very interested to read about the development of The Last Express, which was also developed when Brøderbund collapsed). It is very interesting to piece together these history pieces from the various books :-)
nwhatt 8y ago
Blatantly ripping this off from Stratechery, but DOS was why Mac lost in the 80s and the end of the day a GUI OS is just a feature. Apple had a clearly superior UI, but the distribution and adoption of DOS allowed windows to take it by storm.

129 points by danso 8y ago

> But the most glaringly obvious drawback to MS-DOS stared you in the face every time you turned on the computer and were greeted with that blinking, cryptic “C:\>” prompt. Hackers might have loved the command line, but it was a nightmare for a secretary or an executive who saw the computer only as an appliance. MS-DOS contrived to make everything more difficult through its sheer primitive minimalism. Man, that wasn't minimalism, _the computers really were small._

smallnamespace 8y ago
So much of modern UI design is driven by just how different I/O is now compared to 20 years ago and how familiar users are with computers. Like, 'cascading' windows (e.g. in Program Manager) made sense in a world where a 12-14" 640x480 monitor was normal, users still wanted to ability to multitask, and skeuomorphic design (everything is a 'window') was the most intuitive analogy for users. Nowadays you would just tile your two main windows on your widescreen monitor.
- taeric 8y ago
  I'm not so sure of that. Tiling is something that I do think is superior in many ways. However, I would be lying if I said I like it better than just dragging to the center of the screen the main app I'm working with. Rarely do I really need/want two windows. Worse, since most of what I do is data entry, copying out of a browser is not something I will do by transcribing text, which means I'm likely reaching for the mouse. Which means I don't really care about the wins of a tiling window. Granted, I do tend to side towards training of a more tiling like experience is far superior to just diving through. However, I no longer subscribe to the idea that knowing the shortcuts and other fancy management tricks of advanced window managers is necessary. I do it nowdays solely because it makes me happy. And this is perhaps why I find the phone so non-compelling of a platform to use.
danso 8y ago
Yeah, I was just wondering what the alternative was, before Visi On, and then 1984's Macintosh? Didn't Apple ][ just boot right into BASIC (or Oregon Trail, as per my elementary school memories)?
- michrassena 8y ago
  If there was no hard drive controller installed, the Apple II booted into ROM BASIC almost instantly. From that prompt, you could write programs, or even read them from the integrated cassette port (basically a microphone jack).
- korethr 8y ago
  I envy that you had BASIC; I never did. I don't recall if all of the instances from my elementary school career didn't have BASIC installed in the ROM, or if I simply never got the change to discover the world that existed beyond the approved set of educational programs (like Oregon Trail) that the computers existed to run. I sometimes wonder if I'd have gotten into programming sooner had I had exposure more than just Oregon Trail or Number Munchers.
  - bitwize 8y ago
    BASIC could be entered with a magic keystroke or by booting without a disk. If you knew enough to try these things and get to the BASIC prompt on your own, your teacher would have considered you a genius and called you over when the damn thing didn't work.
    - ryandrake 8y ago
      Nowadays if you figured something like that out as a kid in school, you’d be expelled at best, arrested for hacking at worst.
  - phaedrus 8y ago
    Number munchers is one of my earliest memories of using a computer.
topspin 8y ago
> Man, that wasn't minimalism, _the computers really were small._ Yes, they were. But it was more than that. The machines were very diverse. Several very different video card options were all in wide use and to make them work efficiently meant low level frame buffer work. Pointers were rare and weird, and again, diverse; bus mice, serial mice and other stuff. Writing a GUI compatible with all the permutations of PC hardware while being simultaneously efficient enough to run from floppies was possible with difficulty, but what value would it have provided? These were 16 bit machines with either no or extremely limited (286) MMUs; just how many processes were you going to be multitasking with your 512K of MMU-less RAM? DOS was just a program loader, and being just a program loader it was perfectly suited to the PC market. You bought a system with the 'adapter' cards you needed, booted DOS and let some program take over the system, be that Word Perfect, Paradox, Lotus 123 or whatever. That was the real, day to day use case for the PC. An advanced user with a 'fast' disk could bounce between programs in a few seconds and that was entirely sufficient for the vast bulk of PC users. It's also not dissimilar to the contemporary phone/tablet use case. And I don't remember anyone getting too hung up on the C:> prompt. They either acquired the clues needed to run a few commands or had someone make a .BAT file to kick off their program. There were certainly contemporaries with compelling UIs, but they invariably cost more and had a vastly smaller catalog of software.
- icedchai 8y ago
  Cost more? Not really. The Amiga and Atari ST cost much less and were more capable than contemporary late 80's PCs. Less software is definitely true.
  - topspin 8y ago
    Yes really. The clone market made PCs very cheap. Certainly a lot cheaper than anything 'Amiga.' Atari ST had poor expansion; you could get a clone PC with 8 expansion slots for the same price, plug in whatever you needed, leave out whatever you didn't. The market spoke.
    - icedchai 8y ago
valeg 8y ago
GEOS was released in 1986 and featured a graphical user interface for small 8-bit computer. Talk about lost opportunities...
- simmons 8y ago
  GEOS really pushed the limits of the hardware with a great deal of cleverness. It's amazing to compare something like GEOS with the primitive software that was available for the exact same hardware several years before. Using it on a C64 without RAM expansion required a great deal of patience, though.

korethr 8y ago

> Already in February of 1984, PC Magazine could point to at least four other GUIs of one sort or another in the works from other third-party developers: Concurrent CP/M with Windows by Digital Research, VisuALL by Trillian Computer Corporation, DesqView by Quarterdeck Office Systems, and WindowMaster by Structured Systems I've at least heard of the latter two, unlike the former ones, or VisiOn. IIRC,they were mentioned in the documentation of some program or game or another I had found and tried to run on my assembled-or-modified-from-scrap computers back in the mid-90s. I assume they had achieved some measure of success and presence in the marketplace (however small or brief that may have been), had they managed to be worth mention in an old DOS or Windows application's documentation. I'm curious if they'll be covered in subsequent articles in this series.

kryptiskt 8y ago
DesqView was big in the 80's for multitasking DOS programs. It wasn't a graphical window system, but ran in text mode.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  DESQview (as its maker styled it) was a great program for those of us who weren't convinced yet by Windows. While you're right that it started out as text-only (although IIRC later versions supported mice, and you could drag windows around and resize them that way), one of Quarterdeck's last products was DESQview/X, which was basically an X11 server running under DOS. It could run 16-bit Windows applications, DOS applications, and X applications.
- gscott 8y ago
  DesqView 386 let me run multiple bbs lines my PC didn't have good enough specs to run Windows with multiple dos programs running at the same time.... Good times I feel bbs's were still mostly better then the web today.
- mirimir 8y ago
  I loved DESQview/X. Better than any of the initial Windows releases. Also Quarterdeck's QEMM, which provided access to needed RAM. Also bizarre HDDs on cards, for some purpose I can't even remember. It wasn't until Windows NT that I had something I liked better than DesqView.

Koshkin 8y ago

I think RiscOS (which you can run on a RPi) is the modern example of a simple system that can satisfy most needs of a desktop user. I wish DOS/Windows followed the same path.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
IIRC RiscOS is still cooperative multitasking though, which is pretty sad. Other than that it has a lot going for it. It's fast and light-weight, all menus are context menus, and applications are just folders as God intended.

pnathan 8y ago

Oh, DOS. It's always sad to read histories of computing during the 80s. It was a lost decade in many ways. Much more powerful and competent paradigms were alive and vital at the start, but by the end, they were all collapsing. A few different choices, a little bit better business sense, and we'd have a computer world profoundly alien to the one we have now. It's still possible, of course. But it'd be wearing the hair shirt and being a lone hacker as you built up your system. I refer, of course, to both Lisp and Unix machines, along with the various developments in parallel architectures. The Unix machines as sources of power and use lay quiescent for many years, until maybe the early 00s, and IMO the Lisp machines path has never been genuinely walked. There's an elegy to be written for the loss of the operator of the computer being turned into a consumer rather than a producer (unix) or symbiont (lisp). Maybe rpg will write it one day.

pcwalton 8y ago
Well, DOS (by which I really mean the IBM PC) was arguably more "powerful" than Unix minicomputers of the time, in that there was never any OS sitting between you and the hardware. Compared to say, an iPad, it was a very developer-friendly machine. Turbo Pascal, in particular, more or less introduced an entire generation to programming, especially since it had no copy protection.
- bollockitis 8y ago
  I owe my entire career to GWBASIC, QBasic, and Turbo Pascal, all of which was done from an IBM PC. When I first discovered UNIX by way of Red Hat Linux I was utterly confused: all of those absurdly named directories in my root! And where were the executables? I remember pecking out some C in nano, compiling it, and then wondering how the hell you turn a.out into a.exe.
  - the_af 8y ago
    Yes. My first line of code was written in that primitive BASIC that came with the Commodore 64. But my first real program which did something useful -- a game, what else -- was written in GWBASIC. I owe everything to DOS and GWBASIC.

gerdesj 8y ago

Printers. Oh $DEITY. You boot your 80286 with 1MB RAM and a 20MB (RLL) HDD. This was my second PC and I'd forked out over £100 to get a 287 Maths Co-pro. so I could run a dodgy copy of AutoCAD. I had it all on this box: WordPerfect with the multi colour cardboard Fn key strip. Harvard Graphics and Super Calc and a flirtation with WordStar (I still prefer joe for a terminal editor). GW BASIC and some other games rounded out the collection. Printing was a right laugh because each app, including your own, had its own printing system. Getting our Epsom RX80 working with all of the above was a major feat and my efforts with C (Borland? Can't remember) nearly drove me mad. Ahhh, I can still see the faded (partial) Mandelbrot set crossing over the perfs. on the tractor fed paper because I'd screwed up my co-ordinate transformations.

badsectoracula 8y ago
I remember when i was a kid i had an (ancient by that time) Star LC-20 printer and the manual came with control codes to print stuff. At the time i made a small spreadsheet program (i had just learned how to parse expressions from a book i had on Turbo Pascal and making a spreadsheet program sounded the most logical application for that) that my father ended up using for a couple of years or so in the 286 he had at his shop (i used an XT clone). Obviously i also wanted to make sure that it had a manual since all professional programs have a manual. Months before that, the owner of a local computer shop had given me some stacks of old continuous paper that was around A6 in size (although it was squareish, so not really A6) that he was about to throw away, so i decided to use that since it had a nice "booklet" feeling. To write the actual manual, i wrote a program in Turbo Pascal that allowed me to write the text in a quasi-WYSIWYG way: i was editing each page in a full screen view (the paper could hold around 40x20 or so characters with the normal font) and each character could be "styled" with bold, underline, italic and big flags (this used a double sized font, i had to take into account the letter size) which was displayed as different colors. The program was thedefinition of being purpose built: it only supported that particular printer (well, that particular printer line, i also got an LC-10 at some point and it worked there too) and only that particular paper size. One of the most interesting bits i remember was that the printer didn't really had a concept of paper sizes (it was a continuous paper printer only) and the paper size i used wasn't fitting exactly the (default font) line height, so after printing every page, i was sending commands to change the line heights and move the paper back and forward with different line heights to reposition the header at the same spot for each page. After printing the pages i had to cut the perforated sides and since i didn't had a big stapler to hold all of them together, i opened the holes where the staple would be with a needle and put and bent a staple with a screwdriver (or something like that, i do not remember exactly) and then putting some tape over the side. That process wasn't as fun as writing the software and printing it, which ensured i only made a single copy of the manual which i gave to my father. He eventually gave it back to me some years later when he upgraded the computer he used at his shop, but that was almost 20 years ago and since then we moved a few times and i moved a few times myself and it was either lost or hidden in some long forgotten corner of my attic here (where the few things i still have from my childhood/teen days are stored). I do not remember printing stuff being particularly hard though, but i might have been lucky and ended up with a very simple printer.

walshemj 8y ago

It was CPM/86 not CPM I have actually used a IBM compatible pc to run it which probably make me one of a fairly small group I think it was a DEC rainbow. I also usued a grey import IBM Pc before it was sold in the UK we had out electronics shop build a custom 240-110 v power supply

tomc1985 8y ago

Yay... another "technology safari" post that loves to point and laugh at how dated old technology (read: old to the author) was. Why can't people accept things the way they were without constantly disparaging them?

danso 8y ago
The theme of the author's blog is the history of gaming, and he spends a lot of his time explaining and often glorifying old games and systems. Perhaps to some, he isn't paying enough respect to MSDOS in this instance. But he is someone who does thorough research about old tech and software: https://www.filfre.net/hall-of-fame/ https://www.filfre.net/hall-of-fame/

rwallace 8y ago

> The user interfaces for the Lisa and the Macintosh made almost all the right choices right from the beginning No, they did not. Off the top of my head: - No cursor keys. You had to reach for the mouse every time you wanted to move the cursor. Rectified later, yes, but not the right choice from the beginning. - Menus across the top of the screen, inherited from Xerox Alto whose portrait format monitor made vertical space most plentiful, did not make so much sense on the Macintosh landscape monitor, still less so on today's letterbox monitors. - One-button mouse leading to a workaround where to perform the most common operation of running a program or opening a file required clicking twice in rapid succession. Windows fixed the first problem immediately, but the second problem only years later. - Copy-pasted text bringing attributes from the source document where it should take them from the destination document. This problem still has not been fixed to this day. Like other artifacts, the Lisa and Macintosh had their good points and their bad points. Let's not let appreciation of one blind us to the other.

Waterluvian 8y ago
I don't get the mouse one. Double clicking is like a safety. The number of times I accidentally clicked on stuff with my overly relaxed surfing hand. And how did windows fix it? Maybe I'm too young to remember. I've always been double clicking.
- wvenable 8y ago
  People cannot reliably double-click. It's both a hidden interface and one that requires careful timing -- it's hard to imagine a worse user-interface action. That being said, as a power-user I have no problem with double clicking and find that it works pretty well for me.
- jccalhoun 8y ago
  I'm also curious as to how Windows fixed it.
  - rwallace 8y ago
    Windows can be set to only require a single click... I think that's actually since 95, but I'm not sure; it's definitely at least since XP. Did the default get fixed at any time, or does Windows 10 still default to require double click?

apo 8y ago

This article skips over one of the most interesting stories in modern business: how Gary Kildall lost IBM to Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall#IBM_dealings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall#IBM_dealings

djur 8y ago
He covered that in a previous series of articles about the origins and development of the IBM PC, starting here: https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-1/ https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-1/
- apo 8y ago
  Yes, there's a detailed account here: https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-2/ https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-2/
Apaec 8y ago
That's just because Billy's mommy had ties with IBM CEO John Opel http://prospectingprofessor.blogs.com/prospecting_professor/2005/12/bills_billions_.html http://prospectingprofessor.blogs.com/prospecting_professor/....

olliej 8y ago

This article is astonishing in its depth, I thoroughly enjoyed as much as I have read so far. It just keeps going.

sys101 8y ago

1) I came from 370 BAL. The sense of freedom from rules was outstanding in DOS. 2) x-windows. 3) print.com true multi-tasking in Ms/pc/Dr DOS. 4) LIM and emm386

JdeBP 8y ago
At the time, print spooling with PRINT.COM was not really regarded as "true multitasking". We knew what true multitasking was, from knowledge of operating systems as diverse as Sinclair QDOS, AmigaDOS, and MP/M, and that was not it. (-:

voltagex_ 8y ago

>but it was a nightmare for a secretary or an executive who saw the computer only as an appliance. MS-DOS contrived to make everything more difficult through its sheer primitive minimalism I don't know about that - people have adapted to the GUI because it's the most dominant thing. Microsoft shipped Solitaire to get people used to the mouse and I'm sure I've heard of people who were extremely reluctant to give up TUI or DOS programs that they were extremely efficient in.

yoz-y 8y ago
People adapted to GUIs because they were simpler to grok. Text commands are useful and more powerful if you already know them, in a GUI you can actually see all of the buttons you can press. In the end, both are very useful.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  What the headlined article is talking about is not a TUI-GUI split. It is talking about a command-line interface versus other forms of TUIs. As mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, there were plenty of ways of end users interacting with MS/PC/DR-DOS without having to use the command-line.

badsectoracula 8y ago

The book mentioned at the bottom "The Making of Microsoft: How Bill Gates and His Team Created the World’s Most Successful Software Company" is a very interesting one. It was actually the first book i read on computing history many years ago and i got hooked to it since then. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Microsoft's early history - and i'd like to find something similar that covers their 90s history to a similar extent (the book only covers up to 1992, but the majority of it is on 80s stuff).

accidentalrebel 8y ago
If you haven't read it yet try "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy. He covers a big chunk of computing history from the hardware hackers at MIT to the game development revolution that spawned from micro computers.
- badsectoracula 8y ago
  Yes, i have :-). It was also very interesting to see the "evolution" of Brøderbund from its early stages in Levy's book to a big slow moving company in Jordan Mechner's Karateka and Prince of Persia diaries (and i'd be very interested to read about the development of The Last Express, which was also developed when Brøderbund collapsed). It is very interesting to piece together these history pieces from the various books :-)

nwhatt 8y ago

Blatantly ripping this off from Stratechery, but DOS was why Mac lost in the 80s and the end of the day a GUI OS is just a feature. Apple had a clearly superior UI, but the distribution and adoption of DOS allowed windows to take it by storm.