10 ms·

Anyone else love the look of DOS GUIs? https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTIyODU3OC83MTY0MTEyLnBuZw==/original/kYLtCi.png https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTIyODU3OC8

Anyone else love the look of DOS GUIs? https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTIyODU3OC83MTY0MTEyLnBuZw==/original/kYLtCi.png https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTIyODU3OC83MTY0MTEyLnBuZw==/o... They have such a cozy feel, reminds me of simpler times. It would be cool if there were a CSS framework where you could make webpages like that.

colejohnson66 5y ago
Look at TuiCss: https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss
zetalyrae 5y ago
I have fond memories of SETEDIT: http://setedit.sourceforge.net/ http://setedit.sourceforge.net/ It was kind of a complete floating windows GUI in a TUI: http://setedit.sourceforge.net/se1.gif http://setedit.sourceforge.net/se1.gif
- zozbot234 5y ago
  PsychDOS is a very similar project: https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/DOS/INDEX.HTM https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/DOS/INDEX.HTM I wonder if it would be possible to extend a terminal multiplexer to the point of providing such an intuitive interface to existing TUI software on modern *ix systems. I'm sure the effort would be quite non-trivial, but it would help a number of workflows. Adding support for the additional features that are found in these TUI environments (consider e.g. menubars) could then be done via custom terminal extensions.
  - DHowett 5y ago
    > I wonder if it would be possible ... Check out the VTM project[1]! It feels like that's the direction they're heading. No direct affiliation; they've filed some bugs on Windows Terminal, however. :) [1] https://github.com/netxs-group/VTM https://github.com/netxs-group/VTM
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Well, that's a terminal multiplexer but not very TUI like. I don't think it would be directly usable over a low-bandwidth SSH connection, which is the kind of use case people often have in mind for TUI's.
- lproven 5y ago
  That was my preferred Linux text editor for a while, too. These days, I use Tilde, which is modern, maintained, and packaged for contemporary distros. https://os.ghalkes.nl/tilde/ https://os.ghalkes.nl/tilde/
  - mysterydip 5y ago
    Thanks for the link! I had been struggling to find something that "felt right", from changing themes in Kate or using vim or nano. This looks perfect.
    - lproven 5y ago
      Oh, great! Happy to help. I've been using it for years now -- it's becoming a faithful friend, to the bafflement of my colleagues who are mostly Vi(m) or Emacs fans. The one thing it doesn't do for me is pick up Git commit templates, so for that I have to have my default set to `mc`. I don't know why that one thing doesn't function.
agumonkey 5y ago
yes i do, the frugal aspect is extremely appealing to me. someone made a turbovision (borland turbo pascal ui framework) lib for java https://jexer.sourceforge.io/ https://jexer.sourceforge.io/
yoz-y 5y ago
Shoutout to the https://dosgameclub.com https://dosgameclub.com which naturally has all the website and forums done in this style.
easton 5y ago
https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/ https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/ might be up your alley
- sigg3 5y ago
  The Most Advanced Computer Interface, period.
anyfoo 5y ago
Totally! However, even with the proper fonts (that also have to be aspect ratio corrected, the usual VGA text mode did not have square pixels), I struggle to recreate this to the point that it's really recognizable. CRTs with that text mode (and including scanlines, but not only that) just seem very hard to reproduce on modern displays. The fact that your photo does evoke the same feeling while I'm seeing it on a modern 5k display shows that it's possible, but the amount of tricks needed might be so much that it becomes whimsical somehow (or at least in contrast to just changing the font)...
squarefoot 5y ago
> Anyone else love the look of DOS GUIs? I do. Brings back memories of Turbo-C. > It would be cool if there were a CSS framework where you could make webpages like that. A quick search brought this old project: https://github.com/6112/cursesjs https://github.com/6112/cursesjs Never tried that, however. Ncurses is what is used under Linux and other UNIX like systems to draw terminal based GUIs, and allows some pretty good graphics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses http://elmon.sourceforge.net/ http://elmon.sourceforge.net/ https://christopherstoll.org/2015/12/29/ncurses-system-performance-monitor-mac.html https://christopherstoll.org/2015/12/29/ncurses-system-perfo...
- mindcrime 5y ago
  If you like that old TurboVision look, you'll love https://github.com/magiblot/tvision https://github.com/magiblot/tvision
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    Thanks, I recall seeing it some time ago but totally forgot about it.
pengaru 5y ago
Eh, the Borland Grahics Interface (BGI) style TUIs were kind of awful. I hated the Borland Turbo C IDE in no small part because of that style TUI. It just wasted so much precious character space on TUI frames and other decorations. More of my fond TUI memories from that era were the bespoke ones in the demo/art/music/bbs scenes. Those in many cases were still character based but seemed to make better use of the screen space and at least more aesthetically pleasing character sets. Scream Tracker / Impulse Tracker comes to mind as one example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/53/Screamtracker_321.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/53/Screamtracker... Which you can still enjoy today in a cross-platform clone via SchismTracker: https://github.com/schismtracker/schismtracker https://github.com/schismtracker/schismtracker
- ddingus 5y ago
  Hmm..... That same thing in say 96x50 would feel much better. Edit, just viewed your tracker link! Yes, exactly.
- torgoguys 5y ago
  I love all things text mode. For anyone searching for the Borland style text interface, it was actually called TurboVision, not BGI (which was a generic graphics library). TurboVision (and many GUIs of the time) largely followed the Common User Interface (CUI) spec by IBM for its interactions in text mode. It is fair to say there was a lot of screen space devoted to borders and such, especially in 80x25 mode, but that helped make everything super clear and usable.
  - pengaru 5y ago
    Ah my bad re: BGI vs. TurboVision, my memory from those days is quite fuzzy!
  - pronlover723 5y ago
    Only if you were an English speaking user
  - tssva 5y ago
    The IBM spec was CUA( Common User Access) not CUI.
ddingus 5y ago
Yes. My favorite was anything done in 80x50. Nice, mostly square characters. Mix in a mouse, and the product was easy to use, clean, fast, productive. That sort of aesthetic, in windows even, would be a lot of fun and quite useful, if a bit of a middle finger to modern sensibilities.
- zem 5y ago
  norton commander in 80x50 was beautiful
- csdvrx 5y ago
  > That sort of aesthetic, in windows even, would be a lot of fun and quite useful Who's stopping you? Try jexer: https://gitlab.com/klamonte/jexer https://gitlab.com/klamonte/jexer
wenc 5y ago
I liked Turbo Vision but I thought Microsoft’s text UI (the one used in products like QuickC, QBasic etc — not sure what it’s called) was actually cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing.
ubermonkey 5y ago
OH GOD NO. Man, I hated all that stuff at the time. If you're stuck in text mode, just be text. Don't try to mimic a GUI; it just looks weird and generally works poorly. A web site that imposed this sort of interface would be a site I visited ONCE.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Lmao I like how saying "no" got you downvoted. Express an opinion about a purely subjective thing that others don't like and you get downvoted. Come on HN, you can do better.
  - jonsen 5y ago
    Commenter could do better than just writing an emotional burp.
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      They put the same amount of effort in as the others. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28808280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28808280 . It's just the unpopular opinion.
  - ubermonkey 5y ago
    I expected it, to be honest. HN is a place where threads settle into orthodoxy quickly.
- lproven 5y ago
  I suggest that you need to look at the historical context of it. When DOS was the uncontested king of business computing, user interfaces were all over the place. Every app had its own UI, its own keystrokes, its own everything. To steal some text I wrote for Wikipedia: In WordPerfect, the command to open a file was F7, 3. In Lotus 1-2-3, a file was opened with / (to open the menus), F (for File), R (for Retrieve). In Microsoft Word, a file was opened with Esc (to open the menus), T (for Transfer), L (for Load). It was a mess and a significant effort to learn multiple apps. Then classic MacOS and MS Windows started to introduce the idea of uniform UIs, where programs had the same menu bar with the same core menus with the same commands on them, opened and navigated with the same keystrokes. It made life so much easier. A lot of apps came across, even big-name ones -- for instance MS Word (v5.0, proprietary 2-line menus at the bottom of the screen; v5.5, CUA menu bar); WordPerfect (added CUA menus in v5); Borland Quattro; etc. And if you have a standard menu bar, then you more or less need to have dialog boxes as part of the UI. Once you go that far, you may as well apply it to multiple documents support and so on. And so you end up with a familiar, more-or-less harmonious UI across different apps from different vendors, and for the first time it became possible to operate a program you'd never seen before first time. This was a huge win for usability, accessibility, and it saved time, effort and stress for millions of people. It was a triumph. That UI persists today in most modern FOSS apps and desktops, except for intentional rebels like GNOME 3, who want to make us all use phones with big screens. If I am going to use a text editor, say, in the shell sometimes, then YES I want it to use the same UI I have in my GUI session, with the same keystrokes and menu options. Life is much to short to learn some crappy half-assed UI from the 1970s because a bunch of old dudes with beards have loved it ever since. Even if I am an old dude with a beard now.
Narishma 5y ago
I don't think VGA monitors had scanlines like that. Some older CGA and EGA monitors did though.
- ddingus 5y ago
  If their displays supported 15khz, they would. Eventually, everything double scanned and pushed to 70hz vert refresh
Serow225 5y ago
Not web, but another one for .NET is: https://github.com/migueldeicaza/gui.cs https://github.com/migueldeicaza/gui.cs
jiggawatts 5y ago
I once wrote a web front-end for a DOS-era web application that was used at over 2,000 locations by hundreds of thousands of people. It was virtually identical to the original layout and functionality, but it had basic-yet-functional HTML look to it. Think Google search. On the 1st of April it would instead switch to a "DOS skin" using the fixedsys font and the original colour theme and box-drawing character layout. Virtually identical to the original, except that some things were centred and you could scroll with a mouse. I thought it was hilarious. Management... not so much.
b3nji 5y ago
Like this? https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386 https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386
gordaco 5y ago
I absolutely do. I'm 100% aware that it's the nostalgia talking, but I don't care, I unapologetically love them. For context, the first computer we got at home was a PC at some point in '94 or '95. We had MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11. Some years later we moved into Windows 95. While I didn't really use these kind of GUIs (DOSShell and so on) as often as I would like, I always thought they were very pleasant to use. There is something about that DOS font that makes me happy each time I see it, and there is a certain feeling of being a stereotypical movie-style hacker when you use these instead of modern, actually graphical UIs. And yes, the reminiscence of simpler times with simple software, way before the surveillance capitalism and the brutal omnipresence of ads, is easy to appreciate. The nice thing is that early versions of Windows supported these GUIs as well. So, a few years later, during my degree in Computer Engineering, I learned some x86 assembly (using Turbo Assembler as a compiler); this was during the early 00s, and we still used EDIT.com as the main text editor, although there were some others available. I loved it since the first day, both in concept (super low level programming with direct access to the hardware, managing interruptions and so on) and in execution (everything was in that text mode I loved, since modern Windows and their restrictions didn't play nicely with such low-level programming). I learned a lot from Ralf Brown's Interrup.lst, and wrote a few simple GUIs of my own, using box drawing characters and all that. Aside from those I wrote for academic work, I mostly spent a lot of time creating a silly GUI that allowed you to modify the look of the console. There were a few resolutions available, from 40x25 to 132x60, and you could change the colours of the text, the background and the border (yes, there is a border, which you can set to a different colour than the background. And my program could get 2^18=262144 colours available, not just 16! Although 16 was the max simultaneous on-screen limit IIRC), plus the font (I was able to add an edition screen where you could see the aspect of all 256 characters, yet I could use box drawing and so on for the interface in this screen. Did you know that DOS allowed two different sets of characters in screen at the same time?). There were some other additions like pixel-level scroll as opposed to the usual line-level scroll, and background "music" using the PC speaker. It didn't have any practical purpose aside from these silly customisations (which, in the case of Windows, went away when you closed the windows, and some times, also when you moved from full screen to a window), but man, did I have fun coding it. It's still one of my best memories of programming, nearly 15 years later. Then, in 2009, my last Windows 98-capable computer stopped working, and current hardware only supported Windows XP and newer, so all of this fun basically stopped being possible (especially considering that basically all state of the art hardware was already 64 bits, and 16-bit applications like EDIT.com weren't supported any more). With emulators it's not the same, because I know I'm not really accessing the low-level hardware registers. By that time I already had a job and there was less time for this kind of hobbies, so I eventually stopped. Currently my recreational programming is mostly oriented towards math (Project Euler and so on), which is very different, but I still remember those days very fondly. I still have all that code somewhere. Yeah, it's all nostalgia, but that doesn't mean it doesn't hit hard.

colejohnson66 5y ago

Look at TuiCss: https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss

zetalyrae 5y ago

I have fond memories of SETEDIT: http://setedit.sourceforge.net/ http://setedit.sourceforge.net/ It was kind of a complete floating windows GUI in a TUI: http://setedit.sourceforge.net/se1.gif http://setedit.sourceforge.net/se1.gif

zozbot234 5y ago
PsychDOS is a very similar project: https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/DOS/INDEX.HTM https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/DOS/INDEX.HTM I wonder if it would be possible to extend a terminal multiplexer to the point of providing such an intuitive interface to existing TUI software on modern *ix systems. I'm sure the effort would be quite non-trivial, but it would help a number of workflows. Adding support for the additional features that are found in these TUI environments (consider e.g. menubars) could then be done via custom terminal extensions.
- DHowett 5y ago
  > I wonder if it would be possible ... Check out the VTM project[1]! It feels like that's the direction they're heading. No direct affiliation; they've filed some bugs on Windows Terminal, however. :) [1] https://github.com/netxs-group/VTM https://github.com/netxs-group/VTM
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Well, that's a terminal multiplexer but not very TUI like. I don't think it would be directly usable over a low-bandwidth SSH connection, which is the kind of use case people often have in mind for TUI's.
lproven 5y ago
That was my preferred Linux text editor for a while, too. These days, I use Tilde, which is modern, maintained, and packaged for contemporary distros. https://os.ghalkes.nl/tilde/ https://os.ghalkes.nl/tilde/
- mysterydip 5y ago
  Thanks for the link! I had been struggling to find something that "felt right", from changing themes in Kate or using vim or nano. This looks perfect.
  - lproven 5y ago
    Oh, great! Happy to help. I've been using it for years now -- it's becoming a faithful friend, to the bafflement of my colleagues who are mostly Vi(m) or Emacs fans. The one thing it doesn't do for me is pick up Git commit templates, so for that I have to have my default set to `mc`. I don't know why that one thing doesn't function.

agumonkey 5y ago

yes i do, the frugal aspect is extremely appealing to me. someone made a turbovision (borland turbo pascal ui framework) lib for java https://jexer.sourceforge.io/ https://jexer.sourceforge.io/

yoz-y 5y ago

Shoutout to the https://dosgameclub.com https://dosgameclub.com which naturally has all the website and forums done in this style.

easton 5y ago

https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/ https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/ might be up your alley

sigg3 5y ago
The Most Advanced Computer Interface, period.

anyfoo 5y ago

Totally! However, even with the proper fonts (that also have to be aspect ratio corrected, the usual VGA text mode did not have square pixels), I struggle to recreate this to the point that it's really recognizable. CRTs with that text mode (and including scanlines, but not only that) just seem very hard to reproduce on modern displays. The fact that your photo does evoke the same feeling while I'm seeing it on a modern 5k display shows that it's possible, but the amount of tricks needed might be so much that it becomes whimsical somehow (or at least in contrast to just changing the font)...

squarefoot 5y ago

> Anyone else love the look of DOS GUIs? I do. Brings back memories of Turbo-C. > It would be cool if there were a CSS framework where you could make webpages like that. A quick search brought this old project: https://github.com/6112/cursesjs https://github.com/6112/cursesjs Never tried that, however. Ncurses is what is used under Linux and other UNIX like systems to draw terminal based GUIs, and allows some pretty good graphics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses http://elmon.sourceforge.net/ http://elmon.sourceforge.net/ https://christopherstoll.org/2015/12/29/ncurses-system-performance-monitor-mac.html https://christopherstoll.org/2015/12/29/ncurses-system-perfo...

mindcrime 5y ago
If you like that old TurboVision look, you'll love https://github.com/magiblot/tvision https://github.com/magiblot/tvision
- squarefoot 5y ago
  Thanks, I recall seeing it some time ago but totally forgot about it.

pengaru 5y ago

Eh, the Borland Grahics Interface (BGI) style TUIs were kind of awful. I hated the Borland Turbo C IDE in no small part because of that style TUI. It just wasted so much precious character space on TUI frames and other decorations. More of my fond TUI memories from that era were the bespoke ones in the demo/art/music/bbs scenes. Those in many cases were still character based but seemed to make better use of the screen space and at least more aesthetically pleasing character sets. Scream Tracker / Impulse Tracker comes to mind as one example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/53/Screamtracker_321.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/53/Screamtracker... Which you can still enjoy today in a cross-platform clone via SchismTracker: https://github.com/schismtracker/schismtracker https://github.com/schismtracker/schismtracker

ddingus 5y ago
Hmm..... That same thing in say 96x50 would feel much better. Edit, just viewed your tracker link! Yes, exactly.
torgoguys 5y ago
I love all things text mode. For anyone searching for the Borland style text interface, it was actually called TurboVision, not BGI (which was a generic graphics library). TurboVision (and many GUIs of the time) largely followed the Common User Interface (CUI) spec by IBM for its interactions in text mode. It is fair to say there was a lot of screen space devoted to borders and such, especially in 80x25 mode, but that helped make everything super clear and usable.
- pengaru 5y ago
  Ah my bad re: BGI vs. TurboVision, my memory from those days is quite fuzzy!
- pronlover723 5y ago
  Only if you were an English speaking user
- tssva 5y ago
  The IBM spec was CUA( Common User Access) not CUI.

ddingus 5y ago

Yes. My favorite was anything done in 80x50. Nice, mostly square characters. Mix in a mouse, and the product was easy to use, clean, fast, productive. That sort of aesthetic, in windows even, would be a lot of fun and quite useful, if a bit of a middle finger to modern sensibilities.

zem 5y ago
norton commander in 80x50 was beautiful
csdvrx 5y ago
> That sort of aesthetic, in windows even, would be a lot of fun and quite useful Who's stopping you? Try jexer: https://gitlab.com/klamonte/jexer https://gitlab.com/klamonte/jexer

wenc 5y ago

I liked Turbo Vision but I thought Microsoft’s text UI (the one used in products like QuickC, QBasic etc — not sure what it’s called) was actually cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing.

ubermonkey 5y ago

OH GOD NO. Man, I hated all that stuff at the time. If you're stuck in text mode, just be text. Don't try to mimic a GUI; it just looks weird and generally works poorly. A web site that imposed this sort of interface would be a site I visited ONCE.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Lmao I like how saying "no" got you downvoted. Express an opinion about a purely subjective thing that others don't like and you get downvoted. Come on HN, you can do better.
- jonsen 5y ago
  Commenter could do better than just writing an emotional burp.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    They put the same amount of effort in as the others. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28808280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28808280 . It's just the unpopular opinion.
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  I expected it, to be honest. HN is a place where threads settle into orthodoxy quickly.
lproven 5y ago
I suggest that you need to look at the historical context of it. When DOS was the uncontested king of business computing, user interfaces were all over the place. Every app had its own UI, its own keystrokes, its own everything. To steal some text I wrote for Wikipedia: In WordPerfect, the command to open a file was F7, 3. In Lotus 1-2-3, a file was opened with / (to open the menus), F (for File), R (for Retrieve). In Microsoft Word, a file was opened with Esc (to open the menus), T (for Transfer), L (for Load). It was a mess and a significant effort to learn multiple apps. Then classic MacOS and MS Windows started to introduce the idea of uniform UIs, where programs had the same menu bar with the same core menus with the same commands on them, opened and navigated with the same keystrokes. It made life so much easier. A lot of apps came across, even big-name ones -- for instance MS Word (v5.0, proprietary 2-line menus at the bottom of the screen; v5.5, CUA menu bar); WordPerfect (added CUA menus in v5); Borland Quattro; etc. And if you have a standard menu bar, then you more or less need to have dialog boxes as part of the UI. Once you go that far, you may as well apply it to multiple documents support and so on. And so you end up with a familiar, more-or-less harmonious UI across different apps from different vendors, and for the first time it became possible to operate a program you'd never seen before first time. This was a huge win for usability, accessibility, and it saved time, effort and stress for millions of people. It was a triumph. That UI persists today in most modern FOSS apps and desktops, except for intentional rebels like GNOME 3, who want to make us all use phones with big screens. If I am going to use a text editor, say, in the shell sometimes, then YES I want it to use the same UI I have in my GUI session, with the same keystrokes and menu options. Life is much to short to learn some crappy half-assed UI from the 1970s because a bunch of old dudes with beards have loved it ever since. Even if I am an old dude with a beard now.

Narishma 5y ago

I don't think VGA monitors had scanlines like that. Some older CGA and EGA monitors did though.

ddingus 5y ago
If their displays supported 15khz, they would. Eventually, everything double scanned and pushed to 70hz vert refresh

Serow225 5y ago

Not web, but another one for .NET is: https://github.com/migueldeicaza/gui.cs https://github.com/migueldeicaza/gui.cs

jiggawatts 5y ago

I once wrote a web front-end for a DOS-era web application that was used at over 2,000 locations by hundreds of thousands of people. It was virtually identical to the original layout and functionality, but it had basic-yet-functional HTML look to it. Think Google search. On the 1st of April it would instead switch to a "DOS skin" using the fixedsys font and the original colour theme and box-drawing character layout. Virtually identical to the original, except that some things were centred and you could scroll with a mouse. I thought it was hilarious. Management... not so much.

b3nji 5y ago

Like this? https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386 https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386

gordaco 5y ago

I absolutely do. I'm 100% aware that it's the nostalgia talking, but I don't care, I unapologetically love them. For context, the first computer we got at home was a PC at some point in '94 or '95. We had MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11. Some years later we moved into Windows 95. While I didn't really use these kind of GUIs (DOSShell and so on) as often as I would like, I always thought they were very pleasant to use. There is something about that DOS font that makes me happy each time I see it, and there is a certain feeling of being a stereotypical movie-style hacker when you use these instead of modern, actually graphical UIs. And yes, the reminiscence of simpler times with simple software, way before the surveillance capitalism and the brutal omnipresence of ads, is easy to appreciate. The nice thing is that early versions of Windows supported these GUIs as well. So, a few years later, during my degree in Computer Engineering, I learned some x86 assembly (using Turbo Assembler as a compiler); this was during the early 00s, and we still used EDIT.com as the main text editor, although there were some others available. I loved it since the first day, both in concept (super low level programming with direct access to the hardware, managing interruptions and so on) and in execution (everything was in that text mode I loved, since modern Windows and their restrictions didn't play nicely with such low-level programming). I learned a lot from Ralf Brown's Interrup.lst, and wrote a few simple GUIs of my own, using box drawing characters and all that. Aside from those I wrote for academic work, I mostly spent a lot of time creating a silly GUI that allowed you to modify the look of the console. There were a few resolutions available, from 40x25 to 132x60, and you could change the colours of the text, the background and the border (yes, there is a border, which you can set to a different colour than the background. And my program could get 2^18=262144 colours available, not just 16! Although 16 was the max simultaneous on-screen limit IIRC), plus the font (I was able to add an edition screen where you could see the aspect of all 256 characters, yet I could use box drawing and so on for the interface in this screen. Did you know that DOS allowed two different sets of characters in screen at the same time?). There were some other additions like pixel-level scroll as opposed to the usual line-level scroll, and background "music" using the PC speaker. It didn't have any practical purpose aside from these silly customisations (which, in the case of Windows, went away when you closed the windows, and some times, also when you moved from full screen to a window), but man, did I have fun coding it. It's still one of my best memories of programming, nearly 15 years later. Then, in 2009, my last Windows 98-capable computer stopped working, and current hardware only supported Windows XP and newer, so all of this fun basically stopped being possible (especially considering that basically all state of the art hardware was already 64 bits, and 16-bit applications like EDIT.com weren't supported any more). With emulators it's not the same, because I know I'm not really accessing the low-level hardware registers. By that time I already had a job and there was less time for this kind of hobbies, so I eventually stopped. Currently my recreational programming is mostly oriented towards math (Project Euler and so on), which is very different, but I still remember those days very fondly. I still have all that code somewhere. Yeah, it's all nostalgia, but that doesn't mean it doesn't hit hard.