5 ms·
I miss the incredible slickness of these old DOS programs. Single-character commands, judicious use of color, and efficient presentation. Pure art.
by queuebert 5y ago
I miss the incredible slickness of these old DOS programs. Single-character commands, judicious use of color, and efficient presentation. Pure art.
- xtracto 5y agoThe "magic" of doublespace / norton utilities, XTree Gold hex-view and other programs amazed my young self.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoWell when the target platform only had 512KB ram, or 640K if they could afford it, and a 30MB drive cost $400, you had to squeeze every last bit out of your program. Norton Utilities were slick. Slicker than any MSDOS tools, or even Apple Dos 3.0 or ProDOS (or ProntoDOS for that matter) utilities for that matter.
- fouc 5y agoI never understood why the beautiful & easy-to-use QBasic Editor never inspired a copycat for linux. It would've easily beaten out nano.
- sprash 5y agoMidnight Commander "mcedit" comes close to the aesthetics (blue background, grey dialogs with shadows, etc.) but is not a perfect copy. A perfect clone of the MS-DOS editor for UNIX/Linux does not exist. Maybe this is the new toy project for the "written in Rust" crowd.
- vanviegen 5y agoI think that is because back then, terminals weren't capable of handling key combinations like shift-arrows (for selection), ctrl-c (for copy), and mouse support wasn't great either.
- indeyets 5y agoJoe's Own Editor is a thing since 1988 https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/ https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/
- BBC-vs-neolibs 5y agoIsn't that more of a Wordstar copy? I loved QBasic but never hade any love for JOE.
- fouc 5y agoWell the one of the appealing part of QBasic Editor was the friendly bright blue color scheme. Along with the always present menu bar on the top. Just a great editor for newbies. Seems like Joe has the helpful menu system, but it feels overall more "serious" in comparison, especially with the minimal white on black color scheme.