I'm also a fan of the TUI from Qbasic, it also appeared in Microsoft Works for DOS, Microsoft Word for DOS and probably other places. The UI was refered to as

I'm also a fan of the TUI from Qbasic, it also appeared in Microsoft Works for DOS, Microsoft Word for DOS and probably other places. The UI was refered to as COW character oriented windows. It would be good if it could be open sourced, for historical reference. There were other interesting TUIs, the one in Defrag in DOS, and the Antivirus would change characters on the fly to generate a mouse cursor. The TUI in DOSSHELL.exe would use customise some characters to draw icons. Maybe Scott Hanselman could be persuaded to work on open sourcing all the COW apps. (Honarable mention for EDIT in DOS7, which appears to be a rewrite, supporting long filenames). In the modern era, there is YEdit from the author of YCmd, which implements a similar looking UI, in Windows http://www.malsmith.net/edit/ http://www.malsmith.net/edit/ Some other TUIs of note included the ones in Wordperfect, Norton Utilities, and of course TurboVision (though the last has implementations in modern environments).