
Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents - danso
https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/doing-windows-part-1-ms-dos-and-its-discontents/
======
gerdesj
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.

~~~
pjmlp
Back in those days we had a Clipper application which used a table as printer
drivers.

Basically we defined the columns to be printer operations, bold, italic,
subscript, ...., then went through the manuals copying the escape codes while
creating a row for each printer model being supported.

Adding new printer support was releasing an updated version of the
printers.dbf file.

It was really "fun" making it work and testing printouts.

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cwyers
> 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._

~~~
topspin
> 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
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.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
I grew up on Ataris. When the platform died, I ended up on a Microsoft PC, and
definitely felt like I had regressed.

~~~
icedchai
Atari and Amiga were about 5 years ahead of the PC. By 1996 or so, it was
over. It's sad to think about what these platforms could've become with better
financing and management. MacOS was crap back then, too.

------
pnathan
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
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
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
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.

------
badsectoracula
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
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
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 :-)

------
rwallace
> 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
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.

~~~
flomo
Even to this day, there are certain users who double-click on everything.
(e.g. on AJAX forms you always need to disable the button.) My assumption is
users are confused when a single click or a double click is appropriate, so
they always double-click.

~~~
outworlder
Yup, seen this with kids on windows.

If an icon is on the desktop, then it requires a double click. If it is added
to the task bar, then it is a single click. I understand the reasoning for the
distinction, but it is not intuitive at all.

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korethr
> 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
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
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.

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

------
Koshkin
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
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.

------
walshemj
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

------
nwhatt
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.

------
sys101
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
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.
(-:

------
apo
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
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
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/)

------
voltagex_
>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
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
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.

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tomc1985
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
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/)

