Microsoft open sources GWBASIC

On Sat, 23 May 2020 at 03:52, Richard Cini via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: OS/2 1.0 used a character-oriented UI, because Presentation Manager wasn't ready yet. It's one of the more complete I saw. There are a handful of screenshots here: https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/os2/history/os210/index.html Later DOS-era apps often used CUA-compliant COW interfaces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access E.g. WordPerfect 6 for DOS, and MS Word 5.5 and 6 for DOS, both so, and are my favourite versions of both apps. MS Word 5.5 is a free download from MS now if you have something that can run MS or PC DOS and want to play. http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/WIN98/EN-US/Wd5… 3Com had a quite rich library for COW apps on Windows -- probably last seen for most people in the setup routines for the very popular 3C589 ISA Ethernet card. 3Com's 3+Share DOS-based NOS used it extensively and it was fast, consistent, had useful accelerator keystrokes and was generally a pleasure to use. They published APIs for 3rd parties to use it. Quarterdeck also published an API for DESQview, but it was mainly meant to do simple multitasking-awareness for DOS apps rather than for UI. It enabled copy/paste support and a few other things. http://firealarms.redbat.ca/guicentral/page.php?mc=misc&pg=d281 https://rkixmiller.dudaone.com/386-dos-environments https://winworldpc.com/product/desqview/1x Novell also had a reasonably rich COW UI library for Netware not only for its console admin/setup tools but also for 3rd party apps, on Netware or on DOS. Some screenshots: https://virtuallyfun.com/category/novell-netware-3-12/ http://maques.hu/maques/nwudma.htm http://rconip.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html But probably the richest Text UI (TUI) I know of was Niklaus Wirth's Oberon OS. I've put quite some work into its Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system) I'm glad to see that others have too. Oberon is alive and well. It runs under Windows, Linux and MacOS, as well as natively on x86-32 as well as a modern FPGA version of its original hardware. There's a good quick rundown here: http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/ This page goes into a lot of depth but mostly on the later A2 OS with the Bluebottle zooming UI: https://www.progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon&section=compilers&… The official docs and things are here: http://www.projectoberon.com/ Here's what the Linux version looks like: https://verhoeven272.nl/fruttenboel/Oberon/index.html -- Liam Proven ? Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven ? Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 ? ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053