13 Dec
2005
13 Dec
'05
12:38 p.m.
Subject: Re: Old MS-DOS & WIN Software
From: Scott Stevens <chenmel at earthlink.net>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:30:56 -0500
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>
Something rather surreal in some regards, but which could be very
useful for quick hackish projects, is Visual Basic for MS-DOS.
It's not something Microsoft promoted for very long, but it was
out there and some of us grabbed a copy.
And yes, I do have the boxed Professional version. And what may
have been the only third-party book teaching how to code in it.
It's sort of cool- a completely text-mode version of Visual Basic
that you can develop code with on with a machine that only has an
MDA card. Like watching mpegs rendered to 'ASCII graphics'
(somebody actually coded that, btw.) It works almost identically
to Visual Basic 3.0 for Windows.
It's other brother, QuickBasic4.5/dos is in that collection and still
something I use. My old dosware, early windowsware is stuff I'd bought
and gotten with my first machines. Some of those machines didn't last
but I did keep the software as it's useful and mine.
However the one I like the most is Corel Paradox for windows as the license
is actually in english and allows for a work copy and a home copy on the
basis that you are only really using copy of it at any time. That and it
produces decent Pascal!
Allison