Richard said program based on the COW library. Does anyone have/know of a sample program that used the library? Was there an SDK for it or was it used only for Microsoft's products? Reading this just reminded me of Visual Basic for MSDOS, which had a windowing system for the 80x25 IBM monochrome adapter. I purchased it in 1992 but didn't use it very much, but I just dug it out of the back of a cupboard for a look. One of the manuals says "Visual Basic provides a complete development environment for MS-DOS applications. You can design the windows, dialog boxes, menus, command buttons, option buttons and other interface elements for a application." Visual Basic for MSDOS was compatible with QBasic and QuickBasic and even had a forms designer. The diagrams of the character UI screens in it are very similar visually to Windows 2, they sure made heavy use of the box drawing characters. Steve.

I remember using Visual Basic for Windows, but not the DOS version. I?d have to look at the version though. I remember buying it at Egghead Software across from my office in NYC. Get Outlook for iOS On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 11:15 PM -0400, "Steve Malikoff via cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: Richard said program based on the COW library. Does anyone have/know of a sample program that used the library? Was there an SDK for it or was it used only for Microsoft's products? Reading this just reminded me of Visual Basic for MSDOS, which had a windowing system for the 80x25 IBM monochrome adapter. I purchased it in 1992 but didn't use it very much, but I just dug it out of the back of a cupboard for a look. One of the manuals says "Visual Basic provides a complete development environment for MS-DOS applications. You can design the windows, dialog boxes, menus, command buttons, option buttons and other interface elements for a application." Visual Basic for MSDOS was compatible with QBasic and QuickBasic and even had a forms designer. The diagrams of the character UI screens in it are very similar visually to Windows 2, they sure made heavy use of the box drawing characters. Steve.

Thanks Liam. Oberon is pretty interesting. I may download that just to see it in action. I?ve used a ton of 3Com cards so the setup program is pretty familiar. I haven?t used DESQview, well, since I had it installed on my Compaq DeskPro 386/25. What I am looking for is code that actually uses the CoW library...like a ?Hello World!? for the library. I do plan on installing VB_DOS and play with that too. I have no real project in mind for it though. Get Outlook for iOS On Sat, May 23, 2020 at 3:34 PM -0400, "Liam Proven via cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: On Sat, 23 May 2020 at 03:52, Richard Cini via cctalk 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

Thanks. I believe the official name is CW for Character Windows, probably to avoid that confusion. Get Outlook for iOS On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 10:24 AM -0400, "Liam Proven via cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: On Sun, 24 May 2020 at 03:42, Richard Cini wrote: Oberon's definitely worth a look. Oberon also had some wider influence: Oberon's Text UI (TUI) inspired Acme, the Plan 9 editor/IDE/email client, and some of the Plan 9 UI in general. I have VB for DOS but I never wrapped my head around VB and its odd semi-OOPS. I was much happier in QB3 or QB4. Sadly, AFAICT, when the CUA-compliant, text-oriented windowing era came to DOS, I think that for the most part, everyone rolled their own. Borland's later-era DOS Pascal compilers made their toolkit available to users, which QB4 did not AFAIK. So there were apps in Borland TurboPascal that used them. This is my preferred console editor on Linux: https://os.ghalkes.nl/tilde/ I *think* the programmer re-implemented his own COW system but I'm not sure. Ask him? It replaced this: http://setedit.sourceforge.net/ Sadly not updated for modern Linux distros. It links to some info about COW libraries for Linux. BTW: I'd avoid that term if possible, as it overlaps with Copy-On-Write, a major modern filesystems feature. TUI is the term used in the Oberon context and is a bit more distinctive; the only overlap I know is a defunct travel company. -- 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