vwestlife
June 4th, 2008, 09:53 PM
Long story short, in 1984 the Macintosh came and wowed everyone with the concept of a bitmapped graphical user interface on a personal computer, soon copied and followed by Windows, Amiga, GEM, GEOS, etc. However, skillful programmers proved that you can teach an old dog new tricks by bringing many of the same "graphical" interface elements to a standard 80x25 DOS text mode screen, as the Text-mode User Interface (TUI).
My favorite TUI, and perhaps the most widespread, was Borland's Turbo Vision. The design and layout is clean and concise, and it makes good use of contrasting colors to define the different psuedo-"graphical" elements like buttons and scrolling text boxes.
http://thomasjensen.com/software/buchfink/buchfink.gif
http://www.heptagon.com.br/images/tvision.gif
Microsoft tried to compete with their own Visual Basic for DOS, whose TUI is as close to a text-mode distillation of the Windows 3.x GUI as you'll find anywhere. Unfortunately it wastes a lot of screen space trying to make the windows and buttons look as much like Windows as possible.
http://toastytech.com/guis/textvbdos.png
Microsoft's Exchange Client for DOS featured a similar, but not identical, TUI:
http://toastytech.com/guis/textexchangedos.png
Two companies, Symantec and Central Point Software, took advantage of VGA's ability to redefine the text mode character set to add even more of a graphical look to the TUI, with a real mouse pointer, check boxes, radio buttons, window close boxes, and the like. Norton Utilities and PC Tools used similar, but not identical, "graphical TUIs". Unfortunately it is impossible to show the graphical characters in a screen shot, so you'll have to settle for how Norton's TUI looked in standard text mode:
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/8/88/Norton-utilities-6.0.png
A number of companies decided to roll their own TUI, such as CompuServe's DOSCIM...
http://i29.tinypic.com/2aj6m0y.jpg
Ultimately, the TUI suffered from a lack of conformity. Each variant had a different look with different controls. MS-DOS 6.x exemplified this, as it bundled utilities from Norton Tools and PC Tools, each with their own unique psuedo-graphical TUI, as well as Microsoft's own utilities, which used several similar, but not identical, TUIs of their own. At least with PC DOS 7.0/2000, IBM's own utilities almost all use the Turbo Vision TUI.
My favorite TUI, and perhaps the most widespread, was Borland's Turbo Vision. The design and layout is clean and concise, and it makes good use of contrasting colors to define the different psuedo-"graphical" elements like buttons and scrolling text boxes.
http://thomasjensen.com/software/buchfink/buchfink.gif
http://www.heptagon.com.br/images/tvision.gif
Microsoft tried to compete with their own Visual Basic for DOS, whose TUI is as close to a text-mode distillation of the Windows 3.x GUI as you'll find anywhere. Unfortunately it wastes a lot of screen space trying to make the windows and buttons look as much like Windows as possible.
http://toastytech.com/guis/textvbdos.png
Microsoft's Exchange Client for DOS featured a similar, but not identical, TUI:
http://toastytech.com/guis/textexchangedos.png
Two companies, Symantec and Central Point Software, took advantage of VGA's ability to redefine the text mode character set to add even more of a graphical look to the TUI, with a real mouse pointer, check boxes, radio buttons, window close boxes, and the like. Norton Utilities and PC Tools used similar, but not identical, "graphical TUIs". Unfortunately it is impossible to show the graphical characters in a screen shot, so you'll have to settle for how Norton's TUI looked in standard text mode:
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/8/88/Norton-utilities-6.0.png
A number of companies decided to roll their own TUI, such as CompuServe's DOSCIM...
http://i29.tinypic.com/2aj6m0y.jpg
Ultimately, the TUI suffered from a lack of conformity. Each variant had a different look with different controls. MS-DOS 6.x exemplified this, as it bundled utilities from Norton Tools and PC Tools, each with their own unique psuedo-graphical TUI, as well as Microsoft's own utilities, which used several similar, but not identical, TUIs of their own. At least with PC DOS 7.0/2000, IBM's own utilities almost all use the Turbo Vision TUI.