I grew up learning to program in the late 1980s / early 1990s. Back then, I did not fully comprehend what I was doing and why the tools I used were impressive given the constraints of the hardware we had. Having gained more knowledge throughout the years, it is now really fun to pick up DOSBox to re-experience those programs and compare them with our current state of affairs.
This time around, I want to look at the pure text-based IDEs that we had in that era before Windows eclipsed the PC industry. I want to do this because those IDEs had little to envy from the IDEs of today—yet it feels as if we went through a dark era where we lost most of those features for years and they are only resurfacing now.
If anything, stay for a nostalgic ride back in time and a little rant on “bloat”. But, more importantly, read on to gain perspective on what existed before so that you can evaluate future feature launches more critically.
First editors and TUIs
In the 1990s, almost every DOS program you ran had a full-screen Text User Interface (TUI) which sported text-based windows, drop shadows, colors, and mouse support. Here is just one example:
The MS-DOS Editor (aka EDIT.COM) with one of its settings dialog open. Note the menu bar, the rich dialog with list selectors and buttons, and the status bar documenting navigation shortcuts.
Each program was its own island because its interface was unique to the program. However, they were all so similar in how they looked like—80x25 characters didn’t leave much room for uniqueness—and how they worked that the differences didn’t really get in the way of usability and discoverability. Once you learned that the Alt key opened the menus and that Tab moved across input fields and buttons, you could navigate almost any program with ease.
But let’s talk about editors. MS-DOS shipped with a TUI text editor since version 5 (1991), which I previously covered in a recent article and is shown above. This editor “worked”, but it was really inconvenient for coding: you needed to exit the editor to compile and run your code, and when you re-ran the editor, you’d have to navigate back to where you were before.
“In my house”, we used something called SideKick Plus (1984), which wasn’t really a code editor: it was more of a Personal Information Management (PIM) system with a built-in notepad. The cool thing about it, however, was that it was a Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) program, which meant that it loaded in the background and you could bring it up at any time by pressing Ctrl+Alt.
SideKick Plus' main screen after pressing Ctrl+Alt to bring it up. Note how DOS remains in the background.
... continue reading