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Comment by layer8

6 months ago

The DOS screenshots are reflective of the PC video hardware of the time. Text mode had a fixed 16-color palette [0] at best, the IBM font including graphics characters was preset, while the aspect ratio of the characters wasn’t fixed (the screenshots in the article are 80x25, but I used 80x40 or 80x50, with correspondingly more quadratic text cells). However, the screenshots aren’t quite representative of how things looked on a CRT monitor, however; it looked more vibrant and organic, if that makes sense.

Personally I didn’t find Windows visually pleasing before Windows 95, but much of that can again be attributed to the PC video hardware limitations of the time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#Color_p...

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layer8

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gcanyon  6 months ago

Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I worked with DOS in… WordPerfect? I don’t remember for sure which word processing application it was. But I honestly don’t remember ever seeing anything remotely “graphic“ in my DOS days.

  • lproven  6 months ago

    Oh, there was.

    WordPerfect 6 had a full GUI mode with a very vaguely Win3-like GUI implemented in DOS.

    Borland Quattro Pro had one too.

    Microsoft Word could be flipped in and out of it: in it, you got WYSIWYG bold, italic, underline etc, and more lines on screen, but otherwise the UI remained much the same.

    PowerQuest imitated Win95 so well in PartitionMagic it was pixel-perfect.

    It was entirely a thing in the late DOS era. It let DOS apps look competitive, and yet demand far lower system requirements and run on much older machines than one needed for Windows.