[HN Gopher] Visi On by VisiCorp - The obscure first full GUI for...
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Visi On by VisiCorp - The obscure first full GUI for the IBM PC
Author : jug
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-04-09 16:07 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (toastytech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (toastytech.com)
| dannyobrien wrote:
| This messes with my chronology a bit --- where did you get the
| mouse to work with this? Did it come with the software? Were mice
| prevalent on PCs before the Mac and Windows?
| tibbetts wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Systems became available in
| 1982. My first mouse (on an Apple 2c) came with drawing
| software included.
| coldcode wrote:
| I think I probably played with it at my job on my early model IBM
| PC/XT since evaluation was one of my jobs. But I also had a Lisa
| on my desk for a while, which was much better (but insanely
| expensive). PCs back then were just not powerful enough to do
| much in the way of a graphics UI. Visi On was ahead of its time
| but way too far. Most people were using DOS based UI which wasn't
| bitmapped and was mostly fine for the time. Even Windows wasn't
| all that great until 3.0. Today we take for granted how
| ridiculously more powerful everything is.
| Rerarom wrote:
| Love ToastyTech, discovered it back in December 2004 and checked
| it regularly since (hasn't been much updated in the last few
| years but I still hope).
| ck2 wrote:
| I love these time-warp flashbacks.
|
| Comdex, that hardware board based disk copier to win the
| escalating copy-protection war. I doubt anyone born after the
| 1990s can understand/appreciate it.
|
| At the end of the TRS-80 lifespan one of the hardware mods they
| came out with was "high resolution" graphics ability to go from
| 128x48 to 640x240 res (still monochrome). How far we've come.
| tssva wrote:
| There were also some color graphics solutions for the TRS-80
| Model 1. They generally ran at 256x192. As a kid I used to lust
| after them when I saw ads in 80 Micro.
| bitwize wrote:
| Tandy was just bringing the Model 4 up to par with the Model
| II/12/16, their business line. Those machines had high
| resolution (same 640x240) available as an option almost since
| their inception.
| lodovic wrote:
| This was definitely ahead of its time. Too bad the source code is
| probably lost, would have been an interesting read.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| These things would've been written in assembly code back in the
| day. So that's your source code. In this case, it looks like
| they used a custom interpreted VM.
| postexitus wrote:
| They still used Assembler - imagine looking at any code today
| without comments or variable names. Reading Assembly without
| source code is exactly like that.
| bitwize wrote:
| My favorite of these pre-Windows PC GUIs was Ashton-Tate's
| Framework. It was vaguely similar to VisiOn but tremendously
| powerful. It was coded by a guy who used to work for PARC, and
| was based on the central notion of a "frame". A frame could hold
| formatted text, a spreadsheet, graphics, or other things
| depending on its type; and each cell in a spreadsheet-type frame
| counted as a frame of its own. It was completely programmable in
| a scripting language with Lotus-formula-like syntax and Lisp-like
| semantics called FRED, and the content of any frame was easily
| addressable from within the language. You could also run a DOS
| shell, or do RS232 communications, with the input and output
| going through a frame of specialized type.
|
| This made Framework usable in a manner similar to how many people
| use Emacs today: pulling information into frames,
| programmatically processing and consolidating them into other
| frames. FRED was powerful enough to build entire applications in
| this way. The word processor bit even featured a powerful
| outlining facility somewhat similar to Org mode. It was still a
| piece of office software, not a programming tool; but, tellingly,
| it was marketed to executives as a decision making tool, not a
| productivity tool for clerks, accountants, or secretaries.
| zabzonk wrote:
| I remember Visi On, but never used it. The first GUI I used was
| Gem on an Atari ST (not too bad), and then Windows 2.0 (awful).
|
| Then I moved jobs to a Unix training company (C, the shell and
| all that stuff, and later C++ expert), and one day Windows 3.0
| (and later 3.1) came out and my boss came up to me:
|
| Him: "You are now our Windows C programming trainer"
|
| Me: "But [in Manuel voice] I know nothing"
|
| Him: "Well, everybody else refuses point-blank to do it -learn,
| read some books"
|
| Me: "Grumble"
|
| But I did read some books, and learnt and taught a lot, enjoyed
| myself and today generally prefer Windows to Unix.
| bingohbangoh wrote:
| What's the advantage of Windows over Unix? Is it just
| preference for you?
| bitwize wrote:
| Windows is much more end-user-focused than Unix. This was
| even true in the 3.x days. I played around with a late-90s
| Solaris 2.x image recently and its usability was garbage
| compared to Windows 3.x, let alone 9x or NT 4.
|
| Plus, the NT kernel is just a much better design than Unix.
| Multithreading, dynamic linking, fine-grained access control,
| and async I/O are baked into the NT design, not bolted on as
| afterthoughts.
| Someone wrote:
| Is that "Speadsheet" in the top right of the first screen dump a
| bug or a typo by whoever made that screen?
|
| Also: interesting choice for a 50% gray pattern, with those
| vertical lines instead of a checkerboard. Is that purely
| artistic, or does it hide hardware ugliness on some systems?
| jhbadger wrote:
| "Speadsheet" would be the name of the document. So a typo by
| the person who made the file and then screenshot it, not in the
| program itself.
| bitwize wrote:
| Since horizontal scanlines were visible in RGB CGA, it probably
| made a nice even grid on that display.
|
| It may have also made a solid color on composite CGA.
| Findecanor wrote:
| I'm speculating that the purpose would have been to avoid
| getting straight lines on top of the background look jagged.
|
| Besides, it is also faster to render.
| h2odragon wrote:
| > Writing these disk images requires a Central Point Deluxe
| Option Board,
|
| oo. I should dig mine up.
| watersb wrote:
| > _a kind of non machine specific "virtual machine" (called the
| Visi Machine) that all applications were written for. Only the
| very core of Visi On (called the Visi Host) was machine
| specific... Sounds kind of like Java or .Net doesn't it?_
|
| Sounds kind of like 1990s Microsoft Excel.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Wow those alternating white and black vertical stripes. Imagine
| that on a real CRT. This is why people had to start studying eye
| strain.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| They were probably designed exactly for a crt and they look
| merely acceptable but sub-optimal on anything else.
|
| Like things that rely on ntsc artifact colors. In emulators and
| on vga/hdmi they are just white pixels on black in odd seeming
| arrangement. But via composite to a color crt they become
| sensible images with black, white, red, and blue areas from a
| source video mode that was just 1bpp.
|
| In fact these could be exactly that. (probably not but
| possible, and I'll say both the for and against arguments)
|
| Alternating single pixel black & white lines, is exactly how
| you get solid blue or solid red from a b&w signal fed over ntsc
| composite to a color crt.
|
| (or lcd depending on the composite input electronics. It's not
| really the crt that matters but the ntsc signal. I have seen
| tvs and monitors that replicated the original fuzziness and
| ntsc artifacts, and ones that digitized the input to produce an
| artificially perfect, and thus actually wrong image like an
| emulator that is ignorant of such display hardware details.)
|
| But countering that theory is that I would expect software of
| this nature and from this time to be optimized for monochrome
| displays, as in, Herculese, because the crts were all mono and
| this gave far more detail for text and information-dense
| graphics. High res color was either unavailable or stupid
| expensive. Color was low res, ate all your ram, and was more
| for games and schhool computers. Feeding a mono signal via ntsc
| to a color tv would be an absolute garbage way to try to do
| office productivity work, and ntsc color artifacts don't happen
| in cga or other rgb formats even though the screen is a color
| crt.
|
| So, all in all, I think this simply needs to be tried on some
| actual Herculese, ttl mono, rgb, cga, and ega screens to see
| what the intended look was. It was probably a compromise that
| didn't look as good as possible on any one type of display, but
| looked acceptable on all of them.
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(page generated 2022-04-09 23:00 UTC)